UNDERSTANDING THEFOURTH GOSPEL

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UNDERSTANDING THE

FOURTH GOSPEL

Second Edition

John Ashton

1

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataAshton, John 1931–

Understanding the Fourth Gospel.I. Bible. N. T. John—Critical studies

I. Title226.506

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataAshton, John, 1931–

Understanding the Fourth GospelIncludes bibliographical references and index.

I. Bible. N. T. John—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.BS2615.2.A74 1991 226.5 06—dc20 90-43422

Printed in Great Britainon acid-free paper by

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ISBN 0-19-929761-4 978-0-19-929761-0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To my friends

at the Universities of London,

St Andrews, Edinburgh,

and Oxford

Un etat dangereux: croire comprendre

Paul Valery

Begeisterung ohne Verstand

ist unnutz und gefahrlich

Novalis

foreword

I remember well the first conversation I had with John Ashton thirtyyears ago. We briefly touched on a topic witch we had both inde-pendently noticed, namely, what he was to term ‘intimations ofapocalyptic’ in the Gospel of John. At that time the writing of hisjustly celebrated study of the Gospel of John was still ten years away.Its gestation and birth are a testimony to the world before theResearch Assessment Exercise when a slower and for that reasonmore long lasting contribution to knowledge could be achieved.

Ashton’s big book is based on the assumption that the key ques-tions regarding the gospel are those tackled by Rudolf Bultmann inhis classic commentary of 1941, and throughout the book he is incontinuous dialogue with Bultmann’s methods and conclusions. Hedeparts from Bultmann, however, in viewing the Fourth Gospel as aprofoundly Jewish document that can be only properly understood inthe light of the struggles that were endemic in the aftermath of thedestruction of the Second Temple. His essay on the development ofJohannine Christianity from conventional Jewish messianism to amore sophisticated christological presentation is masterly. The bib-lical text comes alive within the hypothetical history of religioustraditions, as the story of the Johannine community is imaginativelyand carefully reconstructed.

For me, the climax of John Ashton’s book is his exposition of thetheme of revelation, identified by Bultmann as the key idea ofthe gospel yet here located within a thoroughly Jewish milieu. Hisoriginal, and substantial, exposition of the gospel in the light of theapocalyptic tradition is masterful in its economy and profound in itsinsight. Curiously, this part of the study has not made the impact itshould have done, for, in my view it has set the course for historicalthe study of this aspect of the gospel in its Jewish milieu for years tocome. What is more, it paves the way for similar treatments of earlyChristian literature. His description of the gospel as an ‘apocalypse inreverse’, so fitting in its enigmatic quality for a text which is itselfpuzzling the reader with its riddles, so accurately summarizes that

avoidance of typical apocalyptic terminology within the gospel at thesame time as the spirit of apocalyptic remains so characteristic ofthe gospel as a whole. Curiously, he does not pursue what would bethe obvious next interpretative step: the elucidation of the relation-ship, whether literary or in terms of a debt to a common world ofthought. The apocalyptic literature of Second Temple Judaism hasmade a significant contribution not only to the Apocalypse but alsoto the Gospel of John. The two are very different texts. The gospel is abook of witness to the unique and definitive emissary from the worldabove, whereas the Apocalypse is a book of prophecy. Both texts,however, offer in narrative and visionary form words which seek tobring about an epistemological and ethical transformation inreaders/hearers in preparation for the eschatological meeting ‘faceto face’ either in the New Jerusalem (Rev 22: 4) or in heaven with theexalted Christ ( John 17: 24). Their hope for this worldmay be differentbut their theological presuppositions are remarkably similar.

The second area where John Ashton’s remarkable exegetical in-sight could have elucidated the interpretation of this remarkablebook is in the area of Wirkungsgeschichte. It is not only in literarytexts but also in art, and, of course, music that this text has beeninterpreted in very different media. I am firmly of the opinion thatthis dimension of historical study enhances the historical discussionof the text’s antecedents and immediate historical context. JohnAshton’s wide tastes and interest make this an obvious next stepfor this sensitive interpreter who had a natural flair for interdiscipli-narity long before it became a buzzword in the humanities.

Despite this, Ashton’s book stands as one of the major contribu-tions to the study of Christian origins and New Testament theologyover the last twenty years. It is a classic example of careful analysisand judicious use of a generation’s scholarship which has led to theencapsulation and consolidation of that generation’s wisdom.

As befits friends and colleagues, we still go on discussing areaswhere I would have wished John would have taken matters further.For example, once one has found the apocalyptic key to the Gospel ofJohn, there is the crucial Johannine question about the relationshipto the revelatory text in the New Testament, the Apocalypse. But thisis a great book. It is beautifully written and is testimony to the valueof mature reflection rather than the hurried rush to publish.

viii Foreword

It is so good to see it with a second edition with the more extendedtreatments of various issues included in which the significance ofwhat he has discovered has been taken further.

Christopher Rowland

Foreword ix

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acknowledgements

After my teacher Xavier Leon-Dufour, to whom I owe the dawningrealization that there is more in John’s Gospel than meets the eye, myfirst debt is to the many friends who, sometimes without knowing it,encouraged me to embark upon the writing of this book at a time,nearly ten years ago, when I had lost confidence in myself: JamesBradley, Robert Butterworth, Dick Caplice, Tom Chetwynd, Peterand Margaret Hebblethwaite, Maurice Keane, Judy Leon, Andrewand Beryl Murray, Rosemary Sharpe, Lois and Donald MacKinnon,Robert Murray. Once the project was under way, some of these,especially the last two, assisted me by offering a variety of shrewdobservations on what I had written by the middle of 1981. Not longafter that John Bowden, James Crampsey, and Christopher Evansgave me further encouragement, although I am uneasily aware thatthe last-named disapproves of what he regards as my excessive use ofadjectives as well as of sentences beginning with ‘But’. At about thesame time Douglas Templeton, whose own lapidary style all toosuccessfully masks a keen understanding of the earliest Christianwriters, made other helpful comments, and unmixed some of mymetaphors.

In 1984 I joined the Faculty of Theology at Oxford, since when Ihave benefited from the experience of Wilma Minty at the TFL, whowas constantly turning up new books and articles on the FourthGospel, and from the generous assistance of Doreen Abrams and JanePusey at the Faculty Office. I am especially grateful to BernadetteO’Reilly, who, in 1988, transcribed on to floppy discs well over half analready bulky manuscript, and to Alicia Gardner, who added anotherchapter the following year. I should also like to thank the staff ofBodley’s Lower Reading Room for their virtually limitless patience,and those members of the Oxford University Press whose collectivetalents have contributed so much to making this book look as a bookshould, notably Katy Douglas, who also suggested the design on thecover, and above all Heather Watson, who eliminated innumer-able blemishes, and whose skill as a copy-editor has left me lost in

admiration. I am indebted to Margaret Barker for many stimulatingtelephone conversations, and to John Hyman for his unwaveringinterest and support.

The extent of my debt to Rudolf Bultmann will be obvious to anyreader, and I am grateful to Basil Blackwell for permission to useand cite the English translation of his commentary, published in1971. J. L. Martyn has also kindly allowed me to quote from hisHistory and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. The extract from TheApocalypse of Abraham printed on pp. 143–4 is taken from The OldTestament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J. H. Charlesworth, published andcopyright 1983 by Darton, Longman, and Todd Ltd. and Doubledayand Co., and is used by permission of the publishers.

Finally I should like to thank the friends and colleagues who readthe manuscript when it was nearing completion, and helped me toimprove it in a variety of ways: Mark Goodacre, my severest critic;Clare Palmer, who thinks that the book should be called From Pointsto Stars; Robert Morgan, for steering me sternly away from stylisticaberrations; Peter Coxon, for hunting up some rabbinical references.My greatest debt is to Robert Murray, whose benign shadow hasbeen hovering over this book I�� Iæ�B�, and whose valuable advicemade it possible for me to introduce a number of last-minute correc-tions. Had I been able to follow up all his suggestions this would havebeen a better book, and a more interesting one. But this simplymeans that there is more work to be done.

OxfordApril 1990

xii Acknowledgements

fresh acknowledgements

After Tom Thatcher, whose request that I should participate in aconference to be held in San Diego in 2007 prompted me to think oncemore about a book that took me ten years of a previous millenium tobring to fruition, I am indebted to the friends and colleagues whohave found time in their for the most part very very busy lives to readand comment on the new material that I have been inflicting onthem in the last few months. Robert Butterworth, besides steering meaway from mixed metaphors and other stylistic infelicities, has alsotaught me that time spent seeking for clarity is never wasted. RobertMorgan, who would have preferred, I think, to see a little moretheology in the book and a little less Aristotle in the introduction,has usefully reminded me howmany gaps there are in my knowledgeof the New Testament and helped me to conceal some of them. CatrinWilliams, a new friend and a lover of wisdom, has encouraged meto be braver than I otherwise might have been when tapping intoa source that is always flowing and always fresh. Ian Boxall, oncea pupil, now a valued friend, himself the author of a truly excellentintroduction to the Book of Revelation, knows enough about theother John to remind me of things that I might else have forgotten.Above all I am grateful to Christopher Rowland, kind as well asclever, aware more than most of the deficiencies of what I write. Hewould certainly have wished me to raise my head now and then so asto look up and away from the first century of the common era and totake in some of the things that have happened since. Nevertheless hehas been unstintingly and unstingily encouraging, more so, I sus-pect, than he knows himself. Thanks are due to John Hyman, whopatiently showed me the complicated steps I needed to take so as tobe able to make use of a valuable software called Bibleworks, and toKirsten Templeton who retraced the steps for me when I had lostthem. I am grateful to Deborah Green for her ready cooperation, toDavid Taylor for his assistance with computer-speak Syriac, andlastly I want to add a word of thanks to the staff of the BibliothequeJean de Vernon (the BOSEB) of the Institut Catholique de Paris,

whose unfailing courtesy and kindness even withstood the shock, asI was on the point of finishing my work there, of seeing the Frenchdefeated by the Scots on the Rugby field.

ParisMarch 2006

xiv Fresh Acknowledgements

contents

Abbreviations xviii

Introduction 1

1. The Two Riddles 2

2. Diachronic and Synchronic 11

3. The Johannine Community 22

4. The First Edition 33

5. Reading the Fourth Gospel 36

Excursus I: Four Aporias 42

part i : genesis

1. Religious Dissent 57

1. Putting the question 57

2. The Johannine Jews 64

3. The rise of Judaism 69

4. Family quarrels 78

Excursus II: ‘Salvation is from the Jews’ 97

2. The Community and Its Book 100

1. The book 100

2. The community 107

3. The community in its book 115

4. A local habitation and a name 134

Excursus III: The First Edition 136

3. Messiah 141

1. The notion of Messiah 141

2. The Recognition of the Messiah 154

3. The commencement of the signs 170

4. Signs and wonders 178

Conclusion 183

Excursus IV: A Call to Faith 185

4. Son of God 195

1. The Samaritan connection 197

2. Messiah and Prophet 202

3. Origins 207

4. Mission 211

5. Agency 215

6. Sonship 220

Conclusion 231

Excursus V: The Composition of John 7 233

5. Son of Man 240

Introduction 240

1. The way up and the way down (1: 51) 244

2. Ascent and descent (3: 13) 251

3. The heavenly judge (5: 27) 259

4. Exaltation and glory 267

Conclusion 271

Excursus VI: The Structure of John 3 277

6. Messenger of God 281

Introduction 281

1. The Angel of the Lord 284

2. The Liberating Angel 286

3. More Angels 291

Conclusion 297

Excursus VII: Isaiah and Abraham 299

part ii : revelation

Introduction 305

7. Intimations of Apocalyptic 307

Introduction 307

1. Mystery: the two ages 311

2. Visions and dreams: the two stages 315

3. Riddle: insiders and outsiders 318

4. Correspondence: above and below 324

Conclusion 329

8. The Gospel Genre 330

1. The Messianic Secret 330

2. Two levels of understanding 335

3. The role of the Spirit 343

4. Fact and interpretation 348

5. The consciousness of genre 357

6. ‘The disciple at second hand’ 362

9. The Story of Wisdom 366

Introduction 366

xvi Contents

1. The Search for Wisdom 372

2. The Revelation of Wisdom 377

Excursus VIII: The Fourth Gospel and the Wisdom of Solomon 384

10. Dualism 387

1. Light and darkness 389

2. The world 396

3. Life 399

4. Judgement 405

5. Trial 411

6. Division 414

11. Departure and Return 418

Introduction 418

1. Departure 423

2. Return 434

3. A second Moses 445

Conclusion 451

Excursus IX: The Testament of Moses 454

12. Passion and Resurrection 460

1. Passion 460

2. Death 465

3. Resurrection 476

Conclusion 486

13. The Medium and the Message 491

Introduction 491

1. Words and concepts 494

2. The revelation form 507

Conclusion 521

Bibliography 530

Index of references 555

Index of modern authors 579

Contents xvii

abbreviations

Standard abbreviations for biblical books and the Dead Sea Scrollsare not included.

ANRW Auftstieg und Niedergang der Romischen WeltAnt. Bib. Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum BiblicarumApoc. Abr. Apocalypse of AbrahamAsc. Isa. Ascension of Isaiahb. Babylonian Talmud2 Bar. Syriac Apocalypse of BaruchBarn. Letter of BarnabasBASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental

ResearchBib BiblicaBJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands LibraryBZ Biblische ZeitschriftCBQ Catholic Biblical QuarterlyCII Corpus Inscriptionum IudaicarumI Clem. I Clement1, 2, 3, Enoch Ethiopic, Slavonic, Hebrew EnochEp. Arist. Epistle of AristeasET English translationETL Ephemerides theologicae lovaniensesEusebius, HE Historia EcclesiasticaEvT Evangelische TheologieExpT Expository TimesGen. Rab. Midrash Genesis RabbahHermas, Sim. Shepherd of Hermas, SimilitudinesHermas, Vis. Shepherd of Hermas, VisionesHeyJ Heythrop JournalHippolytus, Ref. Refutatio omnium haeresiumHTR Harvard Theological ReviewHUCA Hebrew Union College AnnualICC International Critical Commentary

IGRR Inscriptiones Graecae ad Res Romanas Pertinentes,ed. R. Cagnat et al.

Int. InterpretationJAOS Journal of the American Oriental SocietyJBL Journal of Biblical LiteratureJ. Eccl. Hist. Journal of Ecclesiastical HistoryJNES Journal of Near Eastern StudiesJos. As. Joseph and AsenethJosephus, AJ Antiquitates JudaicaeJosephus, BJ De Bello JudaicoJosephus, Vita Vita JosephiJQR Jewish Quarterly ReviewJR Journal of ReligionJSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian,

Hellenistic and Roman PeriodJSNT Journal for the Study of the New TestamentJSP Journal for the Study of the PseudepigraphaJSS Journal of Semitic StudiesJTS Journal of Theological StudiesJub. JubileesJustin, Apol. ApologyJustin, Dial. Dialogue with TryphoKuD Kerygma and Dogmam. Ber. Mishnah Berakothm. H

˙ag. H

˙agigah

m. Sanh. Sanhedrinm. Yad. YadayimMek. Mekilta de-Rabbi IshmaelMT Masoretic TextNRT Nouvelle Revue TheologiqueNT Novum TestamentumNTS New Testament StudiesOTPs Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,

ed. J. H. CharlesworthOTS Oudtestamentische StudienPG Patrologia GraecaPhilo, Quod Omn. Quod Omnis Probus Liber SitPhilo, Spec. Leg. De Specialibus LegibusPL Patrologia LatinaPss. Sol. Psalms of Solomon

Abbreviations xix

RB Revue BibliqueRGG Religion in Geschichte und GegenwartRHE Revue d’Histoire EcclesiastiqueRHR Revue de l’Histoire des ReligionsRScR Recherches de Science ReligieuseRSR Religious Studies ReviewSib. Or. Sibylline OraclesSif. Deut. Num. Midrash Sifre on Deuteronomy on NumbersSifra Midrash Sifra on LeviticusSNTU Studien zum Neuen Testament und seiner UmweltStr.–B. Strack–BillerbeckSuppVT Supplements to Vetus TestamentumT. Abr. Testament of AbrahamT. Jud. Testament of Juda, etc.Test. Mos. Testament (¼Assumption) of MosesThDNT Theological Dictionary of the New TestamentThDOT Theological Dictionary of the Old TestamentTLS Times Literary SupplementTLZ Theologische LiteraturzeitungTRu Theologische RundschauTU Texte und UntersuchungenTZ Theologische Zeitschriftv.l. varia lectioZNW Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche WissenschaftZTK Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche

xx Abbreviations

Introduction

The second edition of any book must be both the same as anddifferent from the first. Too many changes and you have a differentbook, too few and you have no right to speak of a second editionat all.

In this new edition I have dropped the whole of the previous Part I,which took up well over 100 pages, and replaced it with a completelyreworked introduction. The previous ‘Questions and Answers’ hasbeen omitted because it was really little more than a ground-clearingexercise. It offered a history of the questions addressed to the Gospelduring two centuries of critical scholarship and assessed the situationat the close of the 1980s. Since then there has been no major advancein Johannine studies, but of course a great deal has been written,much of it good, some of it awful. Any detailed assessment of thissubsequent work would in my view be of little help in setting thescene for the new edition of my own book. This introduction there-fore simply restates the aims of the book, taking account of certaindevelopments and alterations in my views.

The developments in my own thinking are represented by two newchapters, one extending the argument of what is now the first part ofthe book, ‘Genesis’, and the second supplementing the material of thesecond part, ‘Revelation’. Because I no longer believe that the dualismof John gives us any clear indication of the origins of his Gospel I havemoved the chapter with that title into the new second part. Thematerial it contains is relevant to the problem of the central idea ofthe Gospel, which is what this part of the book is all about.

There are many other smaller changes, most of which are eithercorrections or elucidations of what I have previously written. Worthmentioning, perhaps, is the rather fuller treatment of the problem ofthe identity of ‘the Jews’ in what is now Chapter 1, ‘Religious Dis-sent’, and the insertion of four additional Excursuses, the first, fol-lowing this Introduction, a detailed discussion of four of the Gospel’smajor aporias, the second an enquiry into that puzzling phrase,

‘Salvation is from the Jews’, the third a comment upon the affinitybetween the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Wisdom, and the fourth abrief explanation of two of Jesus’ most enigmatic statements: ‘Abra-ham saw my day’ (8: 56) and ‘Isaiah saw his glory’ (12: 41).

1. the two riddles

Rudolf Bultmann laid out the two great riddles (Ratsel) of the Gospelas long ago as 1925. The first he defined as ‘the riddle of where John’sGospel stands in relation to the development of earlier Christianity’,1

and explained it by saying that the Gospel cannot be considered tobelong to any of the three main branches of doctrinal development inthe early Church, namely Hellenistic Christianity (Paul), Jewish-Hellenistic Christianity (the Shepherd of Hermas, Hebrews, the Letterof Barnabas), or Palestinian Christianity (the Synoptic Gospels). As analternative he proposed Mandaean Gnosticism, and in his later writ-ings on the Gospel, notably his magnificent commentary (1941), heretained and elaborated upon this suggestion.

The second great riddle of the Gospel, ‘taking the Gospel as it seesitself (fur sich)’, Bultmann stated to be ‘what is its central intuition, itsbasic idea?’ ‘Doubtless,’ he answers,

it must lie in the constantly repeated proposition that Jesus is the emissary ofGod (e.g. 17: 3, 23, 25) who through his words and deeds brings revelation. Heperforms the works given him by the Father, he speaks what he has heardfrom the Father or what he has seen in his presence. Whoever believes issaved, whoever does not is lost. But there lies the riddle. Precisely what doesthe Jesus of John’s Gospel reveal? One thing only, though put in differentways: that he has been sent as Revealer.2

So here is Bultmann’s solution to his second riddle: the fact ofrevelation, Jesus’ revelation of himself as Revealer. And it is this, theanswer the Gospel itself offers (fur sich) to the second great riddle, thatfurnishes the object of the first: what (an sich) is the historical originof this extraordinary conception—how is it to be explained?

1 ‘Bedeutung’, 55 (italics in the original).2 Ibid. 57–8. The innocent-sounding distinction between an sich (in itself) and fur

sich (for itself ), common in German philosophical writings of all periods, goes back atleast as far as Die Phanomenologie des Geistes (1807), where it furnishes Hegel with adialectical lever that enables him to heave the undifferentiated consciousness up as faras the an-und-fur-sich (another quite ordinary German expression) of Absolute Spirit.

2 Introduction

(a) The First Riddle

Behind the reiterated proposition that ‘Jesus is sent by God, is onewith the Father and as such is the bearer of revelation’, arguesBultmann, lies a powerful myth, and the recognition of this myth isthe first step to the correct understanding of the Gospel.3 The sourceof this myth, he believed, was Mandaean Gnosticism, and accord-ingly he answered his first riddle by what has come to be known asthe Mandaean hypothesis, one of the oddest of the many remarkablebits of jetsam that litter the shores of Johannine scholarship. ForBultmann was convinced that although the evangelist took overthis source and made extensive use of it he deliberately demytholo-gized it at every point. Once the simple truth of revelation had beensuccessfully distilled from the baser elements of the myth, it could beseen for what it really was, the essence of the Christian message, dasblosse daß, the bare fact of revelation. This strange, bold hypothesisattracted few adherents, and nowadays nobody pays any attention toit at all. It did however have the advantage of completeness (a qualitythat in Bultmann’s eyes singled it out from all rival explanations), forit satisfactorily accounted for all the features of John’s theology thatmake this so difficult to explain simply on the basis of other earlierChristian writings.

In fact the hypothetical source effectively isolates the Gospel fromother sources and influences by interposing itself between them.Bultmann thought that the evangelist was probably a convertedGnostic and was consequently familiar with the three main texts ofMandaism, the Book of John, the Liturgies, and the Ginza, or Treas-ury, more or less in the form in which they had been transmitted (inAramaic) and which had become available in a German translationby Mark Lidsbarsky in 1925. The evangelist, now a Christian butstill in thrall to his former beliefs, would have drawn upon thesedocuments freely and adapted them for his own purposes. The pecu-liar flavour of this Gospel, according to this outlandish theory, resultsnot from a confrontation with rival ideologies but from a subtlecombination of the evangelist’s own fundamental Christian beliefswith a seductive but dangerous myth structured round a divineEmissary sent by God to lead certain chosen souls out of darknessinto light.

3 Ibid. 58.

Introduction 3

It is essential to recognize that, once we have brought the evan-gelist back to the world in which he really lived, the world of SecondTemple Judaism, the question of the Gospel’s origins takes on a newurgency. Reformulated, as it must be, to read, ‘what is the position ofthe Gospel in the development of Jewish thought?’, it can be seen to bepart of the most interesting and important of all the problems con-fronting New Testament scholarship: how did Christianity emergefrom Judaism? Martin Dibelius once remarked that the main problemof christology is to explain ‘how knowledge of the historical Jesuschanged so quickly into faith in the heavenly Son of God’.4 Thisproblem requires separate answers for Paul, the Synoptists, andJohn, for they all reached their positions independently.

Neither C. H. Dodd nor Ernst Kasemann, the two most influentialof Bultmann’s scholarly successors, managed to find a satisfactoryanswer to Bultmann’s first great riddle. For Dodd any search for theGospel’s ‘sources’ or even for the ‘influences’ by which it may havebeen affected betrays a radical misunderstanding of its very nature:‘Whatever influences may have been present have been masterfullycontrolled by a powerful and independent mind.’5 Accordingly heblunted the edge of Bultmann’s riddle first by exaggerating beyondthe bounds of credibility the originality of the mind of the evangelistand secondly by substituting for sources and influences the very hazyconcept of ‘background’.6 Bultmann’s pupil Kasemann also rejectedthe Mandaean hypothesis, but continued to look for an answer to theriddle in Christian sources. He found his answer, surprisingly, in theobscure world of what he called the ‘enthusiastic piety’ of certain pre-Pauline christological hymns, which ‘described Jesus as pre-existentheavenly being whose earthly existence was but a stage of a journeyto take him back to heaven’.7

Though on the face of it worthy of some consideration, this sug-gestion receives no further elaboration, and in any case does nothingto help solve the question of the origins of the ideas themselves.

My greatest surprise as I concluded an admittedly rather cursorysurvey of work done on the Gospel since the completion of my ownbook in 1990 was to find that, for whatever reason, the puzzle of its

4 ‘Christologie’, col. 1593. 5 Interpretation, 3.6 In some sections of the second part of his book (‘Leading Ideas’) Dodd makes

effective use of certain Jewish traditions. But he is more attentive to Hellenistic sources,especially the so-called Hermetica.

7 Testament, 21.

4 Introduction

origins has been virtually ignored. ‘Where does John’s Gospel standin relation to the development of Jewish thought?’ It is as if thisquestion had never been asked.8 This neglect entitles me, I believe,to put forward now a fuller and more elaborate version of the answerI attempted fifteen years ago.

Like Bultmann himself the first place in which I look for theanswers to the question of the Gospel’s origins is in the pages of theGospel itself. For it is here that we find the peculiar modification ofcertain beliefs current in Second Temple Judaism that make John’sproclamation of Jesus sufficiently different from other Christian writ-ings to require an alternative explanation of how it came into being.In the first chapter of this book, therefore, I pay great attention to theinternal squabbles between the Johannine group and the othermembers of the synagogue to which they belonged that figure solargely in chapters 5–10 of the Gospel. The distinctiveness of Johan-nine theology suggested to Bultmann an origin in Gnosticism; and solike most other scholars before and after him he failed to look keenlyenough into the pseudepigraphical writings (more or less contem-porary with the Gospel) that testify to very different kind of beliefsfrom those that characterize modern Judaism (based on the Mishnah,published at the end of the second century ad).9

In principle the question of the social and historical situationin which the Gospel was composed is quite distinct from the questionof the origin and genesis of the strange ideas that characterizethe Gospel and make it so hard to explain. We shall see, however,that the two questions are in fact intricately linked, because many ofthe Gospel’s ideas must have been formulated in the context ofthe uneasy relationship between the Johannine Christians and theother members of the synagogue to which they belonged.

A serious weakness of Bultmann’s work was his failure to recog-nize that John’s Gospel cannot properly be understood without someawareness of the immediate circumstances of the community inwhich it was conceived and came to birth. Bultmann himself con-sidered these to be irrelevant to the meaning of the Gospel. Convincedas he was that this held an enduring significance for all human

8 In a survey of more than 40 books published in the period between 1985 and 1994

(‘Aus der Literatur’). Konrad Haldimann and Hans Weder do not find a single one thateven grazes the question.

9 Peter Hayman once remarked to me that ‘the Mishnah is the New Testament ofJudaism’, a deeply insightful comment that I have never forgotten.

Introduction 5

beings, in all ages and all societies, the situation in which the Gospelwas first proclaimed was of no interest to him: ‘the encounter withJesus’ words and person’, he says, ‘casts man into decision in hisbare, undifferentiated situation of being human’.10

Possibly the first scholar fully to recognize the importance ofgetting some insight into the circumstances of the Johannine com-munity was J. Louis Martyn. This is how he spells out the problem inthe first edition of his masterly little book, History and Theology in theFourth Gospel (1968). From the first section of his introductory chap-ter (headed ‘The Problem’) a new note is sounded:

Our first task . . . is to say something as specific as possible about the actualcircumstances in which John wrote his Gospel. How are we to picture dailylife in John’s church? Have elements of its peculiar daily experiences left theirstamp on the Gospel penned by one of its members? May one sense even in itsexalted cadences the voice of a Christian theologian who writes in response tocontemporary events and issues which concern, or should concern, all mem-bers of the Christian community in which he lives?11

The question highlighted so effectively by Martyn has certainlyreceived plenty of discussion since,12 but perhaps there is still roomfor another individual viewpoint. This I offer in Chapter 2 of thepresent book.

Chapters 3–5 treat of the titles of Jesus, and Chapter 6 (new to thepresent edition) of another title (Messenger of God) implicit in hisassertion that he always acts on behalf of God. We shall see thatthese titles contain, in embryo as it were, all the claims made forJesus that so outraged ‘the Jews’. Their analysis represents, therefore,a further contribution to the problem of the Gospel’s origins.

(b) The Second Riddle

I turn now to Bultmann’s second riddle, which concerns the peculiarnature of the revelation brought by Jesus. Bultmann was right tostress that revelation is the pivotal idea of the Gospel, its Grundkon-zeption. But like all other commentators before and since he failed tospot its affinity with apocalyptic (revelatory writing). John J. Collins,an acknowledged expert on this abstruse topic, once defined anapocalypse as ‘a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative

10 Theology, ii. 63. 11 p. xviii.12 I comment on this in §. 4 of this chapter.

6 Introduction

framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldlybeing to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality whichis both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, andspatial insofar as it involves another supernatural world’.13 Providedthat we understand eschatological in the sense that Bultmannemploys this word (i.e. as referring to what the Gospel calls life)and admit that Jesus really did speak, as he claims to have done, of‘heavenly things’ (3: 12), this fits the Fourth Gospel to a T. The Jesusof the Fourth Gospel, a ‘Stranger from Heaven’ as he has been aptlycalled,14 disclosed his mysteries not just to a single chosen visionarybut to all (all too few) who would give him a hearing. This stretchesthe genre somewhat but perhaps not to breaking point.

One might have expected such a remarkable congruence to excitea great deal of scholarly comment and explanation. The truth is,however, that the Gospel’s peculiarly close resemblance to apocalyp-tic (for which I argued in the chapter headed ‘Intimations of Apoca-lyptic’ in the first edition of this book) has been virtually disregardedby scholarship.15 It may reasonably, therefore, be repeated. SinceBultmann’s second riddle has been accorded little more attentionthan his first I feel justified in putting forward these arguments again.This is done in Chapter 7, which opens Part II (‘Revelation’).

Chapter 8 treats of the literary genre of the Gospel and of itsappropriation by the Fourth Evangelist. Chapter 9 (new to this edi-tion) concerns the Gospel’s plot. Then follows the chapter on thedualism of the Gospel and after this two chapters (‘Departure andReturn’, ‘Passion and Resurrection’) dealing in some detail with keyelements of the second half of the Gospel that require comment underthe general heading of Revelation. The final chapter (‘The Mediumand the Message’) rounds off the whole book. Apart from the additionof Chapter 9 (‘The Search for Wisdom’), and the insertion of a revisedversion of the chapter on Dualism, Part II of this book differs onlyslightly from the first edition.

(c) History and Exegesis

Aristotle held the view that in order properly to know or understandan individual thing you have first to know how it is (or has been)

13 Apocalyptic Imagination, 4. 14 See M. de Jonge, Jesus.15 With the solitary exception (as far as I am aware) of Christopher Rowland,

‘Apocalyptic’, 423–4.

Introduction 7

caused. For a long time he was also believed to have held that thereare four kinds of causes—material, formal, efficient, and final. Nowsince only one term in this list (efficient) seems to denote what wemean by causality, it is easy to consign such an apparently nonsens-ical view to the dustbin of ‘mere’ metaphysical speculation. If, how-ever, one translates ÆN��Æ not as ‘cause’ but as ‘explanation’, thenwhat Aristotle wrote immediately begins to make sense. For we canlook at a bronze statue (Aristotle’s most famous example) fromdifferent points of view; from the point of view of the bronze fromwhich it is made, the sculptor who fashioned it, the purpose forwhich he did so, and finally from the point of view of its formalcharacteristics: �e �r�� ŒÆd �e �Ææ��ت�Æ.

The first type of explanation, of efficient cause, is obviously covered,in the case of literature, by the concept of authorship. But thisconcept is not always appropriate for works composed over a longperiod, especially if they derive wholly or partly from an oral trad-ition. And in fact where the authorship of such works has beentraditionally ascribed to a single figure, such as Homer or Moses,this has proved an obstacle in the path of understanding—whereasin other cases, the Chansons de Geste for example, for which anyattribution that exists is very much looser, the way is immediatelyclear for a different and more comprehensive reading. The majorityof modern readers, even in the twenty-first century, probably stillshare the deference of the Romantics towards artistic genius, andwould consequently deprecate any attempt to ‘explain’ Hamlet, say,or Lear, in terms of the particular influences and sources that helpedto shape the mind of the dramatist. But if, in the search for efficientcauses, it seems reasonable to attribute the Shakespearian magic tohis individual genius, this is less true of his ‘ideas’ than of thepeculiarly poetic delicacy and vividness with which he expressedhis wonderfully sympathetic understanding of the human condition,and created living human beings for future generations to marvel at.But whereas Shakespeare’s ‘ideas’, like those of Chaucer, weremostly commonplace and derivative, in the case of the Fourth Gospelit is above all its ideas that require explanation; discounting, as wemust, any theory of direct verbal inspiration, we are left with theneed to account for the elaborate conceptual web that is such aremarkable feature of this work. So without altogether discardingthe hypothesis of an individual religious genius, it is legitimate toconfine the space reserved for ‘efficient causality’ to a study of the

8 Introduction

Gospel’s origins—understood in terms of background, sources, influ-ences, and traditions. This is how I construe Bultmann’s first greatpuzzle: das erste Ratsel. Where did the evangelist get his central ideas,above all his christology? How can this strange new portrait of Christbest be accounted for?

This is clearly a historical question, and in this case so is thesecond kind of explanation, what Aristotle calls ��º�. Bultmann,as we have seen, tends to assume that the explanation of the Gospel’spurpose is to be found in the answers it gives to timeless questionsregarding the human condition, the nature and destiny of man. Thislofty stance excuses him from asking less wide-ranging questionsconcerning John’s intended readership. But anyone taking a morepragmatic view of the immediate purpose of the Gospel is justified innarrowing the search for a ‘final’ explanation in order to focus uponthe handful of people whom the author or authors had in mind whencomposing it. These are the work’s readers; and although Aristotle’sterminology allows a more extrinsic view of a writer’s purpose (e.g.to earn money or to stave off boredom), the intended impact on thereaders is the only kind of aim or purpose integral to a full under-standing of the work as such. Pace Bultmann, it must be included inany complete account of das erste Ratsel: the problem of placing theFourth Gospel in its correct historical context. Why was the Gospelwritten?

The other two kinds of explanation insisted upon by Aristotle,namely matter and form, may be thought less appropriate for awork of literature than for the bronze statue that he himself had inmind. Still, we may think of the matter as the content of a piece ofwriting and the form as the way in which this is expressed. Aristotlehimself often spoke of questions concerning the form of a thing asequivalent to asking simply what it was, or rather what kind of thingit was. Where literature is concerned this means asking about thegenre of a piece of writing. This question might be thought to differonly slightly from questions concerning its aim or purpose, as caneasily be seen when we reflect on the nature of an epic or a play. Butthough the difference is slight, it is nonetheless crucial. Questionsconcerning genre resemble those the form critics put concerningindividual forms or Gattungen; that is to say, the answers they seekare general rather than particular: they relate to the kind of situation,the kind of audience to which a work is addressed. In so far as suchanswers necessarily reach out beyond the work of art itself, they are

Introduction 9

the sort of general answer implied in terms like ‘apologetic’, ‘catech-etic’, and ‘kerygmatic’, not the sort that require the specification of aparticular historical situation. That is the concern of the historian;genre belongs to the domain of exegesis.

The primary task of exegesis, however, is to understand andinterpret the work in hand. It is concerned above all, that is to say,with meaning. Of the Fourth Gospel we have to ask as Bultmann did(his second great puzzle) what is its basic idea, its Grundkonzeption.We must ask too what the evangelist made of the traditions heinherited, and search for the significance of his choice of the gospelform. What is more, since the Gospel is, among other things, a story,we need to enquire how a study of its plot and its themes mayenhance our understanding. In Aristotelian terms these are ques-tions of matter and form, and constitute the object of Part II of thepresent work.

Although history and exegesis are distinct and different disciplinesthey are often directed to the same object. For the historian a work ofliterature or any piece of writing that the exegete is attempting tounderstand from the inside may be simply one piece of a largerpuzzle, a piece that has to be inserted into its historical context beforeit can be used as evidence. William Wrede, reacting strongly againstwhat he saw as certain pernicious tendencies of New Testamentscholarship towards the end of the nineteenth century, wanted toguide it back to what he considered to be its proper object, the studyof history.16 This ambition was not entirely misconceived: the his-torian, he argued, has no reason to attach to the writings of the NewTestament any greater significance than to other works, be theyChristian, pagan, or Jewish, of the same period, But the literaryhistorian, who for obvious reasons may have a particular interestin the New Testament, is entitled to select one of its writings, asBultmann did with John, and attempt to trace its origins. Such astudy is likely to require at some points a meticulous exegesis of thetext in question, and for this reason the distinct disciplines of historyand exegesis are not to be regarded as existing side by side in adjacentcompartments that turn out (regrettably) not to be altogether water-tight. This is especially so when, as is the case of all four Gospels, thework in question is neither pure fiction (although this too may come

16 See on this his essay ‘Task’ and Robert Morgan’s introductory comments to thisin Nature, 2–67.

10 Introduction

within the historian’s survey) nor pure history (although the work ofmajor historians from Herodotus onwards may be treated simply asliterature) but a mixture of the two.17 In that case it is crucial for afull understanding that the nature of the mix be properly grasped.(The gospel genre will be discussed briefly below.) The differencebetween history and exegesis is perhaps best expressed by saying,as the scholastics did, that they differ in respect of their formalobjects. It is in fact possible to shift from one discipline to the otherjust as easily as from one window to another in a modern computer.In this book, therefore, although I see Part I as historical and Part IIas exegetical, I shall not hesitate to move my mouse from history toexegesis and back again as the argument requires.

2. diachronic and synchronic

(a) Two Contrasting Approaches

One has only to cast an eye over the various surveys of studies of theGospel that have been conducted over the last fifteen years, by JurgenBecker,18 covering the years 1978–84, Konrad Haldimann and HansWeder (1985–94),19 and, most recently, Klaus Scholtissek,20 to seethat for all of them the factor that best enables them to distinguishbroadly between the different kinds of study is the ongoing debatebetween synchronic and diachronic approaches. This is equally true,as Becker points out, of the first half of the twentieth century, as canbe seen by a glance at the articles on the Gospel in the threesuccessive editions of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1912,1927, 1959).

In 1996, in a critique of narrative criticism (just one of manypossible synchronic approaches), I tentatively forecast that it would

17 The nature of the mixture may vary from Shakespeare’s historical plays to moremodern writings as diverse asWar and Peace, Les Memoires d’Hadrien, Maurice Druon’sLes Rois Maudits and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot.

18 ‘Aus der Literatur’. 19 ‘Aus der Literatur’.20 ‘Johannes auslegen I, II, III, IV’. I have not had direct access to these: my

observation is based on the summaries in New Testament Abstracts, 44 (2000), 1001;45 (2001), 1026; 47 (2003), 939; 49 (2005), 1019. See too, for the same broad distinction,J. Beutler, ‘Methodes et problemes’. (Though the two main sections of this piece bothhave the same heading, approches synchroniques, the one on p. 29 should readdiachroniques.)

Introduction 11

be unlikely to survive beyond the turn of the century. How wrong Iwas! It is probably fair to say that as things look now, ten years later,historical criticism is fighting a rearguard action.

The jargon generally employed to distinguish between (a) thestudy of a text in the form that it has come down to us and (b) theattempt to track the various stages in its composition is derivedultimately from the famous Cours de linguistique generale of Ferdinandde Saussure,21 who used ‘diachronic’ to refer to the approach oflinguistic theorists chiefly interested in the history of languages.The alternative, ‘synchronic’ approach involves the study of theinterlocking relationships that go to make up a language at a par-ticular point in time, ignoring the problem of how it reached thatstate in the first place.

The distinction between diachronic and synchronic is clearlyanalogous to the distinction between history and exegesis discussedin the previous section. In theory then there is no contradictionbetween the two approaches and no obvious reason why they shouldbe regarded as incompatible. When applied to the study of literature,however, and in particular to the study of the Bible, the partisansof synchronicity, whom I shall call synchronists, frequently raiseobjections in principle to the alternative approach. Part of the purposeof the present section is to enquire into the reasons for this; but I wantto emphasize from the outset that the reasons, whatever they maybe, are not good ones. Mark Stibbe, introducing a collection ofnarrative-critical studies published in 1993, comments on what hecalls ‘the loss of historical consciousness’ among current literarycritics of John: ‘First of all, and most obviously, they have rejectedhistorical criticism. Nearly all the books which study the final form ofJohn’s Gospel begin with some brief and iconoclastic rejection offormer, more historical methods.’22 Yet Gerard Genette, a self-confessed narratologist, often cited with respect even by postmod-ernists, prefaces a lengthy study of A la recherche du temps perdu bystating that ‘we will be concerned basically (essentiellement) with thework in its final form, sometimes however taking its antecedents intoaccount, not for their own sakes, which would make little sense, butfor the light they may shed’.23 No rejection of historical methods

21 (1913), 117–40.22 M. W. G. Stibbe (ed.), The Gospel of John as Literature (Leiden, 1993).23 Figures III (Paris, 1972), 67.

12 Introduction

here. More recently Christine Hoegen-Rohls, in an illuminatingstudy of the four chapters that comprise the Farewell Discourse,declares that her work is firmly grounded on the historical-criticalmethod and that while she will be concentrating on a synchronicstudy of the text this by no means excludes the possibility of makinguse of results accruing from a diachronic study.24

For the sake of comparison let us turn for a moment to a literaryexample. Although most readers of, say, Paradise Lost are likely to bemore interested in the final form of the poem than in the history of itscomposition, few, I suspect, would question the right of the literarycritic or historian to delve into Milton’s notebooks or correspondencein an attempt to see how the poem took shape. One such critic,Dr Johnson, comments as follows on one of the earlier sketches ofthe work, still conceived as a tragedy in five acts and headed ‘Adamunparadised’: ‘it is pleasant to see great works in their seminal state,pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence; nor could there beany more delightful entertainment than to trace their gradualgrowth and expansion, and to observe how they are sometimessuddenly advanced by accidental hints, and sometimes slowly im-proved by steady meditation’.25 Which does not mean of course thatDr Johnson was incapable of appreciating the finished work in itsentirety. On the contrary, his knowledge of the early sketches of thepoem is likely to have enhanced his appreciation of the work in itsfinal state. Similarly it is a feasible supposition that a music criticacquainted with Beethoven’s preliminary sketches for one of hissymphonies, sonatas, or quartets will have a better understandingof the finished work and probably a greater enjoyment than anenthusiastic amateur.

It may be objected in response to these comments that in the caseof Milton and Beethoven we have reliable evidence providing a clearpicture of the early state of their work. The Fourth Gospel is not likethat. Apart from the episode of the adulterous woman (8: 1–11) it hascome down to us more or less as we find it in modern printed editions:more or less, because when the manuscripts disagree, as they do in

24 Der nachosterliche Johannes, 6–9.25 The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their

Works, i, ed. R. Lonsdale (Oxford, 2006), 261. Milton formed the intention of writing onthe subject of Adam’s fall as early as 1639, when he was 31. But he did not start work onit for some 16 years, and the 1st edn. was not published until 1667. The work did notreach its final, 12-book format until its 2nd edn. in 1674, the year of Milton’s death.

Introduction 13

almost every verse, one is forced to choose between them, so that anyprinted version of this or any other New Testament writing, asmay be seen from the huge number of variants at the bottom ofevery page, is the result of thousands of tiny decisions on the part ofits editors. The synchronists insist on following one of these editionsline by line, although it is worth adding here that the less dogmaticamong them often baulk at the final hurdle. John 21, widely con-sidered to be an appendix or epilogue, proves for some (includingC. H. Dodd) too great an obstacle in the way of a totally integratedreading of the entire Gospel.26

Martyn begins one of his programmatic essays by comparing theGospel to an archaeologist’s tell. It contains, as he says, ‘numerousstrata, and to some extent these strata may be differentiated from oneanother’.27 If we admit, provisionally, that the cracks and joinsknown as aporias do indicate the presence of such strata, informa-tion of a different kind is required to decide which is the earlier.Unlike the tell, the Gospel does not display its strata one on top ofthe other in a given order: there is nothing in the text itself to informus which came first. Nevertheless, supposing it were possible onother grounds to discover the correct order of the various strata,should we not then be in the position similar to that of Dr Johnson orour postulated music critic, capable, that is to say, of a fuller under-standing of the Gospel as we now have it?

(b) A Defence of Diachronicity

What objections do the synchronists raise against attempts to dis-cover how the Gospel reached its present state?

There are, I think, two main types of objection to the diachronicapproach. The first (i) is well represented by C. H. Dodd, who con-ceives it ‘to be the duty of an interpreter at least to see what can bedone with the document as it has come down to us before attemptingto improve upon it’. The second type (ii) is that of the champions ofnarrative criticism, and the theoreticians of this discipline known asnarratologists. Interested above all in the story of the Gospel, theyrealize that the value of their work depends on there being anunbroken line from start to finish.

26 On this see Excursus I, ‘Four Aporias’, where it will be seen that ch. 21 is far frombeing the only problem.

27 Gospel of John, 90.

14 Introduction

(i) Let us start with Dodd, who introduces the third (exegetical)part of his own classic Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953) withwhat at first sight looks like a reasoned and plausible argument infavour of what came to be called later the synchronic approach.Although Dodd does not name him, it is obvious that he has Bult-mann in his sights. The exegete’s job, he argues, is to interpret thetext before him, not to burrow underneath it. What is proposed forhis analysis is not the lost work of some hypothetical evangelist (nodoubt he is thinking of Bultmann’s title, Das Evangelium des Johannes,i.e. the Gospel as John wrote it) but the Fourth Gospel as we have it.This is what he says:

Many attempts have been made to improve the work by rearrangement of itsmaterial . . . It is of course impossible to deny that the work may have suffereddislocation, and plausible grounds may be alleged for lifting certain passagesout of their setting, where there seems to be some prima facie breach ofcontinuity. Unfortunately, when once the gospel has been taken to pieces,its reassemblage is likely to be affected by individual preferences, preconcep-tions and even prejudices. Meanwhile the work lies before us in an orderwhich (apart from insignificant details) does not vary in the textual tradition,traceable to an early period. I conceive it to be the duty of an interpreter atleast to see what can be done with the document as it has come down to usbefore attempting to improve upon it. This is what I shall try to do. I shallassume as a provisional working hypothesis that the present order is notfortuitous, but deliberately devised by somebody—even if he were only ascribe doing his best—and that the person in question (whether the authoror another) had some design in mind, and was not necessarily irresponsibleor unintelligent. If the attempt to discover any intelligible thread of argumentshould fail, then we may be compelled to confess that we do not know howthe work was originally intended to run. If on the other hand it shouldappear that the structure of the gospel as we have it has been shaped in mostof its details by the ideas which seem to dominate the author’s thought, thenit would appear not improbable that we have his work before us substantiallyin the form which he designed.28

My objection to Dodd, let me be clear, has nothing to do with thetarget he sets himself: no reasonable person could find anythingwrong in ‘seeing what can be done with the document as it hascome down to us’. But I do object to his deliberate exclusion of otheraims and other methods. Bultmann’s purpose, which is to recover asfar as possible the original work of John the Evangelist in its purity

28 Interpretation, 289–90.

Introduction 15

and integrity, is on the face of it just as legitimate and no lesslaudable an enterprise than that of Dodd. There is a sense indeed inwhich Bultmann is doing exactly what Dodd requires—seeing whatcan be done with the document as it has come down to us. Dodd’sfrank admission ‘that the work has suffered some dislocation’ isdisingenuous, in so far as it includes no acknowledgement that thedislocations need to be explained. The unargued assumption thatthey can have no bearing upon the interpretation of the text is not astrength but a weakness.

There are in fact places where, as Dodd puts it, ‘no intelligiblethread can be found to the argument’. One of these is the conclusionof chapter 14; Jesus says ‘I will not converse with you muchlonger. . . . let us move out of here (¼ªø�� K ��FŁ� ) and then carrieson talking for a further three chapters. According to Dodd ‘themovement is a movement of the spirit, an interior act of will, but isa real departure nevertheless’.29 This is surely an evasion of thedifficulty, not a solution, for the words ‘let us move out of here’cannot just refer to ‘an interior act of will’. On the junction betweenchapters 9 and 10 Dodd is more forthcoming: ‘if we were enquiringinto the history of the composition of the work, it might plausibly beargued that ch. ix, which has a distinct character of its own, onceexisted as a separate unit’. Then he adds, ‘whatever may have beenthe history of composition, it does not appear that we could atpresent improve upon the existing order without disintegrating thework which has come down to us, and relying upon mere specula-tion’.30 Like Bultmann, who must be in his mind here, he fails toconsider the possibility that the evangelist himself may have intro-duced new material at this point.

In concluding his argument, Dodd calmly withdraws a previousconcession, that the person responsible for the work in its final formmay have been simply an intelligent scribe. He selects instead whatfor him is the only alternative, that ‘the structure seems to have beenlargely shaped by the author’s central ideas’. But in what sense canthe leading ideas of the Gospel (light, life, judgement, etc.) be saidto shape its structure? Surely these are not structural ideas?Dodd himself devotes the whole of the second part of his book (wellover 100 pages) to a discussion of these, one with a value quite

29 Interpretation, 409.30 Ibid. 355.

16 Introduction

independent of his conception of the Gospel’s overall design. If, then,the structure is not shaped by the ideas, it is open to us to speculatethat the final redaction of the Gospel may not be the work of theevangelist after all.

If by some freak chance Bultmann’s theory happened to be right,and the work of the evangelist had been spoilt by an ecclesiasticalredactor intent on adding to it elements of sacramentalism and futur-istic eschatology absent from the original, then Bultmann couldscarcely be blamed for drawing his readers’ attention to these altera-tions. Nor, in principle, was he wrong to undertake the laboriouswork of restoring theGospel to its original state if indeed it had sufferedthe kind of disruption that his argument supposes. His fault, if faultthere was, is to be sought not in his principles but in his practice.

Taken as a whole, Dodd’s arguments are extremely weak andleave one wondering whether his decision to ignore questions ofredaction was not motivated to some extent by convenience as wellas conviction. A priori it would seem at least possible that the study ofthe awkward transitions in the Gospel could prove a useful tool fordetermining how it was composed. It is a matter of some regret thatan exegete of Dodd’s learning and insight should have thrown thistool away without ever attempting to apply it.

(ii) The second type of objection to any diachronic approach is theone raised by the so-called narrative critics, who are interestedespecially and sometimes exclusively in the story or plot of the Gospel.They deny a priori that the study of the prehistory of the text has anyrelevance to the meaning of the Gospel in its present form.

Here are some examples:

dissection and stratification have no place in the study of the gospel and mayconfuse one’s view of the text.31

the meaning of the present text is not dependent upon the recovery of thesources . . . Even if the sources were recovered, focusing attention on themwould only serve to distract us from our task of reading the Evangelist’stext.32

questions of multi-layered interpolation . . . have no place . . . no more than doquestions of ‘the author’s intentions,’ for the assumption of unity endows theentire text with intentionality.33

31 R. A. Culpepper, Anatomy, 5.32 G. C. Nicholson, Death as Departure, 15–16.33 J. L. Staley, Print’s First Kiss, 29–30.

Introduction 17

Narrative unity is not something that must be proved from an analysis of thematerial. Rather, it is something that can be assumed. It is the form of thenarrative itself that grants coherence to the material, no matter how dispar-ate the material might be.34

Literary readings presuppose an holistic approach to the text as againsta tendency to atomize it into units of earlier material and sources. . . . Stressis placed on the overall coherence of the narrative, and meaning is found inrelationship of parts to the whole. Along with this goes an understandingof gaps, lacunae and fissures in the text as purposefully conceived, to beunderstood and resolved in terms of the rhetorical strategies and ploys ofthe implied author, or as textual signals inviting the implied reader toactualize the narrative reality or obtain meaning by testing hypotheses andimaginatively filling the gaps. The literary text, on this perspective, becomes‘a dynamic series of gaps’.35

What reply can be made to these objections?The bald assertion that ‘dissection and stratification have no place

in the study of the gospel’ (strange in a work dealing expressly withthe Gospel’s anatomy) does not withstand scrutiny. But my realcomplaint against Culpepper (as against Dodd) concerns the exclu-siveness of his claim. In other respects Culpepper’s book makes a realcontribution to Johannine scholarship and one can understand whyit is widely admired. Similarly, although as Dodd, Culpepper, andmany others have shown, it is possible to study the meaning of thetext fruitfully without delving into the sources, the search for sources(which also involves an enquiry into the integrity of the text) does nothave to be a pointless and unprofitable distraction. I am baffled by theblank refusal of people claiming to be literary critics of whateverpersuasion to consider any solution to a textual problem except anintegral reading of the text as it stands in the manuscript tradition.In my copy of the works of Shakespeare36 there are two passagesin Love’s Labor’s Lost where the editor claims to detect ‘some obvioustracks in the snow’ in the First Quarto of 1598 (published some yearsbefore Shakespeare’s death). The first of these (IV. iii. 292–394) is ‘apreliminary sketch’ of Berowne’s great speech on love, the second(V. ii. 817–22) ‘a first-draft version’ of the price imposed by Rosaline atthe end of the play for accepting Berowne’s courtship. In the revised

34 M. A. Powell, Narrative Criticism, 92. 35 D. Tovey, Narrative Art, 21.36 The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974). The editor of Love’s Labor’s Lost is Anne

Barton.

18 Introduction

version ‘the twelvemonth’ he is required to spend in visiting the sickis imaginatively expanded:

You shall this twelvemonth term from day to dayVisit the speechless sick, and still converseWith groaning wretches, and your task shall beTo enforce the pained impotent to smile.

The editor puts both of the first drafts in brackets. What else shouldshe have done?

With assertions like ‘the assumption of unity endows the entiretext with intentionality’ and ‘it is the form of the narrative itself thatgrants coherence to the material’ I have more problems, simplybecause I do not understand them. If unity is simply assumed, thenthe intentionality of the text is assumed along with it. But what if thematerial, on examination, proves to lack coherence? As for thesuggestion of ‘a dynamic series of gaps’ (Tovey), a far cry indeedfrom David Friedrich Strauss’s ‘seamless garment’ (jener ungenahteLeibrock),37 this is clearly an invitation to the implied readers of theGospel (why not the real readers?) to fill the gaps in for themselves.But how? In accordance with ‘the perceived strategies and ploys’ not,be it noted, of the real author, who guards his independence, but ofthe implied author, always at the beck and call of his inventor, thenarrative critic who has designed and constructed him. I cannot takethis seriously.

(c) Aporias

I have already had occasion to refer to the so-called aporias firstdisclosed by Schwartz and Wellhausen a century ago. The choice ofthe word Aporien is Schwartz’s. Finding no word in his own languagepat to his purpose, he somewhat recklessly concluded that the Greekword I�æ�Æ was just what he needed. Applied to things, theword means straits or difficulties; applied to persons it refers to any

37 ‘Vorrede zu den Gesprachen von Ulrich von Hutten’, Gesammelte Schriften3

(1877), 556. ‘Seamless garment’ is the translation of W. F. Howard, The Fourth Gospelin Recent Criticism and Interpretation (London, 1931), 258. But what kind of garment isseamless? My dictionary renders Leibrock by ‘frockcoat’, which cannot be right. But it isclear from what Strauss says that he was thinking of a shroud: he says of Leibrock thatthe Gospel itself speaks of it; in fact John makes no mention of the �Ø �� in which,according to the first three gospels, Jesus’ body was wrapped after having been takendown from the cross.

Introduction 19

embarrassing situation from which it is hard to extricate oneself—animpasse. For a way out of this impasse we may turn to a scholar whohas devoted much of his career to this topic. Aporias, says RobertFortna, ‘are the roughnesses and tensions—interruptions and sud-den turns, nonsequiturs and even contradictions, passages withdense or overcrowded wording, the doublets—that so patently char-acterize the Fourth Gospel and distinguish it from the narrative of theother Gospels’.38 Many of these aporias are quite complex, as anyonewill confirm who has wrestled with Schwartz’s turgid expositions ina series of lectures at the University of Gottingen at the beginning ofthe twentieth century; and Bultmann may be the only commentatoron the Gospel to deal with them all at any length. One will search hiswork in vain, however, for any hint that some at least of the aporiaspoint to subsequent insertions by the evangelist himself. (Is thisbecause to have recognized this possibility would have forced himto take account of the changing situation of the evangelist and hiscommunity?)

The objections to the relevance of the aporias to the study of theGospel are of two kinds. The first comes from critics who, like thenarratologists, are uninterested in the prehistory of the text. Here area couple of examples:

I find myself less and less favorably disposed toward those approaches to theGospel that highlight the disruptive character of the text and use perceivedaporias as a key point of departure for reading the text. In fact, the moreliberally such a technique is invoked the less receptive I become. Why? Iwould respond that by and large I find that the proposed aporias can bereadily explained in other—and, I would add, simpler—ways.39

In light of literary criticism’s sensitivity to the strategy of the text, many ofthe apparent aporias on which source critics depend are seen to be much lessproblematic. A passage that seems awkward to the source critic, whosejudgment often amounts merely to observing that ‘he or she would nothave written it like that,’ can appear quite reasonable to a critic who isattentive to the literary dynamics of the text.40

To these glib assertions that there are better or simpler ways ofsolving the aporias than those advocated by the diachronists allone can say is, ‘Show me.’

38 Fourth Gospel, 4. 39 F. F. Segovia, ‘Tradition History’, 186.40 R. Bauckham, ‘Audience’, 105–6.

20 Introduction

The other objection, raised by one of the most productive of pre-sent-day Johannine scholars, is more serious. It comes in a smallsection of the first volume of Jorg Frey’s massive three-volume study,Die johanneische Eschatologie (1997). The first volume is an impres-sively comprehensive history of research, and his final discussionof the aporias, occupying scarcely three pages of a very big book, isentitled ‘Die Aporie der johanneischen Literaturkritik’: the impasse ofJohannine source criticism. Frey wants to argue that when appliedto the Fourth Gospel source criticism has proved not nearly as usefula tool as in the study of the Synoptics. Here is the crucial sentence:

When interpreters deliberately renounce any stylistic verification of theirtheories and follow the old Tendenzkritik in relying solely on theologicalcriteria, this can only lead into the vicious circle of individual theologicaltheories.41

This is a free translation, but not, I trust, an inaccurate one. RobertFortna, introducing his Signs Gospel, distinguishes clearly between(1) ideological (his translation of sachlich), (2) stylistic, and (3) con-textual criteria.42 For Frey any argument concerning the aporiasthat is not based on stylistics (Philologie) is bound to be theologicallymotivated and is therefore worthless. (And he is quietly confidentthat the stylistic criteria themselves are worthless too.) But in the firstplace his calm assumption that anyone employing theological cri-teria is necessarily infected by the demonstrable bias associated withthe Tendenzkritik of Baur and the Tubingen school is a way of dis-missing these without argument. Yet, to take but one example,Fortna’s distinction between the low christology implied in the sim-ple title Messiah and the high christology of the finished Gospel isunquestionably correct. Less straightforward theological differencesmay be harder to detect and more open to discussion, but are not forthat reason to be discarded unexamined. Of more consequence is theassumption that theological (sachlich) and stylistic criteria are all thatwe have. For a scholar of Frey’s evident learning, the failure toacknowledge the existence of Fortna’s third category, contextualaporias, is more than just an astounding oversight: it is a very serious

41 ‘Wo die Auslegung einer philologischen Verifikation ihrer Konstruktion bewußtden Abschied gibt und sich im Gefolge der alten Tendenzkritik allein auf sachlicheKriterien stutzen will, fuhrt der Weg nur in den circulus vitiosus der eigenen theolo-gischen Konstruktionen’ (Eschatologie, i. 431).

42 Gospel of Signs, 15–22.

Introduction 21

omission indeed. Shaky as they may seem to some, the contextualaporias are the foundation of all theories of layers of redaction andsuccessive editions of the Gospel. Fortna rightly favours this criterionover the other two because it is ‘somewhat more objective and doesnot depend upon prior decisions as to what is Johannine’. And thefact is that most of the major aporias are of this kind: readily discern-ible because of literary or contextual roughnesses, they do not need atheologian to spot them. If these are ignored, the other criteria aretoo weak to stand alone unaided. (See Excursus I, following thisintroduction.)

It may be worth pointing out that all the aporias dealt with byFortna have to do with his Signs Source, or rather Signs Gospeltheory, and are in some ways harder to handle than those whichpoint to successive editions of the Gospel itself, because this theorypostulates an already existing document that has been incorporated,with considerable modifications, into the evangelist’s own text.

3. the johannine community

No one has followed the course of Johannine studies over at leastthree decades more intently than Robert Kysar. So when he con-cludes, perhaps a trifle wistfully, that in his view ‘there is nowsufficient evidence in these early years to indicate that the whitherof the Johannine community [the future of the theory] is likely toinclude its demise’,43 one has to sit up and take notice.

His reasons for reaching this conclusion are twofold. The first ‘hasto do with the evidence for such a hypothetical construction as theJohannine community’.44 Here we should distinguish the variousways in which individual scholars have explained the origins andprogress of the community from the general hypothesis that therewas such a community in the first place. Kysar asks, for instance,with regard to the three references to expulsion from the synagogue,whether these necessarily refer to an event that had already hap-pened. Perhaps not. But the most important reason for believing thatthe Johannine group was no longer attached to the synagogue at thetime the Gospel was written is the uncompromisingly bitter tone ofthe exchanges between Jesus and ‘the Jews’ in chapters 5, 8, and 10.

43 ‘Whence and Whither’, 76. 44 Ibid. 71.

22 Introduction

(More on this in my Chapter 1.) And as for the existence of thecommunity, how else should we explain the sheepfold of chapter 10or the many-branched vine of chapter 15? Questioning whether thesectarian attitude of the Gospel should be explained as a consequenceof the expulsion from the synagogue, Kysar suggests that there couldbe other reasons. Indeed. As I will explain at length, my own theoryis that the expulsion was the consequence, not the cause, of theJohannine group’s adoption of beliefs incompatible with the strictmonotheism of those whom the Gospel calls ‘the Jews’. Finally, Kysaremphasizes that ‘simply because a hypothesis illumines the possiblemeaning of a passage does not necessarily prove that the hypothesisis true’. This, as a logical principle, is undeniable. Broadened out toinclude science as well as literature, it helps to explain why it is stillpossible to believe in creationism or a flat earth (there are websites forboth). But most reasonable people will continue to affirm that theearth is round and that the origin of species is best explained bynatural selection. When it comes to literature, of course, matters areless straightforward. One cannot, for instance, attribute to those whodeny the existence of Q the kind of unreason that seems to afflict themembers of the Flat Earth Society. The continuing disagreement ofscholars about questions on which no certainty has been reachedmay suggest that they should consider adjusting the terms in whichthe questions are put; but it does not mean that they should simplystop searching for answers.

Kysar’s second reason for fearing the rapid demise of the theory ofthe Johannine community is ‘the decline of historical criticism’ and,more alarmingly, the objections confronting the study of history ingeneral—because

the waves of . . . postmodernism have gradually washed away the assump-tions on which the study of history was founded during the Enlightenment. . . If postmodernism prevails it will mean the death of the historical criticalmethod of biblical interpretation and all the historical reconstructions thatwere the results of the method, including those involving the Johanninecommunity.

The greatest challenge, according to Kysar, is ‘the question of thelocus of meaning’. Perhaps it is true that ‘a text means differently as itis interpreted by different readers’. Nevertheless, swimming asstrongly as I can against the tide of postmodernism, I still believethat it makes sense to look for the meaning that the first readers of a

Introduction 23

text would have found in it. There is no obvious decline in the studyand composition of books on history, and these are still separatedfrom fiction and historical novels in all the bookshops that I know.I trust that the worst of Kysar’s fears are ill-founded.

Now I want to consider some more specific objections against thecommunity theory.

(a) A Life of Christ?

One enormous obstacle blocking the path to the acceptance of Mar-tyn’s general theory is the widespread but largely mistaken beliefthat the Gospels are Lives of Christ—not of course in the same senseas the nineteenth-century Lives so brilliantly analysed by AlbertSchweitzer, but very much in the same sense as the Greek andRoman biographies (bioi) by Plutarch or Suetonius.45 Crucialhere is the quite proper insistence that the Gospels cannot be unique.‘This word ‘‘unique’’ is a negative term signifying what is mentallyinapprehensible. The absolutely unique is, by definition, indescrib-able.’46 So far so good. But before searching for a genre into whichthe Gospels can be slotted and thereby better understood the firstmove, surely, is to delineate the Gospels themselves as accurately aspossible: to ask, quite simply, what is it that characterizes them asGospels?

We may start, however, by suggesting that the use of the pluralform skews this question from the outset. For we should really beasking about the Gospel of Mark. It was Mark after all who, whatevermodel he himself had in mind, introduced the modifications thatentitle us to search for a formula to convey the special characteristicof the canonical Gospels that eventually led to their being classedtogether as ‘the fourfold Gospel’. Matthew and Luke had Mark’sGospel before them as they wrote, and the easiest way of explainingthe formal similarities between these three and the Fourth Gospel isthat John was acquainted with at least one of the others.

45 R. Bauckham, in fact, declares that ‘the most damaging criticism of Martyn’stwo-level reading strategy is the fact that it has no basis in the literary genre of theFourth Gospel’. Exhibiting an uncharacteristic deference to current scholarship, hesays that ‘recent discussion of the gospel genre strongly favors the view that first-century readers would have recognized all four canonical gospels as a special form ofGreco-Roman biography’ (‘Audience’, 104). The ‘special form’ makes all the difference.

46 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vii (Oxford, 1960), 255.

24 Introduction

Martin Hengel begins a lecture called ‘The Four Gospels and theOne Gospel of Jesus Christ’ (summarizing a book of the same title)with a zealous defence of the view that the Gospels are biographies.Aware, however, that this is not enough, he adds, referring to Mark,that it is a ‘kerygmatic biography’. ‘Because ‘‘biography’’ and ‘‘proc-lamation’’ are fused in his work,’ he continues, ‘Mark can call hisnarrative about Jesus ‘‘[a] saving message’’, that is an account ofJesus’ activity which brings about faith and thus salvation.’47 Leav-ing aside the somewhat tendentious translation of �Pƪª�ºØ as‘saving message’, we may question what exactly happens whenbiography and proclamation are, in Hengel’s word, fused. Fuseoxygen and hydrogen and what you get is water. It is at leastconceivable that the fusion of biography and proclamation mayresult in something that cannot properly be called either biographyor kerygma. When we speak of a carrot cake we mean a cake inwhich carrots are one of the main ingredients. But they are notexactly fused with the flour, the eggs, and the oil. Applied to Mark’sGospel, the term ‘kerygmatic biography’ seems to imply that it is aspecial form of biography just as the carrot cake is a special form ofcake. But is this right?

Since the term ‘kerygmatic’ is associated (at any rate for anyBritish reader who has a little knowledge of New Testament schol-arship) with the discourses in the first five chapters of Acts,48 we mayperhaps gloss it with the opening of Peter’s Pentecost speech in Acts:‘Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works(�ı Æ��E�) and wonders and signs which God did through him inyour midst’ (Acts 2: 22). This seems a fair summary of one importanttheme in the early chapters of Mark. Equally important, of course,are the passion and resurrection stories that follow (also emphasizedin Peter’s speech): Sean Freyne gives a good account of similarfeatures in Greco-Roman biographies: ‘prophecies and portents ofdoom, betrayals, plots and intrigues, arrests and escapes, trials andpseudo-trials, farewell speeches and last words, detailed descriptionof the last days of the subject and their attitude to death; reactions ofbystanders and miraculous signs; and finally heavenly ascensionsand assumptions’.49 The parallels with the Gospels are evident and

47 ‘Four Gospels’, 22.48 See especially, C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (1936).49 ‘Early Christian Imagination’, 10.

Introduction 25

worth stressing. But in spite of the many obvious resemblances it isstill permissible to ask whether the novelty that prompted earlierscholars to speak of the uniqueness of the Gospels has any precedentamong the bioi with which they have been compared.

A fascinating answer to this question is given in an essay byJonathan Z. Smith in which he argues that

for those figures [in the relevant ancient writings] for whom an ultimatereligious claim is made (e.g. son of god), their biographies will serve asapologies against outsiders’ charges that they were merely magicians andagainst their admirers’ sincere misunderstanding that they were merelywonder-workers, divine men or philosophers. From Iamblichus’ De mysteriisAegyptiorum and Apuleius’ Apologia to the Gospel of Mark . . . the character-istic of every such religious biography . . . of Late Antiquity is this doubledefense against the charge of magic—against the calumny of outsiders andthe sincere misunderstanding of admirers.

He adds:

The solution of each group or individual so charged was the same: to insiston an inward meaning of the suspect activities. The allegedly magical action,properly understood, is a sign. There is both a transparent and a hiddenmeaning, a literal and a deeper understanding required. At the surface levelthe biography appears to be an explicit story of a magician or a Wunder-mensch; at the depth level it is the enigmatic self-disclosure of a son of god.50

Smith selects two texts for detailed comparison, Philostratus’s VitaApollonii and Iamblichus’s De Vita Pythagorica liber, saying of theformer that ‘his biography as biography is unimportant’,51 and ofthe latter that ‘for mere mortals, a figure like Pythagoras mustremain a cipher’.52 He concludes that ‘what an Apollonius, a Py-thagoras, a Jesus reveals in the narratives concerning them, is theirown enigmatic nature, their sui generis character’, and commentsprovocatively, ‘I would want to claim the title ‘‘gospel’’ for the Vitaeattributed to Mark and John as well as those by Philostratus andIamblichus.’53 Neither Philostratus nor Iamblichus can have influ-enced Mark, since he preceded them by some two centuries; but thennor can Plutarch or Suetonius, writing around the end of the firstcentury ad. There are historical features in the work of all threewriters, but all three, unlike Plutarch and Suetonius, were more

50 ‘Good News’, 193–4. 51 Ibid. 197.52 Ibid. 203. 53 Ibid. 203–4.

26 Introduction

interested in what Hengel calls ‘proclamation’ than in any kind ofhistorical biography. To call them biographers without further ado isto focus on what was for them a secondary aspect of their work. EvenSmith’s suggested term, ‘religious biographies’54 has the disadvan-tage of laying too much stress on the biographical aspect; so for wantof a better name I suggest ‘proclamatory narratives’. This has thedouble advantage of restricting the range of comparison and ofsuggesting that the religious aspect of a work (namely the extremeclaims it makes on behalf of its hero) is likely to affect its historicalreliability. (An example of this in the case of all four Gospels is themiracle of the loaves and the fishes.)

When we turn to the Fourth Gospel, moreover, there is an addi-tional argument available, drawn from two major sections of theGospel, first the acrimonious controversies between Jesus and ‘theJews’ in chapters 5–10, and secondly the farewell discourse andprayer in chapters 14–17. Although projected back into the life ofJesus, these display the concerns of a much later period. The violentdissensions of chapters 5, 8, and 10, the way ‘the Jews’ are portrayedin these, the claims made by Jesus about himself and the consolatorywords of the farewell discourse (14–16) all go to prove that theirauthor, whom we call the evangelist, was writing for readerswhose circumstances were radically different from those of the fewfollowers Jesus had gathered in his own lifetime and who must haveread these chapters as a direct reflection of their own experiences.55

So Bauckham is simply wrong to say that the original readers of theGospel ‘would not expect it to address the specific circumstances ofone particular community’. So much seems to me to be evident fromthe Gospel itself. Bauckham adds that the Gospel ‘displays a strongsense of the ‘‘pastness’’ of the story of Jesus, temporally and geo-graphically located in its own time and space’. But the correctinference from this fact is the need for the ‘two-level’ reading herejects. It is true that this need does not apply to all sections of thegospel narrative or to all the characters who play a part in it.Composed, as I have already argued, over a long period, this is nota homogeneous text.

54 For an alternative principle of classification, ‘according to social function’, seeC. H. Talbert, ‘Biographies’.

55 See J. Frey, ‘Bild’, 38, and, more fully, Eschatologie, ii. 247–68, under the heading,‘Das johanneische Zeitverstandnis’.

Introduction 27

(b) A Gospel for all Christians?

The Gospels for All Christians, the defiant title of the collection inwhich Richard Bauckham argued that far from being written forlocal communities, as most scholars believe, the Gospels were actu-ally intended for distribution throughout the Christian world, begsthe question it is intended to answer. For it presupposes that duringthe period of the Gospels’ composition, between, say, ad 65 and 90,members of local churches thought of themselves as belonging to amuch larger organization, already scattered all over the knownworld. Bauckham indeed asserts that the early Christian movement‘had a strong sense of itself as a worldwide movement’ but heprovides no direct evidence in support of this claim. Whilst Paulwas active, as is plain from his authentic letters, the term KŒŒº���Æ

referred to a local church. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, of course, itrefers to some universal church in which all Christians, Jews andGentiles alike, were united. But it is at least conceivable that Ephe-sians was written after the Gospels. So the question remains open:does it make sense to speak of ‘all Christians’ at the time when theGospels (that is to say the canonical Gospels) were being composed?

First, a few more general points before considering the essay inwhich Bauckham deals with the special case of the Fourth Gospel.(Some of these have already been made by other scholars: PhilipEsler,56 David Sim,57 and Margaret Mitchell.58)

— Part of Bauckham’s case rests on the ease of travel in the first andsecond century and the abundant evidence that many of theearly Christian leaders did in fact travel extensively. One ofthese, writing two or three decades after the composition of theGospels, was Ignatius of Antioch, who had close ties with manyof the young Christian churches, including Ephesus. If the Gos-pels had been available to any of these churches, he if anyonewould have picked them up. Yet there is no direct quotation fromany of the Gospels in his letters, and all his allusions to the Jesustradition are easily explained by appealing to the oral tradition.

— Eventually, of course, the authority of all four Gospels came to berecognized by the mainstream Christian churches. But so did theletters of Paul, all written to individual churches (or, in one case,to a single person). This did not prevent them from being widely

56 ‘Community’. 57 ‘Gospels’. 58 ‘Patristic Counter-Evidence’.

28 Introduction

distributed throughout the Christian world, but this wide distri-bution tells us nothing about the audience the author of theseworks had in mind.

— The Johannine letters, universally acknowledged to belong to thesame tradition as the Gospel, show that those who emerged fromthis tradition had come to live in communities sufficiently distantfrom one another to make it necessary to communicate by letteryet sufficiently close for a tradition of mutual hospitality to havegrown up. Their leader could not speak to them all at the sametime: if he wanted to share his own gospel with them he wouldsoon have to write it down. If Bauckham is right that ‘it wasdistance that required writing, whereas orality sufficed for pres-ence’,59 then this was distance enough. Written compositioncertainly does not prove that the gospels were destined for readershundreds of miles away.

— The dictum that ‘it was distance that required writing’ is in anycase false on two counts. The Qumran community, cut off fromthe rest of the country, was certainly not content to confine itsteaching to the spoken word. And Clement records how it wasMark’s listeners (IŒæÆ�Æ�) who urged him to put his gospel intowriting.60

I now turn to the article in which Bauckham deals specifically withthe Gospel of John, ‘The Audience of the Fourth Gospel’.

‘The most damaging criticism of Martyn’s ‘‘two-level’’ readingstrategy’, he argues, ‘is the fact that it has no basis in the literarygenre of the Fourth Gospel.’ But this, as we have seen, is to beg thequestion. The next section of Bauckham’s article, headed ‘A Two-Level Text’, accurately sums up the position of his adversaries:

Closely connected with the two-level reading strategy is the view that theFG is a multilayered work, in which texts from various stages of thecommunity’s history have been preserved alongside one another. Thisperspective posits a complex history of literary redaction as the key to theJohannine community’s social and theological history. The ability todistinguish these various sources and levels of redaction depends primarilyon the identification of aporias and theological tensions between differentparts of FG.

59 ‘For Whom’, 2860 As reported in Eusebius, HE 2. 15. 1–2. This point is well made by Mitchell,

‘Patristic Counter-Evidence’, 51.

Introduction 29

He goes on to affirm, without argument, that ‘literary criticism’ has abetter way of dealing with these aporias and that ‘we need to bemuch more open to the possibility’ that the ideological tensionsbetween the different parts of the Gospel ‘belong to the characterand method of FG’s theology’. Possibly so, but not unless the literarycritics are prepared to demonstrate in each instance the superiority oftheir approach. Such work of theirs that I have read (quite a lot) hasleft me unimpressed.

The section entitled ‘In-Group Language?’ is confusing because it isconfused. Bauckham claims that nowadays the Fourth Gospel is seenas the most accessible of the four to Christians and non-Christiansalike, though he provides no evidence for either assertion. That itshould be accessible to Christians is easily explained on the basis ofcenturies of teaching and tradition. But to non-Christians, with noprevious knowledge of Christianity? I doubt it. (See the concludingsection of this introduction.) The explanations the Gospel itself some-times gives of its riddles (which Bauckham considers a counter-argument against the in-group language theory) have nothing to dowith the insider/outsider dichotomy of the in-group language butrelate to the evangelist’s before/after theology: during Jesus’ lifetimeall is hidden; after the resurrection all becomes clear. Similarly theriddles employed to lead to a fuller understanding (the Samaritanwoman and, arguably, Nicodemus) fulfil, it is true, a different functionfrom the oppositional riddles used in Jesus’ confrontations with ‘theJews’. But this simply means that one has to be precise about theidentification of insiders and outsiders. And this, in turn, is differentfrom the two levels of understanding, the first available to the char-acters in the story, the second to the readers of the Gospel. Thesearguments will be developed muchmore fully in Chapter 2. Bauckhamcomplains that ‘scholars who read FE’s language as the in-group talkof a sectarian community’ have ‘missed the fact that FG seemsdesigned, on the contrary, to introduce readers to its special languageand symbolism’. But there is no contradiction here.

One piece of evidence that tells against the theory that the whole ofthe Fourth Gospel as we have it was composed by a single author in ashortish period of time is the final chapter, John 21, which suggeststhat people with different allegiances and belonging to two distinctgroups, yet both seeing themselves primarily as followers of Jesus,had at last come to recognize the desirability of mutual recognitionand respect. In the body of the Gospel Peter yields to John. A book

30 Introduction

which up till then had not been directed at Christians who acknow-ledged the authority of Peter was now adapted to that purpose. Butthis was after a long period in which it served the interests of a morerestricted group (to which scholars have given the name of theJohannine Community). Even some of the most ardent synchronists(including C. H. Dodd, who dismisses it as ‘a mere postscript’) makean exception of this chapter. Bauckham, interestingly, is not one ofthese, but his argument tails off at this point with the lame admissionthat his very different view (‘that chapter 21 is an epilogue and anintegral feature of the design of FG’) ‘cannot be argued here’.

(c) The Birkath- ha-Minim

In 1979 J. Louis Martyn published a revised edition of his classicHistory and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (1968).61 In it he added along note62 defending his views on the Birkath- ha-Minim againstcertain objections raised privately by Wayne Meeks and more objec-tions in the published writings of certain other scholars. (The eu-phemistically entitled ‘Blessing of the Heretics’, which is more of acurse than a blessing, was a reformulation of the twelfth of theeighteen benedictions recited as a prayer (Amidah) in early synago-gic worship.) Martyn concluded by admitting ‘that we are dealingwith questions which can be resolved only with some degree ofprobability’, but repeated his personal opinion that the Birkath-ha-Minim ‘was issued under Gamaliel II and that it is in some wayreflected in John 9:22 etc.’ In another note63 he argues againstMorton Smith that the 18th Blessing was probably inserted towardsthe beginning of the period (80–115 ce) in which Gamaliel II con-trolled the Jamnian Synod, not towards the end, as Smith proposed.An earlier date would make a connection with the excommunicationreferred to in John 9: 22 more likely.

Most of the very considerable scholarly work on this question thathas appeared in the meantime is very critical of Martyn’s position.This ranges from Daniel Boyarin’s complete dismissal of the wholestory concerning a curse of heretics as completely unreliable

61 The 3rd edn. (2003) is in all essential respects identical with the 2nd. A few shortexcursuses are omitted and an essay added from his collection, The Gospel of John inChristian History. But there is no sign of any further revision of Martyn’s positionbetween 1979 and 2003—nearly a quarter of a century.

62 Ibid. 54 n. 69. 63 Ibid. 56 n. 75

Introduction 31

(‘the aroma of legend hovers over this entire account’64) to thetheory of Liliane Vana that the Birkath ha-Minim was part of the18 blessings before the destruction of the temple, at a time when thesewere not a synagogal prayer and their daily recitation was notcompulsory, and that consequently it has nothing to do with theexclusion of Jewish Christians from the synagogue.65

If, contra Boyarin, some historical basis is to be accorded to theTalmudic story, I am persuaded by the argument of Stephen Katzthat ‘the Birkat ha-Minimwas not directed solely at Jewish Christianswhen promulgated (or revised) after 70. Rather it was aimed againstall heretics and detractors of the Jewish community who existed inthe last two decades of the first century—including of course but notuniquely Jewish Christianity.’66

Katz continues by reminding us of what he calls ‘an importanthermeneutical consideration—the difference between speaker andhearer’. In this case,

the Jewish leadership directed its malediction against all heretics, while theJewish Christians, who knew of the animosity against them and of the feelingthat they were heretics ‘heard’ the Birkat ha-Minim as particularly aimed atthem.Thiswas aperfectly natural response. Thus Johnandother later second-century Christian sources could well speak of Jews cursing Christians in thesynagogue, when in fact the malediction was againstminim in general.67

To this perceptive comment I would add that, as in a divorce, it isnecessary to listen to both sides in order to get the full story. John’sGospel gives us one, surely biased, version of the break between the twogroups. The version of ‘the Jews’ would have been very different, andmaywell have saidnothing about excommunication.68 But the divorcewas real: the Jesus group had broken away and would never return.

In putting so much stress on the relationship between the Birkathha-Minim and the expulsion of the Jesus group from the synagogue,

64 ‘Ioudaioi in John’, 220. 65 ‘Birkat ha-minim’.66 According to Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, Katz is too much motivated by apologetic

concerns. He himself believes that ‘the rabbis of Yavneh were a small, politicallydivided, largely impotent group who only had power over a tiny minority in the latefirst century, and had little power even in the years beyond’ (‘Methodological Consid-erations’, 95.)

67 ‘Issues’, 73–4.68 Van der Horst makes the point that ‘the door [of the synagogue] always

remained open [to Christians] even in Jerome’s time’ (‘Birkat’, 368). But we are dealingwith a local dispute.

32 Introduction

Martyn lays himself open to the complete rejection of his theory by,among others, Boyarin. This is unfortunate, because as I observedfifteen years ago his reading of John 9 is not built upon his interpret-ation of the Eighteen Benedictions: ‘at most it is buttressed by it’.69

Quite apart from the support he finds for his theory in rabbinicalsources the evidence of the Gospel itself, read, as it surely must be, inrelation not to the time of Jesus but to that of the Jesus group withinthe synagogue, points to a decisive break between ‘the Jews’ andthose among them who professed belief in Jesus. This evidence aloneis sufficient to justify research into the history of this group.

4. the first edition

There is nothing bizarre in the notion of an author re-editing his ownwork during his own lifetime. After the publication of his Essais in1580 Montaigne spent much of his time in the remaining twelveyears of his life supplementing and reworking them. The second,more or less definitive edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost was publishedin 1674, seven years after the first, ten-book edition, had begun toappear. It carried on the title-page the words ‘Revised and Augmen-ted by the same Author’. Roderick Hudson, Henry James’s secondnovel, was given four separate editions. The fourth of these, pub-lished in 1907 for the New York edition (the one with the famousPrefaces), was very different from the first, which had appearedthirty-two years earlier. But even the second (1879) edition, said byJames to have been minutely revised with many verbal alterations,had in fact been changed quite radically. More relevant, perhaps, toour own subject is the medieval religious poem, Piers Plowman,because of the continuing uncertainty about the identity of theauthor. But whilst we may not be quite sure whether William Lang-land of Shipton-under-Wychwood actually wrote the work generallyascribed to him, most scholars believe that the three editions of Piers,dating roughly from 1367, 1378, and 1385, are by the same hand.70 Ifthis author was busy writing for twenty years or so, Goethe took

69 Understanding, 108 n. 102.70 In her introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of the poem (Ware,

Hertfordshire, 1999), commenting on the fact that the author must have spent mostof his adult life writing and rewriting it, Priscilla Martin remarks that ‘this suggests anearnest, anxious, and obsessive personality’(p. viii)!

Introduction 33

three times as long over the composition of Faust. His biographer,Nicholas Boyle, writes of his ‘ability to transform the nature andquality of a literary work simply by adding to it—an ability nowheremore apparent than in the sixty years long development of hisFaust’.71 Equally significantly, the wide gaps between four periodsof creative composition meant, as Goethe himself conceded, that theplay ‘turned out to be something rather less than unitary in itsconception or homogeneous in its execution’.72 Its first draft, theso-called Urfaust, was not published in Goethe’s lifetime, a fact thatshould alert us to the possibility that in speaking of two or moreeditions of John’s Gospel we may be going beyond the evidence.Criticizing the obsessive desire of modern literary historians to givea precise date to the works of medieval authors, John Benton arguesthat these

could keep their personal copies of a manuscript for many years, allowingother copies to be made at different stages of development but maintainingtheir capability to shape the work, to correct it, and allow it to develop.Copies of such texts made at different dates are like sketches of a growingchild, each an authentic representation of a given stage, no one morerepresentative than another.73

In the same way, all of the different ‘states’ of an etching by, say,Rembrandt, may be authentic but none definitive.74

Turning now to the hypothesis of the first edition of the FourthGospel (a term I retain for convenience despite residual misgivingsabout its applicability), it should first be stated clearly that it restsvery firmly upon the aporias discovered by Schwartz and Wellhau-sen and their successors. That is why it is important to examine thesewith some care (as I have attempted to do for four of them inExcursus I). To dismiss them with an airy wave of the hand (‘thereare better and easier explanations’) simply will not do. The reasonsfor refusing to accept any theory of integral composition are in mostrespects similar to the arguments of the so-called Analysts in the

71 Goethe: The Poet and the Age, i (Oxford, 1991), 86.72 See David Luke’s introduction to his translation of Part One in The World’s

Classics series (Oxford, 1987), p. ix.73 ‘778: Entering the Date’, in D. Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature

(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 5.74 e.g. the etching entitled Ecce Homo, extant in eight states and radically reworked

in the sixth, in which the crowd in the foreground has been removed and replaced bytwo dark cellar arches.

34 Introduction

Homeric Question. Many of the minor inconsistencies they havedetected can indeed be explained as understandable lapses in thecourse of a long composition by a single author. But the Doloneiaepisode in book 10 cannot be brushed aside in this way, nor can thatsection of the embassy to Achilles in book 9 in which a third envoy,Phoinix, plays an important role in spite of having been explicitlyexcluded earlier.75

The arguments for the existence of a Signs Source are also con-structed mainly upon the aporias spotted and emphasized independ-ently by James Matthew Thompson, in a series of articles written forThe Expositor between 1915 and 1917

76 and Alexander Faure77 a fewyears later. Some scholars, notably Robert Fortna,78 have attemptedto complement these with detailed stylistic arguments, but these aretricky, very complex, and largely unconvincing. Jorg Frey, basinghimself upon a very thorough analysis of two other scholars,79 hasargued that the Gospel (including chapter 21 and the JohannineLetters too) exhibits such homogeneity of style that common author-ship is the only possible explanation. But he takes no account at all ofany suggestion of successive editions by the same author and appearsto assume that a homogeneity of style excludes any possibility thatthe author used sources. When one gives the matter a moment’sthought one can see that this assumption, though shared by most ofthe partisans of the theory as well as by its detractors, is patentlyfalse. If John made direct use of the Synoptics (which is disputed) hismanner of doing so was certainly very different from the way Mat-thew and Luke used Mark. As Hengel remarks, John ‘was too inde-pendent an author to copy in a straightforward way’.80 The cuttingand pasting technique of Matthew and Luke is in any case theexception, not the rule. More commonly, when writers use sourcesthey change the style of these to bring them into conformity with

75 G. S. Kirk quotes what he calls ‘the inevitable conclusion’ of D. L. Page, ‘that thelarge part played by Phoinix in this embassy has been superimposed upon an earlierversion in which only Ajax and Odysseus were sent to plead with Achilles’, The Songs ofHomer (Cambridge, 1962), 218. Yet his next chapter is headed ‘The Overriding Unity’.

76 See the bibliography for a list of these articles.77 ‘Die alttestamentliche Zitate’.78 The Gospel of Signs (1970) and The Fourth Gospel (1988).79 E. Ruckstuhl and P. Dschulnigg, Stilkritik und Verfasserfrage im Johannesevange-

lium (Freiburg, Switzerland, and Gottingen, 1991).80 Johannine Question, 91.

Introduction 35

their own habitual usage.81 In book 11 of the Antiquities, for instance,Josephus, a contemporary of the Fourth Evangelist, alters the style ofhis source, the Letter of Aristeas, ‘wherever possible’,82 including thefour written documents Aristeas himself quotes.

5. reading the fourth gospel

The scope of the present work is limited by its purpose, which is toprovide an alternative answer to the first of Bultmann’s riddles and acomplementary answer to the second. This means that many lesser(and, in my view, less interesting) problems are left untouched.Nothing is said here of the identity either of the author of the Gospelor of the Beloved Disciple. The relation of the Fourth Gospel to theother three is barely mentioned; and there is no attempt to trace anyof the historical traditions that may lie behind the Gospel.83 Moreregrettably, because the book is largely confined, as has just beenexplained, to what I conceive to be the first edition of the Gospel, Itouch only fleetingly and incidentally upon passages that seem to meto have been added later: chapters 6, 15–17, most of chapter 11, andthe beginning of chapter 10 (the Good Shepherd).84 More regrettablystill I have managed to say almost nothing (except to some extent inChapter 9) about the purely literary qualities of the Gospel, above allits symbolism. In a book aspiring to completeness these omissionswould be serious defects indeed. So this second edition of Understand-ing, like the first, has limitations and no doubt errors too. Such isscholarship, and such is life.

81 This is equally true, of course, of poets (Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, thoroughlyChaucerian though it may be, is a part-adaptation, part-translation of Bocaccio’sTeseide) and also of composers and artists. Mahler quotes a French children’s song inhis first symphony without compromising his own style and Lloyd Webber sentimen-talizes a simple motif from one of Strauss’s Four Last Songs to make it the theme-tune ofJC Superstar. John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, says that in his work on LesDemoiselles d’Avignon he ‘devoured’ and ‘internalized’ El Greco’s Opening of the FifthSeal (Life, ii. 17), and the same could be said of the tribal and Oceanic heads that he wasalso studying at the time.

82 A. Pelletier, in an exhaustive study, speaks of Josephus’ ‘tendance generale amodifier tout ce qui peut l’etre’, Flavius Josephe, Adapteur de la lettre d’Aristee: Unereaction atticisante contre la Koine (Paris, 1962), 221.

83 C. H. Dodd needed a whole book (Historical Tradition) for this.84 It would be good to have a diachronic study of these chapters in relation to the

present text. Ch. 5 (‘The Shepherd’) of my Studying Johnmakes a start. On the FarewellDiscourse (chs. 13: 31–16: 33) see A. Dettwiler, Gegenwart.

36 Introduction

The huge majority of the readers of the Fourth Gospel, like thereaders of the Iliad and the Odyssey, will continue to respond to it asthey find it. Like their predecessors they will be uninterested in andunfussed by its aporias or any of the theories that have been built onthese—and equally unfussed, one might add, as real readers them-selves, by the elaborate and often fanciful interpretations attributedto the Gospel’s implied readers by the narratologists. This is how itshould be. But students of the Gospel, having read and reread itscores of times, and confident that they—I should say we—under-stand it quite well, are in danger of overlooking how odd, challen-ging, disconcerting, and even disturbing the Gospel must appear toanyone unfamiliar with it; of forgetting the sheer enormity of theclaims made by ‘the Stranger from heaven’. With this in mind I askeda young friend of mine to do me the favour of reading the first threechapters of the Gospel carefully (I stressed carefully) and to comeback in three weeks’ time ready to answer questions about these.What follows is a report on the conversation at our next meeting.

A First-Time Reader

Debbie was born in Glasgow in 1980 and brought up there till the ageof 18, when she went to read modern languages (German andItalian) at an English university. Her parents, who are strictly com-mitted to irreligion, steered her firmly away from the Kirk and didtheir best to guard her from any form of religious instruction. Havingstudied art history at school she knows a little (not much) aboutChristianity. She has both Christian and Jewish friends but nevertalks about religion with them. She plays the flute and is particularlyinterested in the music of the Renaissance and the baroque period.She knows no Greek and the translation I gave her to read was theRSV.

When we met three weeks later I asked her first what she made ofthe Prologue, the first 18 verses. ‘Tricky’, she said, ‘and extraordin-arily dense: all those ideas tumbling one on top of another, God, life,light and darkness, and ‘‘the world’’. And what on earth is ‘‘theWord’’? I do remember’, she added, ‘the Credo in Bach’s B minorMass, ‘‘et verbum caro factum est: the Word was made flesh’’, but Ican’t pretend that I know what it means. And I was reminded of thatscene towards the beginning of Goethe’s Faust which makes methink that Goethe couldn’t make much of it either. ‘‘What’s so

Introduction 37

priceless about the Word?’’ says Faust, and toys with a couple ofother ideas, Mind and Force, before settling on die Tat, ‘‘the Deed’’, forwhat must have been the real beginning of things. I suppose it makesmore sense to put some activity there rather than a word, but I guessthat if Goethe had known about the big bang he might have opted forForce (die Kraft) rather than Deed.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in fact there’s a well-known English scholar who putsthat passage from Faust at the beginning of a long commentary onthe Gospel, though I’ve never quite understood why. But what aboutthe general feel of it all? What did you make of the light/darknessidea?’

‘Well it’s oppositional, isn’t it? Good versus bad, and in the end thegood turns out to be Jesus. Everybody is against him, even his ownpeople, apart from a few very special individuals who have to be bornin a new way, ‘‘not of blood, not of the will of the flesh nor of the willof man, but of God’’: strange stuff. I did notice, though, that right atthe end the opposition seems to centre on the law of Moses overagainst the grace and truth of Jesus Christ. So it all comes down to afight between Christians and Jews.’

‘At least you seem to have heard about Moses and the law. And Isuppose you’re right about the opposition between him and Jesus.Even if it isn’t exactly a fight we already know which side theauthor’s on. But what about the rest of the chapter? What did youmake of that?’

‘It’s certainly a lot less strange. The beginning’s Gibbons, isn’t it?‘Gibbons?’‘You know, Orlando Gibbons.’ And suddenly she began to sing:

‘This is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levitesfrom Jerusalem to ask him: Who art thou? And he confessed anddenied not, and said plainly: I am not the Christ. . . . Art thou Elias?And he said: I am not. Art thou the prophet? And he answered No.’

‘That’s it, certainly: I didn’t realize you had such a nice voice: andit’s a beautiful piece too.’

‘John is John the Baptist, isn’t he, although it doesn’t call him thathere. That line about the Lamb of God reminded me of all thosemedieval and renaissance pictures where he’s shown carrying alamb and holding a kind of long rod or staff that has a little pennantwith a cross on it.’

‘Yes, it’s generally called a reed cross or simply a flag. St John’sCollege in Oxford is really the College of John the Baptist, and it has a

38 Introduction

pub attached called The Lamb and Flag. You may have seen otherpubs with the same name. But let’s get back to the Gospel.’

‘The rest of the chapter seems to be mainly concerned with Jesuscollecting disciples (rather like a modern gang), pinching the first twofrom John’s gang. And they’re all obviously completely smitten withhim, calling him various complimentary names, such as Christ andthe prophet (which John had said he was not). The one that reallyfoxed me, though, was the one at the end, the Son of man. What wasall that business about the heavens opening and angels going up anddown on him?’

‘Yes it is odd, I know. The idea seems to derive from a story inGenesis, the first book in the Bible, about Jacob (whose other name,by the way, was Israel), where he dreamt of a ladder reaching up toheaven with angels going up and down on it. The main point may besimply the up-and-down. The Son of man reappears, as you know, inchapter 3. But say something about chapter 2 first. There are twomain sections. We’ll come to the temple scene in a minute. But tellme first what you made of the marriage-feast at Cana.’

Debbie laughed: ‘It’s magical realism, surely. Jesus seems to mejust like Dumbledore in Harry Potter, who is constantly providingwonderful feasts for the children at Hogwarts. (He’s younger, ofcourse.) Nice of him to turn the water into wine, but is there anyfurther deep significance in it? It says that ‘‘he manifested his gloryand the disciples believed in him’’, but it looks to me like little morethan a party trick.’

‘Let’s leave that aside and go on to the temple scene.’‘It’s full of surprises, this book. Here is Jesus in Jerusalem, maybe

for the first time in his life, and he’s already throwing his weightabout in the temple. OK, he’s protesting about the money-changers,but even so he’s acting pretty high-handedly.’

‘That’s generally how Jewish prophets behave. What else?’‘The temple was destroyed by the Romans, wasn’t it? But when

was the Gospel written, before or after? If before, that means thatJesus was prophesying its destruction, which seems unlikely. But inany case he’s obviously more interested in himself, because he’sspeaking of ‘‘the temple of his body’’, though I don’t see how theJews could have been expected to pick that up. I know that Christiansbelieve that he rose from the dead, and if they believe that there’s noreason why they shouldn’t believe that he foretold his resurrection.He also seemed to have been able to read people’s minds, but I don’t

Introduction 39

quite understand why he didn’t trust them once he had performedsigns for them. Why else would he have performed signs in the firstplace? And why aren’t we told what the signs were?’

‘Well, the signs are obviously important, because they are whatprompted Nicodemus to go and see Jesus. What do you make of him?’

‘To begin with he was evidently the first of the Jews even to thinkof changing sides. And in spite of being a boss man, a ruler, whateverthat may mean, he was obviously scared of being seen in Jesus’company and didn’t dare approach him in the daytime. It’s nowonder that he couldn’t make head or tail of what Jesus said tohim first, about being born anew. And as far as I can see Jesus didn’tmake much effort to help him understand. I suppose that being bornof the spirit is equivalent to what’s said in the Prologue about beingborn of God. I didn’t fully grasp that either. And it gets worse: fleshand spirit, up and down, earthly and heavenly. Jesus may call himselfSon of man, but he’s not a normal human being at all, is he? There’ssome kind of weird attraction, though, a sort of challenge. Do youwant to stay where you are, glued to the earth, or are you preparedto renounce all that and go up higher. And there’s a threat too: if youdon’t believe in him you’re condemned. That’s the flip side of thepromise: ‘‘God so loved the world, etc.’’ It’s all very well promisingeternal life, but anyone who doesn’t believe (and that must includeall the Jews) seems destined for a sticky end. Presumably the onlyperson who has ever ascended into heaven is Jesus himself; but that’sa puzzle too. Fine, he’s the one that descended from heaven (the Wordwas made flesh), but when did he go up again? It’s all extremelyconfusing. Then we get back to light against darkness: ‘‘men loveddarkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.’’ Presum-ably he means women too (like that serial killer, Rose something-or-other), but this does make some sort of sense: people who behavebadly (and I’m sure that some things people do are truly evil) arenaturally going to prefer darkness to light. Yet I don’t quite see howthat fits with the idea that everything depends on whether youbelieve in Jesus. If that means Christians, I have to say that in myexperience it doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference: many ofthem are good (kind, honest, brave) but some aren’t; and the samegoes for other people too, such as Jews.’

‘Hold on, Debbie, you’re going too fast.’‘Am I? But I’m only trying to follow the text. I got the impression

that Jesus too got carried away: he’d been making some kind of

40 Introduction

response to Nicodemus (including ‘‘Are you a teacher of Israel?’’—nastily sarcastic, I thought) and then he takes off on his own: ‘‘Wespeak of what we know’’—the royal We, and continues as if Nicode-mus, the chap who came to see him, is not even there.’

‘All right, let’s move on to the next paragraph.’‘The next paragraph’s completely different: ‘‘Jesus and his disciples

went into the land of Judaea.’’ But isn’t Jerusalem in Judaea?’‘Oh, Debbie, I’m half-regretting having asked you to do this: I’m

going to have to take another look myself at the whole chapter.’‘But it begins to make sense again quite soon. This is very much

the same John: ‘‘You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am notthe Christ.’’ Gibbons again. It’s true that he goes a bit over the topabout the friend of the bridegroom—the best man. I can’t imagine abest man nowadays admitting that he ‘‘rejoices greatly at the bride-groom’s voice’’. But in saying that ‘‘He must increase but I mustdecrease’’ John is showing exactly the same deference to Jesus as hedid before.’

‘Yes, and there’s one last paragraph. I want you to be particularlycareful about this. How does it connect with what has been saidearlier?’

‘I’m not sure who’s supposed to be speaking: it doesn’t reallysound like John the Baptist. But whoever it is he’s saying much thesame thing as before, only even more forcibly. The same oppositionbetween above and below, and earth and heaven. You’ve got tomake a choice: either you’re for Jesus (the Son of God) or againsthim. Only now you have to obey him as well as believe in him, and ifyou don’t, well, the last line speaks for itself, doesn’t it? You’re facedwith the wrath of God. And what about poor old Nicodemus? Heseems to have been forgotten, though presumably if he had been wonover we would have been told.’

‘He reappears a couple of times, but there’s no sign that he everfully understood all that Jesus had said to him.’

‘I was reminded of Goethe’s Faust again, a bit earlier in the scene inwhich Faust quotes the Prologue he says that he has two souls, onethat clings to the world and the other that longs to soar up to higherthings. Maybe Nicodemus was still a bit too fond of the world below.’

‘And whose side are you on, Debbie?’Debbie smiled: ‘I don’t think I’m ready to leave this world yet.’‘And are you going to read the rest of the gospel?’She smiled again: ‘I might,’ she said, ‘one day.’

Introduction 41

Excursus I: Four Aporias

Instead of offering a detailed treatment of all the aporias (whichwould take up far too much time and space) I propose to examinewith some care just four of them, and to consider how these are dealtwith by some of the many commentators who adopt very deliberatelya synchronic approach.

john 21

Let us begin with chapter 21, regarded as a secondary addition evenby many scholars (e.g. Westcott, Dodd, Barrett) naturally inclined toside with unity. The reluctance of scholars even more conservativethan Westcott and Dodd (e.g. Thyen,1 Minear,2 Frey,3 Keener) toentertain any suggestion that this chapter was not part of the ori-ginal Gospel is nevertheless quite comprehensible. As Jeremiasremarked as long ago as 1941, it is ‘the basis and starting-point ofall source-critical work on the Fourth Gospel’.4 Once this ramparthas been breached the enemy is within the gate: there can be nofurther defence of integral unity as a matter of principle, and thefamiliar argument that there is no manuscript evidence, either hereor elsewhere, of editorial insertions or modifications loses all its force.On the basis of the manuscript evidence Lindars is confident thatchapter 21 ‘is certainly not a late insertion’, but it is worth remem-bering John Benton’s observation that many medieval authors keptthe manuscript of a favourite work over a number of years, makingalterations to it as it pleased them.5 If this is how the fourth evan-gelist behaved, then we must remain open to the possibility of anindefinite number of authorial modifications over the years, corre-sponding to the changing situation of the community. Lindars

1 ‘Aus der Literatur’, TRu 42 (1977), 211–70; ‘Entwicklungen’.2 ‘Original Function of John 21’.3 ‘Die johanneische Eschatologie’, i.4 Quoted by Fortna, Gospel of Signs, 23 n. 2.5 ‘778: Entering the Date’, in D. Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature

(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 5.

himself suggests that chapter 21may have been added for the sake ofa wider audience than the one the evangelist originally had in mind,6

and the new prominence given to Peter in this chapter may be takento indicate a recognition of Christian groups beyond the circle of thechurches whose existence we know of from the Johannine Letters.

What then are the arguments against unity? From Bultmannonwards scholars are agreed that stylistic arguments relating tocommon authorship are inconclusive here, so we must look else-where.

In the first place there is the fact that some person or persons otherthan the evangelist identified the Beloved Disciple as the author of allthat precedes: ‘This is the disciple who is bearing witness to thesethings; and we know that his testimony is true’ (21: 24). As Bultmannobserves: ‘the fiction that the author himself puts himself forwardhere as identical with the Beloved Disciple, and at the same timewishes to attest his own death [v. 23] is quite unbelievable’.7 Sosomeone other than the original author had access to the finishedmanuscript and appended his own attestation concerning its reliabil-ity. Can we be certain that he made no further modifications of hisown?

Secondly there is the resounding conclusion of chapter 20, a fittingend to the work of the evangelist, whose new and enriched under-standing of the titles ‘Messiah, Son of God’ will by now be familiar tohis readers. Against this Keener emphasizes that the anticlimacticnature of chapter 21 is no proof of inauthenticity, adducing the lastbook of the Iliad, which recounts Priam’s plea for the return of thebody of Hector, as an example of an ending ‘completely anticlimacticto the story of the plot’.8 Many will disagree with this view ofHomer’s art, but the general point is nonetheless valid. (A betterexample, in my opinion, is the jolly conclusion of Mozart’s DonGiovanni, which comes oddly just after the Don has just been draggedoff screaming into hell.) Yet unlike the final book of the Iliad and thefinal scene of Don Giovanni the story of the miraculous catch of fishesdiffers radically, in both mood and manner, from all that has gonebefore. Dodd is right to say that the true climax of the Gospel isThomas’s confession: ‘the rest, however true and moving, is a merepostscript’.9

6 Lindars, p. 618. 7 Bultmann, p. 702. 8 Keener, pp. 1221–2.9 Interpretation, 443.

Excursus I: Four Aporias 43

The weightiest argument of all, however, comes from the preced-ing scene, in which the disciples received their final commissionthrough the outpouring of the spirit. Haenchen makes the pointadmirably: after this transcendent event, he says, it makes no senseto think of the evangelist sending the disciples back north to resumetheir old jobs as Galilean fishermen10 (of which there had been not ahint in the call-narrative in chapter 1). If the style is the same as thebody of the Gospel the sensibility is not.

john 6: 1

The second aporia is the awkward conjunction between John 5 andJohn 6. This problem has traditionally been seen as one of order. Ithas appeared to many students of the Gospel that chapter 6 shouldcome not after chapter 5 but before.

This is how Bultmann states and solves the problem:

The present order of chs. 5 and 6 cannot be the original one. Since in 6.1 Jesusgoes ‘to the other side’ (��æÆ ) of the lake, he must have been at the lake-sidebeforehand; but in ch. 5 he is in Jerusalem. Thus ch. 6 has no connectionwith ch. 5. On the other hand it would follow on ch. 4 very well [becauseJesus is in Galilee at the end of that chapter]. Correspondingly, 7.1 assumesthat Jesus had been staying in Judaea (Jerusalem) up till then, and ch. 7would thus link up with ch. 5. So the original order must have been 4, 6, 5, 7.This is confirmed by the fact that . . . 6.2 (�a ����EÆ . . . K���Ø K�d �H

I�Ł� � �ø ) is now seen to be a reference back to the exemplary story of4.46–54. It also enables us to see the chronological order which the Evangelisthad in mind. The festival which was imminent in 6.4 has started in 5.1.Finally 7.1 states that Jesus left Judaea because the Jews wanted to killhim, which is appropriate only as a reference back to 5.18 provided ch. 5immediately preceded ch. 7. Moreover the themes which are discussed in chs.5 and 6make the order 6, 5more probable. Ch. 6 shows that the revelation isthe Œæ��Ø� of man’s natural desire for life, ch. 5 that it is the Œæ��Ø� of hisreligion. In ch. 6 we have the dispute with the people, in ch. 5 with theirleaders.11

Bultmann rightly sees that the primary difficulty is contextual. Therecan be no doubt, I think, that if the problems he highlights soeffectively could be solved simply by rearranging the material his

10 Haenchen, ii. 229. 11 Bultmann, pp. 209–10.

44 Introduction

solution would work very well, and it is not surprising (as he himselfsays in a note) that he was not the first to propose it (nor the last). (Ithad been put forward in fact as early as the fourteenth century12 andis also the preferred solution of Schnackenberg and Becker.) But ifone is relying on the dislocation hypothesis it is too good to be true.For if the Gospel had in fact been composed not on a scroll but acodex and its leaves had somehow become lost and jumbled up in theway the theory requires, then it becomes impossible to believe thatonce they had been gathered together again the evangelist (or any-one else already acquainted with the material) would have reassem-bled them in the wrong order.

The synchronists, however, have a different problem, because theyhave to make sense of chapters 5 and 6 as they stand. How do theymanage to do this?

Dodd gets round the problem by ignoring it. He does, to be fair,discuss many of the other aporias (though never convincingly), butnot this one. He correctly observes an important break betweenchapters 4 and 5, which starts with a journey to Jerusalem. But thedifficult transition, as Bultmann notes, is between chapters 5 and 6,where without warning we suddenly find Jesus in Galilee again, atthe lake-side. Dodd contents himself with observing that ‘the intro-ductory sentences, vi.1–3, bring together motives which belong tothe common substance of the Gospel tradition’.13 Not a word aboutthe sudden shift of location, and no mention of the difficulties thathave induced many commentators to transpose chapters 5 and 6.

A solution from the narratological camp has been proposed byMark Stibbe. Following up an observation that the plot, character-ization, and vocabulary of the Gospel seem designed to evoke a senseof elusiveness, mystery, excitement, and suspense, he continues byquoting a remark of H. E. Edwards concerning the itinerary ofchapters 5 and 6: ‘It is as if you were reading a letter from a friendin which he was telling you about salmon fishing in Scotland, andthen, as you turn the page, the letter went on, ‘After this I went overLondon Bridge.’14 ‘It is not impossible’, comments Stibbe, ‘that theauthor intended this sequence in order to heighten the sense of Jesus’

12 By Ludolph of Saxony (see J. H. Bernard, p. xvii n.1). Much earlier if you countTatian, who puts John 6 in chs. 18–20 of the Diatessaron, before John 4–5 (in chs. 21–2).

13 Interpretation, 333.14 H. E. Edwards, The Disciple Who Wrote These Things (Oxford, 1953), 53.

Excursus I: Four Aporias 45

ability to move about so quickly and so elusively.’15 Not impossible,perhaps, but surely not very likely. Is this, I wonder, one of thosesimple solutions to the aporias of the kind favoured by Bauckhamand Segovia?

Keener disposes of the difficulty towards the beginning of hisexegesis of chapter 5:

To keep the Gospel’s geography neater, some have argued that chs. 5 and 6

have been transposed, but this approach does not take into account whatJohn simply assumes, namely major chronological as well as geographicalgaps (e.g. 7: 2; 10: 22; 11: 55). While such transposition is conceivable forpages in a codex, it is difficult to conceive such an accident for the earliestversion, on scrolls;16 and no manuscripts attest the alleged transposition. Itis possible that 6: 28–29 depends on the prior description of the works ofFather and Son in 5: 20, 36. Further, . . . the closing paragraph of ch. 5 presentsJesus as one greater than Moses, which becomes a central theme inch. 6. ‘After these things’ (���a �ÆF�Æ) is a common chronological transitiondevice.17

Since ‘the major chronological as well as geographical gaps’ areamong the Gospel’s salient aporias,18 to assume that John assumesthem, in an otherwise continuous narrative, is to beg the question. Itcomes as no surprise to find that Keener, like all partisans of syn-chronicity, gets round many of the Gospel’s aporias (14: 31 as well as7: 2 and 10: 22) by ignoring them.

Nevertheless his concluding observation concerning the presenta-tion of Jesus as one greater than Moses is worth following up.(A similar comment is made by Andrew Lincoln, for whom thetransposition theory ‘may well be over-concerned with geographical

15 John, 91.16 This seems to be a sheer assumption on Keener’s part. The papyrologists C. H.

Roberts and T. C. Skeat conclude on the basis of the number and spread of the 2nd- and3rd-cent. papyrus fragments of the gospels, and the early date of some of them, that ‘allin all, it is impossible to believe that the Christian adoption of the codex can have takenplace any later than circa AD 100 (it may of course have been earlier)’: The Birth of theCodex (London, 1983), 61. On the other hand, it should be said that advocates of thedislocation hypothesis are no less cavalier in their assumption that the originalmanuscript of the Gospel must have been a codex.

17 Keener, p. 634.18

7: 2, which places Jesus in Judaea (when at the end of ch. 6 he is still in Galilee)belongs, as Bultmann saw, to the same complex of problems as the one underdiscussion. 10: 22 is connected with the puzzling transition between chs. 9 and 10, tobe discussed below. 11: 55 is irrelevant in this context: it is not a problem but aparenthesis.

46 Introduction

issues at the expense of thematic links’.19) In a short study on John 6

Peder Borgen, after excusing himself from the task of dealing with therelationship of that chapterwith chapter 5, observes that the final partof the discourse in 5: 19–47might serve as the thematic background ofchapter 6: ‘Jn 6. 31–58 serves as an illustration of the searching of theScriptures mentioned in Jn 5. 39–40. The phrase KæÆı A�� �a� ªæÆ��

in Jn 5. 39 is even a Greek equivalent of the technical term forperforming a midrashic exegesis.’20 Borgen follows this observationup with further arguments to the same effect but fails to note thatBarnabas Lindars had made exactly the same point in 1972 in supportof his suggestion that chapter 6 is a later insertion.21 Unwilling toconsider how this chapter follows on from what precedes, Borgenside-steps the real difficulty: if the evangelist wished to illustrate hispoint about Jesus as the fulfilment of scripturewhynevertheless did henot add a verse or two in explanation of his sudden return to Galilee?

None of these authors, Bultmann, Dodd, Stibbe, Keener, Borgen,even considers the possibility that the Gospel was not composed at asingle sitting but over a period of years. Yet it is surely much morelikely that the evangelist added an extra chapter at this point withouttaking the trouble to make the adjustments that a smooth transitionwould require than that he neglected to provide a link whilstengaged in the process of a continuous composition. Elsewhere inhis Gospel, when Jesus moves from one place to another the evan-gelist says so.22 Why not here? The Gospel records in 6: 1 that Jesuscrossed the Sea of Galilee, but says not a word about how he got toGalilee in the first place. Why not? Lindars’s answer, elegant andeconomic (and effectively supported by Borgen) is surely the best ofthe many solutions on offer. If it has not been considered seriously bysubsequent commentators this can only be because they have notentertained the proposal that the composition of the Gospel wasinterrupted, perhaps more than once, whilst the Jesus group wasexperiencing major changes in its relationship with the synagogue.

It should be observed that the relationship between Jesus and ‘theJews’ is very different in the two chapters. As happens so often,

19 Lincoln, p. 210. 20 ‘John 6’, 288.21 This is the more surprising because he actually refers to Lindars’s suggestion

(and to my support of it) on the preceding page.22

2: 2, 12, 13; 3: 22; 4: 3, 43, 46; 5: 1; 7: 10; 10: 22, 40; 11: 54; 12: 1, 12–14. The fact thatthe Gospel says nothing about any change of time and place between 7: 10 and 10: 22constitutes another aporia.

Excursus I: Four Aporias 47

internal dissension is accompanied by a slackening of hostilitytowards enemies from without. The implacably resentful persecutorsof the previous chapter have given way to groups of people dividedamong themselves. Jesus’ interlocutors, though often referred to bythe vague term ‘crowd’,23 continue nevertheless to be calledƒ � �ı�ÆEØ (6: 4, 41, 52). In this chapter however their ‘grumbling’(ªªªı����, v. 41) is prompted more by bewilderment than by a realantagonism. The best explanation of this change of attitude is thatthe two chapters represent different stages of the community’s rela-tionship with ‘the Jews’.

10: 1

The third problem-spot I want to discuss is the placing of 10: 1–18, theShepherd and the Door. I quote the next few verses, 10: 19–21:

There was again a division (�����Æ) among the Jews because of these words.Many of them said, ‘He has a demon, and he is mad; why listen to him?’others said, ‘These are not the sayings of one who has a demon. Can a demonopen the eyes of the blind?

Bultmann is surely right to maintain that these verses belong in thecontext of chapter 9.24 As we have them in the Gospel the divisionoccurred months later (‘It was the feast of the Dedication at Jerusa-lem’: v. 22), and was prompted by Jesus’ assertion that the Father hadgiven him the power to lay down his own life and to take it up again(v. 18), an assertion that has nothing to do with the healing of theblind. Bultmann goes on to argue that ‘10. 1–18 belongs to the scenewhich begins in 10. 22ff. and should be inserted after 10. 26’.25 A bettersolution is to see the passage as a subsequent addition.

Between the end of chapter 9 and the beginning of chapter 10 thesituation has changed. The story of the blindman reflects a turning-pointin the history of the Johannine group—the decision of the conservative

23 The word Z�º� occurs four times in this chapter, eight times in ch. 7 (where thecontroversies belong, as I shall argue later, to an earlier stage in the history ofthe Johannine group), seven times in chs. 11–12, and only once elsewhere in theGospel (5: 13).

24 Bultmann, p. 312. He thinks that they originally followed the denunciation ofthe Pharisees that concludes ch. 9. But this would have provoked fury, not thedissension (�����Æ) appropriate to the beginning of the story (9: 16).

25 Bultmann, p. 313.

48 Introduction

leaders of the synagogue to expel from their midst any who professedallegiance to Jesus. The following paragraph (and indeed the whole ofthe subsequent section) points to a radical change of mood on thepart of the Jesus-people. No longer a fringe group (marginalized butmaintaining an uneasy relationship with the centre), they now form anew community, self-sufficient enough to justify the appellationKŒŒº���Æ, ‘church’, ‘assembly’. This has grown in cohesiveness, inself-awareness; and its enemies are no longer conceived as adversarieswithin the synagogue but as coming from outside. For Ezekiel, whoseallegory of the ‘shepherds of Israel’ in chapter 34 clearly lies behindJohn’s Good Shepherd, the danger to Israel comes from within, fromevil shepherds whose authority is tacitly acknowledged even as theyare accused of abusing it; for John the danger comes from thieves androbbers threatening the flock from without. They are described asstrangers (Iºº�æ�Ø), a charge that Ezekiel could not conceivablyhave made.

Moreover the ‘Amen’ saying that opens chapter 10 is extraordin-arily abrupt, following as it does Jesus’ uncompromising denunci-ation of the Pharisees: ‘your sin remains’ (9: 41). It is not just thattheir first reaction is one of incomprehension (10: 6) rather thananger, for incomprehension is a quite proper response to a riddle.When the passage concludes, however, it is surprising that Jesus’allusion to the Father is met, as we have seen, not with fury, but withdissension.

Dodd is clearly uneasy with the sequence as it stands: ‘if we wereenquiring into the composition of the work, it might plausibly beargued that ch. ix . . . once existed as a separate unit, and that thediscourse about the shepherd and the flock, x. 1–18, similarly mayhave had a separate existence’.26 And yet ‘it would be quite possibleto read ix. 41–x. 1–5 as what it formally is, a single speech of Jesusdirectly motivated by the situation depicted in ch. ix’.27

john 20: 30–1

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which arenot written in this book, but these are written that youmay believe that Jesus

26 Interpretation, 355.27 Ibid. 359. For an alternative explanation see Ashton, ‘The Shepherd’, 131–4.

Excursus I: Four Aporias 49

is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life inhis name.

The fourth aporia differs from the preceding three in two importantrespects. In the first place the difficulty can easily pass unnoticed.These two verses make a resounding and seemingly fitting conclu-sion to the Gospel. In the second place it is the basis of an argumentnot for a second edition but for a source, specifically what is known,for obvious reasons, as the Signs Source.

Writing in 1915, James Matthew Thompson observed that

there runs through the narrative portions of the first twelve chapters of theGospel a single and definite point of view with regard to Jesus’ ����EÆ; theyare uniformly emphasized both as a proof of His divine mission and as aproper ground of religious faith. The significance of this point of view isenhanced by the fact that it does not extend to the second part of the Gospel,and is either ignored or adversely criticised in the discourses of the first part.The conclusion (xx. 30–31), then, so far as its mention of ����EÆ is concerned,is shown to correspond to certain definite portions of the Gospel, which havean individuality of their own. It does not summarize the whole gospel orrepresent the point of view of the other parts.28

Elsewhere Thompson says of the concluding verses of chapter 20 thatthey are ‘ludicrously inadequate as a summary of the most charac-teristic doctrine of the Gospel’.29 He goes on to argue that they sitbest at the end of chapter 12, where the first part of the Gospel isbrought to a solemn close and the evangelist sums up its results(12: 37–43). Of this preliminary conclusion he says that it

was obviously written from the point of view of one who thought that Jesus’object was to evoke faith by working miracles, and who wished to accountfor the comparative failure of this attempt. It contains no suggestion of widerfaith or wider issues. It is a fitting conclusion for those incidents and passageswhich we have just enumerated [i.e. the miracle stories], but a most inappro-priate one for some other parts of the chapters which precede it. It shows,moreover no consciousness of the second part of the Gospel (chap. xiii–xxi),in which (except for xx. 30) the word ����E does not occur at all. It istherefore strong evidence for the independent existence of a narrative-Gospel, one of whose characteristics was a belief in the apologetic aim andvalue of Jesus’ miracles.30

28 ‘Structure’, 525–6. 29 ‘Is John xxi an Appendix’, 145.30 ‘Structure’, 523.

50 Introduction

Thompson goes too far: ‘ludicrously inadequate’ is a gross exagger-ation. The verses in question cause Dodd no difficulty at all; in fact hescarcely mentions them. Keener, like Dodd, sees no problem here.And as for Bultmann:

the declaration does not look back specially to the Easter stories, but like thesimilar statement of 12.37 it embraces the whole activity of Jesus, in whichthe Easter narratives are included. As with 12.37, it is at first surprising thatthe work of Jesus is described under the title ����EÆ, but it is comprehensiblein view of the unity which, in the thought of the Evangelist, ‘signs’ andwords form. As with 12.37, however, the formulation is obviously occasionedby the fact that the Evangelist is taking over the conclusion of the ����EÆ-source. Precisely because in his presentation of the Gospel story he has on theone hand made plain the meaning of the ����EÆ as deeds that speak, and onthe other hand represented the words of Jesus as divinely effected event, asÞ��Æ�Æ �øB� [words of life] (6.63, 68), he is able to use the conclusion of thesource without fear of misunderstanding, and at the same time outwardly toconform his book to the form of the Gospel literature as it had alreadybecome traditional.31

Bultmann’s explanation depends partly upon his own rather doubtfultheory of the unity of words and works (see below, p. 498). Yet theremust be some allusion, in this context, to the resurrection appear-ances, and one can see how the normal reference of the term ����EÆ

(to miraculous deeds performed in the presence of the disciples) mightbe stretched to include these. This does not, however, remove thedifficulty completely. G. van Belle, one of the latest opponents of theSigns Source theory, has argued that the purpose of the resurrectionappearances (especially the appearance to Thomas, with its emphasisupon seeing and believing) was very precisely to evoke faith.32 Syn-chronists of all hues would no doubt agree. Evidently too the fact thatthe evangelist used these verses to conclude his Gospel lends their casea certain plausibility. Yet Thompson and, some years later, AlexanderFaure had good reason to be puzzled. The miraculous signs at thebeginning of the Gospel and the resurrection appearances at the endare not as easily assimilated as the synchronists would wish. In anycase, as Bultmann saw, for the fourth evangelist faith is essentially theresponse to Jesus’ self-revelation, and this cannot be restricted to hissigns or deeds.

31 Bultmann, pp. 697–8. 32 ‘Meaning’.

Excursus I: Four Aporias 51

Andrew Lincoln, keenly aware of this, argues sensitively for anextension of the connotation of ‘signs’ to reach the whole of Jesus’mission:

That mission is depicted in terms of words and deeds, discourse or disputesand signs, and either of the two is able to stand for the whole. This inter-pretation gains support from the fact that in 12. 37–8 Jesus’ performance ofsigns that did not result in belief is explained in terms of the Isaiah citation(Isa 53. 1) that speaks of believing our report or message. Further, both waysof viewing Jesus’ mission can be linked to the one term ‘works’ (�æªÆ). Thesigns are seen as ‘works’ in 5. 36; 7. 3; 9. 3–4; 10. 25, 32, 37–8; 14. 10–11; 11. 54,while the words of Jesus are closely associated with such work in 10: 25–7;14. 10; 15. 22–4. In two places—4. 34 and 17. 4—the whole of Jesus’ mission,both his signs and discourses, can be categorized under the one term ‘work’.There are good reasons, then, for thinking that here in this statement of thebook’s purpose, ‘signs’ too can draw in the whole revelatory aspect of Jesus’mission.33

Yes, in its present position; but not, I would contend, when it wasfirst composed as a fitting ending to the Signs Source.

conclusion

Historical critics are not instinctive deconstructionists, ‘predisposed’,as they have been accused of being, ‘towards aporias in the text’. Farfrom being opposed to synchronic study, they always begin by takinga close look at the text as a whole. The apparent dislocations andawkward conjunctions that make them want to dig deeper are therealready; and their observation of these so-called aporias results froma synchronic perception, not from some ingrained inclination to chopand change a smooth and well-integrated piece of writing. Theyneither seek out aporias nor invent them; but having found themin the text they prefer to try and explain them instead of paperingthem over or pretending they are not there. Of course, once theyhave located one, or two, or three aporias, they will be alert to thepossibility that there are others too, perhaps somewhat better con-cealed. This gives rise to a new situation, in which there is a realrisk of portraying a minor inconsistency as a major break. No one,I think, nowadays would go nearly as far as Bultmann or even as far

33 Lincoln, pp. 505–6.

52 Introduction

as Schwartz in estimating the number of genuine aporias in theGospel text. Any author, especially one who has been involvedwith a piece of work over a period of years, must be forgiven a fewslips. But this risk is not, in my view, a sufficient reason for closingone’s eyes to the evidence of real problem spots of the kind discussedabove.

The hypothesis, now some 40 years old, that there were at leasttwo editions of the Gospel, not just one, is made more credible, Ithink, by the effective demolition (especially by Ernst Haenchen) ofdisplacement theories,34 and more recently by Jorg Frey’s pulverizingrefutation of the theory of the Ecclesiastical Redactor.35 With thedisappearance of these two bogies the path is cleared for a relativelysimple perception of the Gospel as predominantly the work of oneman, whom we can safely call John, responsible for the whole textapart perhaps from (a) a source (the signs source) that he freelyadapted to suit his own purposes, (b) a hymn to Wisdom that servedhim as a prologue, (c) the final chapter, and (d) a few relativelyinsignificant glosses. But this may be still too much for a die-hardsynchronist to swallow.

34 Haenchen, i. 44–51. 35 Eschatologie.

Excursus I: Four Aporias 53

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part i

GENESIS

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1

RELIGIOUS DISSENT

1. putting the question

In the beginning of any historical enquiry some account may beexpected of the questions to which answers are being sought. Ofcourse, without any knowledge of the problems or opinions aboutpossible solutions one could not even put the questions in the firstplace. And when Bultmann poses (or proposes) his two Johannineriddles he is keenly aware of the kind of answer he is looking for. Hisfirst riddle, the position of the Gospel in early Christianity, impliesthat the fundamental difficulty is to explain the momentous shiftfrom the message of the earliest Christian preachers to that of thefourth evangelist. His solution, which places a hypothetical Gnosticsource between early and late, virtually isolates John’s distinctiveteaching from other sources and influences. In any case, if we areto avoid being trapped inside Bultmann’s personal problematicwe must change or rather expand his question. As was explainedin the Introduction it is necessary to ask instead what is the positionof the Gospel in the history of Jewish thought (leaving the term‘Jewish’ provisionally vague, since any closer definition would preju-dice the issue of our enquiry). Evidently such a reformulation of thequestion carries its own presuppositions, and part of the purpose ofthe present chapter is to justify these.

The Gospel itself has a number of different doors through which wemay enter: one might, for instance, choose to begin with some of itscentral themes, especially the titles of Jesus and the claims made forhim. For if the question being asked is the position of the Gospel inJewish thought it might seem best to start with ideas or symbols(Messiah, prophet, Son of Man, etc.) of unquestionably Jewish prov-enance, and to consider how they have been transformed so as toserve the fresh purposes of the fourth evangelist. And that is, in fact,what will be attempted in subsequent chapters. But first it is worthtrying to specify as closely as possible the nature of the community

within which the Fourth Gospel was conceived and brought to birth.There are two possible perspectives on this question, one close andthe other distant. The next chapter will take a closer look at thecommunity’s origins and the immediate circumstances of the com-position of the Gospel. In the present chapter the more distantperspective is preferred, and this involves an attempt to locate theorigins of the Johannine community in the period of the SecondTemple—what scholars used to call, confusingly, late Judaism.1

First, though, it is necessary to be clear about the terms of ourquestion. In asking about the origins of the Gospel are we looking forsources, influences, or merely background? All three, certainly, butwe often need to look in different places.

(a) Sources

One apparent merit of Bultmann’s commentary is the precisionwith which he delineates the Gospel’s sources: signs source, revela-tion-discourse source, passion narrative. The work of the evangelistin organizing and adapting these various materials is laid opento inspection and the otherwise seemingly inexplicable readilyexplained. But, with the exception of the Prologue and possibly thepassion narrative, Bultmann’s suggested sources have not won wide-spread acceptance. And even if we include the signs source and anindefinite number of Synoptic-type narratives and sayings, we arestill left with the material Bultmann assigned to the revelationsource; and it is this, along with the evangelist’s own contribution,that gives the Fourth Gospel its distinctive flavour. No source theoryhitherto advanced is of any help here. And even supposing anotherArab shepherd-boy were lucky enough to stumble upon a documentclosely resembling Bultmann’s revelation-discourse source, futurescholars would still be left with the task of explaining how thenewly discovered scroll had come to be written. In general no sourcetheory offers more than a very partial entry into a work of literature(Aristotle’s ‘material’ explanation). How much does one understandof Macbeth or Cymbeline from knowing Holinshed’s Chronicles, or of

1 ‘Second Temple’ denotes the long period (more than half a millennium) betweenthe rebuilding of the Temple after the Babylonian exile towards the end of the 6th cent.bc and its destruction in ad 70. The term fails to take into account the importantrestoration work undertaken by Herod the Great. This lasted over 80 years, and wascompleted less than a decade before the fateful date of ad 70.

58 Genesis

King Lear from knowing King Leir? It seems preferable to remain withthe Gospel itself at this juncture instead of shifting the problemfurther back to the work of an unknown religious genius.

That there was a religious genius behind and beneath the work ofthe fourth evangelist is a truth whose significance is often neglected.But the contribution of Jesus to his thought is not easily demarcated,and in any case is better characterized as an influence than as asource.

(b) Influences

The preaching and teaching of Jesus, his work as a teacher andexorcist, his impact on his disciples, his trial and crucifixion, andthe beliefs that arose about him after his death—all these must beincluded, and remembered, in any discussion of the influences on theFourth Gospel. But these same influences worked upon the SynopticGospels also, with vastly different results; so it is necessary to cast ournet wider.

How much wider? Wide enough, certainly, to cover the wholereligious scene in contemporary Palestine. But to do this satisfactor-ily we are forced to look back—perhaps as far back as the sectariansquabbles in post-exilic Israel, and forward—perhaps as far forwardas the Dark Ages.

That we must look back will be readily conceded. Like all historicalevents, the religious movements in first-century Palestine are partlyto be explained as responses to contemporary events and situations(like the ever-present awareness of the power of Rome), partly as thelegacy of the past. The multifarious writings testifying to the religiousturmoils of the Second Temple period must all be scanned for tracesof ideas that may plausibly be thought to have influenced the firstChristian thinkers. To these we must add the Hebrew Bible, the mostobvious influence of all, whether or not this was exercised directly orthrough the mediation of the Septuagint.

If it were possible to account for the genesis of the Gospel byappealing to sources and influences anterior to or roughly contem-porary with it, then our task would be the relatively simple one ofassembling and correlating these materials. Unfortunately, however,this is not the case. We are forced to extend our survey to includewritings composed later, some of them much later, than the Gospelitself.

Religious Dissent 59

In doing so we are liable to find ourselves taking long journeysboth in time and space. For the most striking fact about the proposedsources and influences is their range and diversity. The sophisticatedallegories of Philo may well have been composed about the sametime as some of the Qumran documents, but conceptually they areworlds apart. The same is true of the Hermetica, that strange blend ofStoicism and Platonism upon which C. H. Dodd drew so extensively.Some of these are roughly contemporary with parts of the Talmud,but there the resemblance ends. Geographically, the locations of thedifferent writings range from Egypt to Iraq, chronologically fromthe third century bc (the date of the earliest sections of 1 Enoch) tothe eighth or ninth century ad.

If we look at a single theme, that of ‘prophet-king’ in WayneMeeks’s book of that name,2 we find that in hunting for the originsof this relatively peripheral motif he examines a large number ofdifferent bodies of literature—rabbinic, Samaritan, and Mandaeanwritings, Philo, Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. None of these isaltogether discounted, although Meeks puts more weight on somethan on others. There is no suggestion that John actually drew uponany of these sources, most of which are too late for him to haveknown; but it is implied that in each case the origin of the tradition,e.g. the Jewish source of Philo’s concept of Moses as a prophet-king,may have had some influence on the writer of the Gospel.

There is, I suggest, an image or model discernible in Meeks’s workand in other studies which, like his, work with ‘background’ as akey concept. This model is nowhere explicitly delineated: it has tobe inferred from what he says: the materials he examines may becompared to a number of broad rivers, each very different from therest, whose sources have been lost sight of and can only be guessed.If we were able to trace them back we would find innumerablerivulets, which we might call traditions, feeding into streams orsources which in turn feed into the big rivers, the only ones forwhich we have names. Some of the rivulets and streams at the

2 I single out Meeks’s Prophet-King not because it is particularly bad but because it isparticularly good. Indeed, it is a model of the monograph genre, meticulously plannedand executed and never drawing exaggerated conclusions from the evidence. If we hada library of such works, all devoted to a single motif or theme, we should be in aposition to draw all the threads together. My point is that in order to avoid aninextricable tangle it would then be necessary to trace the threads back to a commonorigin—a task Meeks deliberately declines.

60 Genesis

origins of the rivers will also have fed into the Fourth Gospel. Thisexplains both why the Gospel has points of resemblance to manydivergent bodies of literature and also why the rivers are so differentfrom one another.

Now this is a very complex model, and it is worth observing thatthe only point where the big rivers actually coalesce is Meeks’s book(and other works conducted along the same lines) just as the onlypoint where the rivulets and streams coalesce, according to thetheory, is the Fourth Gospel. What alternative can be offered?

There are four factors that need to be taken into account by anytheory of the origins of the Gospel. Three of them are uncontentious;these are the Jesus-tradition, the situation of the Johannine commu-nity, and the creative power of the author or authors of the Gospel.The fourth, I suggest, the one we are looking for, is the unorthodoxor dissenting Jewish tradition within which the seeds of the Gospelwere first planted. To say this is to replace the fluid image of flowingwaters with the static image of soil or earth. If the concept ofsyncretism is required to explain the origins of the Gospel, it shouldbe applied, I believe, not to the conscious eclecticism of the authorbut to the rich loam in which the message concerning Jesus wasplanted and in which it continued to flourish. It is unnecessaryto picture the evangelist flitting from one background to another orpottering about his workshop making a selection from the variouswoods at his disposal: rather, the place of origin of the Gospel was onewhere ideas foreign to ‘orthodox’ Judaism and less obviously presentin the other early manifestations of Christianity were alreadystrongly and deeply rooted.

To accept this model it is necessary to discard the view that thedominant religion of the Jewish world in the centuries precedingthe composition of the Gospel can be reconstructed simply from aclose examination of rabbinic, Pharisaic, and deuteronomic ortho-doxy. What is not included in this term is the world of religious dis-course, equally Jewish, which we find in the so-called Apocrypha andPseudepigrapha, in Qumran, and indeed anywhere broadly ‘Jewish’outside what G. F. Moore called ‘normal’ Judaism.3 Throughout theSecond Temple period, and especially in the work of the deutero-nomistsand theChronicler, onecanseedeliberateattempts to suppress

3 Judaism, i. 128. Nowadays few scholars would accept as legitimate any suchimplied distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ Judaism.

Religious Dissent 61

alternative religious positions such as that represented, say, in1 Enoch. These attempts continued into rabbinical times, as is welldemonstrated in Alan Segal’s fine study, Two Powers: eventually theyproved successful, though perhaps never completely.

The idea of ‘normal’ Judaism was derived from later rabbinicalJudaism, and is nowadays seen to be inapplicable to the period of theSecond Temple, during which the views of those who would subse-quently seem unorthodox had more space and air. They developed inways conditioned by the varied circumstances of different groupsscattered throughout the Near East. In any of these we may expectto find patterns of thought retained from ancient times, familyresemblances to be explained by their ultimate derivation from asingle, variegated tradition.

This means that we should be very wary of thinking of, say,Samaritanism or Jewish Gnosticism in terms of sources and influ-ence. Nobody supposes that documents composed, in some cases,centuries later than the Gospel itself were accessible to the fourthevangelist in precisely the form in which we have them now. But it isoften impossible to say precisely when a developed doctrine like theGnostic redeemer myth received its definitive shape. Hence the pre-cariousness of Bultmann’s Mandaean hypothesis and of argumentssuch as those contained in Klaus Haacker’s Stiftung des Heils,which rely too indiscriminately upon the fourth-century MemarMarqah.4

Broadly speaking the influences on the Fourth Gospel are allJewish, provided this term is used widely and vaguely enough tocover ideas emanating from the circle of Jesus. Christianity began lifeas a Jewish sect.

(c) Background

The rather nebulous concept of background, whose explanatorypower is very limited, needs to be introduced to account for therelevance of such writers as Philo and Josephus, as well as of post-Mishnaic Judaism. The light shed by these may be quite strong, butfor the most part it is too indirect to justify speaking of sources or

4 See R. Bergmeier, ‘Fruhdatierung’. Bergmeier criticizes Haacker on similargrounds, 124–5, 130–3. For a useful survey see R. Pummer, ‘Present State’. Pummer,though cautious, is less sceptical than Bergmeier.

62 Genesis

even influences. A reading of Philo, as Borgen has shown,5 helps usto understand what is going on in the Bread of Life discourse inJohn 6, not because John knew Philo, but because they shared acommon exegetical technique. Josephus can help us because, as ahistorian writing at the same time as the evangelist, he can give usrelevant historical information (filtered though it may be through hisown ideological grid); but also because his opinions and attitudes arerepresentative of certain current ways of thinking and speaking. Therabbinical writings can help us because they have some commonancestry with Christianity (though not as much as is often assumed),because some traditions (e.g. the vision of Abraham) shed light oncertain passages in the Gospel, and because many of their principles,above all legal and exegetical, can be seen to be at work in Christianwritings also. We are thus enabled to understand the gist of other-wise puzzling lines of argument. Borgen’s well-known article ‘God’sAgent in the Fourth Gospel’ carries conviction because of the lightshed by the Jewish law of agency upon John’s christology. The samecan be said of some of the central arguments in the importantmonograph of J.-A. Buhner. These suggestions will be more fullyelaborated later, but we may say at once that, while these writingsare helpful for elucidating many otherwise cryptic passages in theGospel, they afford little or no assistance in the understanding of theideas and impulses that precipitated the central teaching of theGospel—Jesus’ revelation concerning his mission and person andhis relationship with the Father.

(d) Conclusion

While the distinction between sources and influences is virtually self-justifying, that between influences and background must be viewedmore as a heuristic device than as an a priori principle. Only aftercareful inspection can a particular document or corpus of writingssuch as those of Philo or Josephus be ranged on one side or the other.And one must allow for the possibility that the light shed may bedirect in some cases and indirect in others. None the less, any failureto distinguish between the two kinds of illumination, one from below,the other from behind, not only generates confusion but allowscertain writers (notably C. H. Dodd, who devotes the whole of part

5 Bread from Heaven.

Religious Dissent 63

I of his big book, more than a quarter of the whole, to ‘the back-ground’ of the Gospel) to employ this term as a way of evading thecentral issues of influences and origins.6

2. the johannine jews7

Mydiscussion up to this pointmay have seemed to imply that the onlyproblem in investigating the origins of the Fourth Gospel is to locateand identify its sources, influences, and backgroundwithin the Jewishtradition and to distinguish these from one another. But there is anobvious objection against such a procedure. If one is to attempt tosituate the Fourth Gospel in the history of Jewish thought, how is oneto explain the attitude of the Gospel itself to those it calls ‘the Jews’?

(a) The problem

‘Among the unsolved riddles of the Fourth Gospel is to be numberedits attitude to Judaism, which was one of profound ambivalence, astrange love–hate relationship, prompting C. K. Barrett to remarkthat ‘‘John is both Jewish and anti-Jewish’’.’8 So opens one attempt tostate and solve the unsolved riddle. But the terms in which HartwigThyen poses the problem are misleading, and this augurs ill for a fullsolution. Even if we ignore the easy substitution of the ambiguousword Judentum (‘Judaism’/‘Jewry’) for John’s specific ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ thereremains the clear implication that the evangelist was somehow tornbetween love and hatred (Haß/Liebe) in his feelings towards those hethus names; whereas in fact there is no love and little sympathy, onlyhostility tinged with fear. The ‘Jewish’ in Barrett’s dictum refers to

6 This is what Dodd says: ‘The fact is that the thought of this gospel is so originaland creative that a search for its ‘sources’, or even for the ‘influences’ by which it mayhave been affected, may easily lead us astray. Whatever influences may have beenpresent have been masterfully controlled by a powerful and independent mind. Thereis no book, either in the New Testament or outside it, which is really like the FourthGospel. Nevertheless, its thought implies a certain background of ideas with which theauthor could assume his readers to be familiar’ (Interpretation, 3).

7 For a more detailed treatment of the problems raised in this section see ch. 2 of myStudying John, ‘The Jews in John’.

8 ‘Das Heil kommt von den Juden’. The English version of the Barrett citation is inThe Gospel of John and Judaism, 71. See too the fine article of Wayne Meeks, ‘ ‘‘Am I aJew?’’ ’, which sharpens Barrett’s paradox by asserting that ‘the Fourth Gospel is mostanti-Jewish at the points where it is most Jewish’ (163).

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customs and ceremonies, turns of phrase and ways of thought; the‘anti-Jewish’ applies to a people, a nation, or, as will be argued, adistinct religious group.

Of course, this distinction does not solve the riddle: it only sharp-ens it. Why does the evangelist, who never attempts to disguise theJewishness of his hero, evince such hostility to his hero’s people?Surely it is hard to rest content with the apparently obvious answerthat he is merely putting on record the sad story of the consistentvindictiveness shown towards Jesus by those of his own race andnation? There aremysteries here, and it is into these dark waters, thesource, horrifyingly, of so much Christian anti-Semitism, that wemust venture in our search for the origins of this extraordinary book.In fact, the term ‘origins’ conveys only part of the problem, for theGospel as we know it was largely inspired by the traumatic experi-ence of the community’s expulsion from the synagogue. It tells, withgraphic symbolism, of the birth, the very painful birth, of a new sect,or, to slant the matter differently, of a new religion. What was once agroup of Jews owning allegiance to the Jewish Messiah, was tobecome a new religious group owning allegiance to Jesus of Nazareth,and carrying with it principles and convictions which were them-selves the germ of some of the strange ideas that would intriguethinkers and theologians for centuries—including the twin doctrinesof Trinity and Incarnation, the most puzzling as well as the mostdistinctive of all Christian beliefs.

When tackling this problem it is necessary to begin by distinguish-ing two questions: identity and role. Both of these questions areprimarily exegetical—that is to say, they concern the interpretationof the Gospel text—but they lead on to the historical question which isour present concern: how to explain the Gospel’s anti-Jewish bias.

(b) Identity

The question ‘Who are the � �ı�ÆEØ?’ has been answered in roughlytwo different ways. In the first place, they are identified as the Jewish(or Judaean) authorities—not the people of Jerusalem or Judaea, stillless the Jewish nation as a whole, but simply the men with the powerand influence that entitle them to speak on behalf of everybody else.9

9 See U. C. von Wahlde, ‘The Johannine Jews’. Von Wahlde, who himself espousesthis solution, gives a useful summary of earlier treatments of the problem.

Religious Dissent 65

Such a solution would effectively clear John of the charge of anti-Semitism, but is open to the objection that the word he uses, what-ever its immediate reference, is not for the most part ‘rulers’(¼æ� ���) nor even ‘chief priests’ or ‘Pharisees’ (though thesewords are familiar to him and he does use them from time totime)10 but ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ, the entire nation, or seemingly so.

There is an important distinction to be made here between thedenotation of a word (the individual or group to which it refers in anygiven context) and its connotation (the range of sense or meaningwhich its use evokes in the reader or listener, which may, of course,differ from one person to another). Applied to the Johannine Jews,this distinction, crude though it is, and capable of much greaterelaboration, suffices to demonstrate that, in order to free the Jewsas a whole from the blame of rejecting the message of Jesus andcausing his death it is not enough to show that in most instances inthe Gospel the word denotes the religious authorities in Jerusalem.When the Argentinians invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982 theactual forces involved were no more than a few thousand militaryand naval personnel. And the number of people who determinedupon the invasion was smaller still. But unfortunately, as in all suchcases, the use of the word ‘Argentinians’ implies that the wholenation was somehow involved. (The Argentinians themselves de-scribed the operation as ‘la liberacion de las Malvinas’—a goodinstance of how two terms can have the same denotation but verydifferent connotations.)

The second, and on the face of it even more attractive solution, hasbeen forcefully argued by Malcolm Lowe.11 It consists of the proposalto translate ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ by ‘Judaeans’. This would root the extraor-dinary hostility evinced by the Gospel in the kind of local or tribalenmity all too familiar in the war-torn history of the human race.Ranged against the Judeans would be Galileans and/or Samaritans,both of them groups that figure noticeably if rarely in the pages of theGospel. Unfortunately, however, although there is plenty of evidencein contemporary writing (above all Josephus) for the use of the termƒ � �ı�ÆEØ to refer to the people of Judaea, it is nowhere usedto distinguish them from Jews of the diaspora or of other parts of

10 There are 3 instances of ¼æ� ��� in the Gospel, 10 of Iæ�Ø�æ�E�, and 19 of�ÆæØ�ÆEØ, as against more than 70 of � �ı�ÆEØ, just under half of which are examplesof the typically Johannine, hostile use of the word.

11 ‘Who were the � �˜`ˇ�?’

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Palestine. Indeed, the � �ı�ÆEØ who debate with Jesus on the shore ofLake Tiberias in John 6 can scarcely be anything other than Gali-leans.12 And the term ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ is just as proper a designation forthe inhabitants of Galilee as it is for the Jewish communities of, say,Antioch or Alexandria.13 A further drawback to Lowe’s solution isthat it offers no satisfactory answer to the puzzling question of thesource of John’s hostility towards the � �ı�ÆEØ. Even if some degree oflocal antipathy between Galileans and Judaeans may be said to havecrept into the Gospel, it has done so only fleetingly;14 it is certainlynot sufficiently pervasive to account for the continual enmity anddistrust of the evangelist towards those he calls ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ.

But if these two solutions are rejected, and we conclude that the� �ı�ÆEØ cannot be straightforwardly identified either with the Jewishauthorities or with the people of Judaea, what is the alternative?Though for the moment the answer to this question must be de-ferred, it is possible to state one condition that any answer mustsatisfy: it must take account of the specifically religious nature of theantagonism between Jesus and ‘the Jews’ in the Fourth Gospel.15

Jesus himself, of course, was a Jew and in giving him the title ‘King ofthe Jews’ the Gospel is appealing to one of the best-attested stories inthe whole tradition. But when, as happens time and time again, heexplicitly or implicitly dissociates himself from ‘the Jews’ whom he is

12 They also resist inclusion among the Jewish authorities, a fact which leads vonWahlde to make a special case of the two verses in question, 6: 41, 52. See thediscussion on the place of John 6 in Excursus I, pp. 44–8.

13 In an unpublished article entitled ‘From Ioudaioi to Children of God: The Devel-opment of a Non-Ethnic Group Identity in the Gospel of John’, Philip Esler attributes tome the view that ‘wherever � �ı�ÆEØ is used . . . these are natives or inhabitants ofJudaea’. I cannot find this in my original article (republished as ‘The Jews in John’),and if I ever did say it I was wrong. Much more important is Esler’s general argumentthat at this period the ethnic and the (as he thinks, secondary) religious meanings of� �ı�ÆEØ are inextricably tangled, and that ‘Jews’ is a mistranslation. He proposes thatinstances of the word in the New Testament, Josephus, or any other 1st-cent. sourceshould be translated as ‘Judaeans’. (See Philip R. Esler, Conflict and Social Identity inRomans: The Social Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis, 2003), 40–76.) I have a lot ofsympathy with this view, which is one of my reasons, when citing passages from theFourth Gospel, for putting scare quotes round ‘the Jews’. This may seem a somewhatpusillanimous solution, but it is not easy to change single-handedly the way people useand respond to particular words. D. H. Lawrence’s bold but misguided attempt to dosomething similar in Lady Chatterley’s Lover was spectacularly unsuccessful.

14 Most obviously in the little episode in 7: 45–52. See below, Ch. 3.15 The people whom the evangelist refers to as ‘the Jews’ are not always straight-

forwardly to be identified with those called ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ in contemporary sources. This isanother reason for putting scare quotes round ‘the Jews’.

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addressing16 he speaks as the representative, it is fair to say, of thecommunity which acknowledges him as its founder and head. Andthe opposition of this community to ‘the Jews’, that sense of totalalienation which permeates the pages of the Gospel, has quite clearlya religious inspiration. Whatever the influence of local rivalries (andobviously the mistrust and hostility of the Samaritans at least has along history) the essentially religious character of the Gospel’s anti-Jewish bias is inescapable.

(c) Role

The clearly negative, adversarial use of the term ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ is foundin slightly less than half (32) of a total of more than 70 instances inthe Gospel.17 Nevertheless this may be legitimately called the typicalusage of the term. ‘The Jews’ of the Fourth Gospel stubbornly andconsistently reject the revelation that Jesus has come to bring. Theyalready have all the revelation they need in their traditions and inthe scriptures, which they regard as theirs by right. Descendants ofAbraham and children of God, they have no interest either in hisoffer of freedom, for they are free already (8: 33), or in the eternal lifehe brings, for this is available to them in their scriptures (5: 39). Theevangelist obviously regards these claims as false and their refusal ofJesus’ revelation as the consequence of culpable blindness. UnlikeLuke, he cannot accept that the Jews, with their faith in God andreverence for the scriptures, share a common ground with those whoacknowledge Jesus as Messiah. A failure to honour Jesus as Messiahand Son of God is equally a refusal to honour the God who sent him(5: 23). In opposing Jesus and appealing instead to Abraham (8: 39),Moses (5: 45), the scriptures and God himself (8: 41), ‘the Jews’ provethat they are not children of Abraham and that God is not theirFather. Eventually, carried away by their obsessive determination to

16 As in the phrase ‘in your law’, 8: 17; 10: 34 (v.l. ‘the law’); ‘for fear of the Jews’(7: 13; 19: 38; 20: 19; cf. 9: 22).

17 These are 5: 10, 15, 16, 18; 7: 1, 11, 13, 35; 8: 22, 48, 52, 57; 9: 18, 22; 10: 24, 31, 33;11: 8, 54; 13: 33; 18: 12, 14, 20, 31, 38; 19: 7, 12, 14, 21, 31, 38. Among the other instances6 come in the phrase › �Æ�غ�f� �H � �ı�Æ�ø : 18: 33, 59; 19: 3, 19, 21 (bis), and 8 inpassages relating to Jewish customs or festivals: 2: 6, 13; 5: 1; 6: 4; 7: 2; 11: 55; 19: 40, 42.It is notable, and, I believe, significant that the strongly negative connotation of theterm is found neither in chs. 1–4 nor in ch. 6 nor in the Lazarus episode in 11: 17–45;and its single occurrence in chs. 13–17 is limited to a back-reference (13: 33 harks backto 7: 33–4).

68 Genesis

see Jesus dead, the chief priests end up by asserting, ‘We have no kingbut Caesar’ (19: 15), an assertion that amounts to a renunciation oftheir own faith.

Given that the radical opposition of ‘the Jews’ to Jesus’ new reve-lation is echoed by the hatred of ‘the world’, as this emerges in theFarewell Discourse, it may be asked how far they actually representthe world in its rejection of the light that is the life of mankind (1: 5)and its consequent assumption that humanity has no need of God.How far was Rudolf Bultmann right to conclude that ‘the termƒ � �ı�ÆEØ, characteristic of the Evangelist, gives an overall portrayalof the Jews, viewed from the standpoint of Christian faith, as therepresentatives of unbelief (and thereby, as will appear, of the un-believing ‘‘world’’ in general)’.18 Viewed from the standpoint of alater Christian faith, Bultmann’s is perhaps a reasonable interpret-ation; but it reads far too much into the Gospel as this was originallycomposed; it is not exegesis but eisegesis.

3. the rise of judaism

Why, though, does the evangelist pick on the � �ı�ÆEØ to play the roleof adversaries?19 Who can these � �ı�ÆEØ be that he loathes them sointensely? For it is not just the Jewish or Judaean authorities whoarouse his anger. If he had wished to do so he could have followedSynoptic usage in putting most of the blame upon the Scribes andPharisees or the chief priests, or alternatively have made more use ofthe colourless word Z�º� (‘crowd’)—which he does in fact employ ascore of times. It is a surprising fact that the only overlap between theJohannine and the Synoptic use of the word ‘Jews’ is to be found inthe title ‘King of the Jews’ in the passion narrative. Only once,moreover, in Matt. 28: 15, is there anything in the Synoptic Gospelsthat corresponds to the typical Johannine usage. Who, then, are the� �ı�ÆEØ of the Fourth Gospel? Must we identify them with the Jewish

18 p. 86. In the first edition of Understanding (135) I also quoted approvingly Bult-mann’s conclusion: ‘ˇƒ � �ı�ÆEØ does not relate to the empirical state of the Jewishpeople, but to its very essence’. Daniel Boyarin is right to rebuke me for this: see ‘TheIudaioi in John’, 223 n. 24.

19 Nils Dahl, who agrees with Bultmann’s general thesis that the Jews are therepresentatives of the world in its hostility to God, adds: ‘it is, however, equallyimportant that the Jews are those who represent the world’, ‘Johannine Church’, 126.

Religious Dissent 69

nation as a whole, in Judaea and the diaspora? In view of theessentially religious nature of the dispute this would seem to be toodrastic a solution; besides, it overlooks the peculiarly Jewish charac-ter of the evangelist’s own ideas. It is doubtful whether a fullysatisfactory answer to this puzzle can be found within the pages ofthe Gospel itself.

In an important article Daniel Boyarin suggests that the key to thisquestion is to be found ‘in a plausible combination of the interpret-ation that it is a designation of the inhabitants of Judea and that it isthe name for a religious group with adherents outside of Judea aswell. Neither alone is satisfactory, but both together ‘‘work’’ hermen-eutically in all instances in the text.’20

What is required, apart from the passages in which the local ornational reference suffices, is evidence of the use of the word � �ı�ÆEØ

to refer to a particular religious group—not to be identified tout courtwith the Pharisees—which might plausibly be regarded as the chieftarget of the evangelist’s resentment. I suggest that this is the namegiven to the powerful party that took advantage of the disarrayfollowing the fall of Jerusalem in ad 70 and gradually assumedauthority over the Jewish people. This party laid the foundations ofwhat we know as Judaism. If the Pharisees had a hand in this, asthey surely did, they will have been anxious to rid themselves of theisolationist and indeed sectarian implications of their name:21 whatbetter chance would they ever have of establishing their claim to bethe true descendants of Abraham?

(a) The Story of a Name

The Gospel uses the term � �ı�ÆEØ, as we have seen, more extensivelythan any other to refer to a religious group which is defined andcharacterized by its hostility to the revelation of Jesus. Sometimes theterm has a national or local connotation, as it has in the manyreferences to Jewish festivals and customs, and as it has for Pilatewhen he asks Jesus, ‘Am I a � �ı�ÆE�?’ or writes on a placard he hasaffixed to the cross the words, ‘The King of the � �ı�ÆEØ’ (historicallyone of the best attested elements in the whole tradition). As timewent on the national sense (‘Judaean’) would be lost—the decisive

20 ‘Ioudaioi in John’, 222. 21 See n. 66.

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moment coming in ad 135, when the Emperor Hadrian, after brutallysuppressing the latest Jewish rebellion, drove all Jews out of Jerusa-lem. From then on the term ‘Jew’ on the lips of a Gentile would referto someone who was Jewish by religion or race. The meaning‘Judaean’ no longer had any application.22

At the time the fourth evangelist was completing his Gospel, thiscataclysmic event was a long way off. His contemporary Josephusemploys the word � �ı�ÆE� to refer to Judaeans both in Judaea and inthe diaspora, as well as to the (predominantly religious) laws andpractices associated with both. A good example of the latter usage isto be found in AJ 12. 48, in a quotation from a letter of Ptolemy ofEgypt to the high priest Eleazer, in which he expresses his eagernessto do a favour to ‘these people and to Judaeans throughout the world:�ıº��� � �b ŒÆd ���Ø� �Ææ����ŁÆØ ŒÆd �A�Ø �E� ŒÆ�a �c NŒı�� �

� �ı�Æ�Ø�’. Josephus himself never underlines the distinction, for aswe have seen the word itself does not permit him to do so, but it isusually possible to determine the reference from the context. Mean-while Judaeans continued to refer to themselves as ‘Israel’, confiningtheir use of the term � �ı�ÆEØ to dealings with foreigners.23 Josephus,writing for foreigners, uses ‘Israel’ sparingly except in connectionwith the old northern kingdom. But there is some evidence of a morespecialized usage, to denote an inner ring, as it were, within theJudaean nation, a religious party that emerged immediately afterCyrus’ decree had put an end to the Babylonian exile.

The first hint comes from Josephus himself, in one of his rareanimadversions on the origin of the word � �ı�ÆEØ. It derives, he tellsus, from the tribe of Judah, and dates from the time of their return

22 One of the last contemporary examples of the local reference might be the term¥ ��� � �ı�ÆEØ that occurs in a 2nd-cent. inscription from Smyrna (IGRR iv. 1431. 29¼ CII 742). This is probably an allusion to Judaean emigres, not, as used to be thought,to Anatolian converts from Judaism.

23 A good example of this discrimination is 1 Macc., where, with a single exception(4: 2), the use of the term � �ı�ÆEØ is reserved either for letters to and from foreigners orelse for public decrees. (The episode in 11: 45–51, written from the point of view of theAntiocheans, is not a counter-example.) The name ‘Israel’ may be used for what is onlypart of the whole, in this case the Maccabean party. Cf. O. Ploger, Theology andEschatology, 37; also Schlatter: ‘ � �ı�ÆØ� and � ��æÆ�º . . . have the same extension andrefer to every member of the (Jewish) race. When a Greek speaks of a Jew with hisreligious practice in mind he calls him � �ı�ÆE�, for this is how the Jew too character-izes his religious position. When a Jew speaks of a Jew with his relationship to God inmind, he calls him � ��æÆ�º’ (59). This thesis has been established beyond all doubt in apair of articles by Peter J. Tomson: ‘The Names Israel and Jew’.

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from Babylon (AJ 11. 173). This suggests that the name properlybelongs to the returning exiles rather than to those who were leftbehind, and supplements an earlier passage where he says that these(i.e. the returned exiles) were the people who were responsible for thereconstruction of the Temple (AJ 11. 84; cf. 22). They are also obvi-ously the men mentioned in a letter to Artaxerxes from some Baby-lonian officials as ‘the Jews who came up from you to us’ and ‘havegone to Jerusalem’, where they ‘are rebuilding that rebellious andwicked city’ (Ezra 4: 12; cf. Ezra 4: 17–22; Neh. 2: 17 ff.; 3: 35 (Heb.)).Ezra himself speaks of Artaxerxes’s henchmen as hastening to theJews (Yehudiya¼ Yehudim) in Jerusalem, ajdfej¯lp

¯

zlWftjl: (4: 23),in order to put a stop to the building work.

Shemaryahu Talmon, in what Boyarin calls ‘a ground-breakingarticle’,24 says that this situation resulted in a three-tier model withan ‘inner-group’ with which the returning exiles identified credallyand nationally, an ‘in-group’ (the ‘people of the land’) with whichthey were identified nationally but not credally (because their under-standing of biblical monotheismwas more rigid and extreme), and an‘out-group’ with which they did not identify credally or nationally.The ‘in-group’ and the ‘inner-group’ together constituted ‘Israel’. Thethird group consisted of the local people who were not allowed by thereturning exiles to participate in the rebuilding of the Temple. Thisresulted in the Samaritan schism and, according to Talmon, in anopposition so intense that when Malachi, the last of the biblicalprophets, distinguished between ‘those who fear God and serve him’and ‘those who do not fear God nor serve him’ the latter designationreferred not to the pagan Gentiles but to the (Jewish) schismatics.25

Another story in Josephus, based this time on a non-biblical source,relates how a group of Samaritans were initially prepared to identifythemselves as Jews in a face-to-face confrontation with the EmperorAlexander, in the hope of being accorded the same privileges ashad already been granted to other Jews. But when challenged onreligious grounds they backed down and repudiated the name Jews.This suggests that the term had a religious significance distinctfrom the racial meaning which, as descendants of Joseph, theywere ready to accept. To this story (AJ 11. 340–5) Josephus adds arider concerning Shechem (the main town in Samaria—modernNablus). Shechem, he says, afforded refuge for escapees from Jerusalem

24 ‘Emergence’. 25 Ibid. 601.

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expelled, despite their protestations of innocence, for violating thedietary laws or the sabbath regulations or for ‘any other such sin’(11. 346).

The picture of Shechem as a centre of religious dissidence inhab-ited by renegade Jews (11. 340) can be held up against the verydifferent-looking picture of a Jerusalem reserved for the good andthe pure. The Passover kept to celebrate the termination of the longexile was reserved for ‘the people of Israel who had returned fromexile, and also by every one who had joined them and separatedhimself from the pollutions of the peoples of the land to worship theLord, the God of Israel’ (Ezra 6: 21).

In speaking of those hostile to the Temple as the ‘people of the land’(yta

˝e

˝zp

¯

: Ezra 4: 4), the Chronicler makes no distinction betweenthem and ‘the adversaries of Juda and Benjamin’ (4: 2); and Josephus,who has Ezra as a source at this point, bluntly identifies this group asSamaritans (orChuthaeans—AJ11.19–30,84–8).Whatever thepreciserelationship between ‘the people of the land’ and the Samaritans,there must have been some links between the northerners (not, afterall, so very far away) and those southerners who had remainedbehind at the exile and subsequently earned the disapproval of thepowerful group (the Judaeans?) of which Ezra, the bete noire of theSamaritans, came to be a leading representative.26 (The rabbis them-selves saw Judaism as originating with Ezra, who inaugurated theage of the scribes.) So it may be no coincidence that Jesus, besidesbeing associated with the people of the land (those ‘ignorant of thelaw’ in John 7: 49), treated the Judaeans as aliens and failed to rebutthe charge that he himself was a Samaritan (8: 48).

Whether or not the Samaritans were actually those who opposedthe rebuilding of the Temple in the late sixth century is less importantfor our purposes than the fact that Josephus thought they were.Since the identification in the source (Ezra) is unclear, it may bethat Josephus was reading back into the past conditions and attitudesobtaining in his own day.

However that may be, the natural name for the citizens of the tinyTemple-state that began with the return from the Babylonian exile

26 So R. J. Coggins, with reference to Second Isaiah, concludes of ‘the northernersand . . . those who had remained in Judah during exile’ that ‘these two groups came tobe identified with one another, and both would be dismissed as no true part of thepeople of God’ (‘Samaritans and Jews’, 37).

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would be, argues Boyarin, ‘Children of Juda’ (edfej jnb) or ‘Yahudim’(zjdfej). Ezra’s reference to ‘the Jews who came up from you to us’having arrived in Jerusalem (4: 23) suggests to him an importantpossibility,

namely that the group received the name ‘Jews’ precisely in the BabylonianExile, as do many exile groups (cf. e.g., the ‘Dutch’ of Pennsylvania). Since aswe well know from the book of Ezra and other sources, this inner group whocalled themselves the Holy Seed or the Returners from Exile, saw themselvesas religiously superior to the People of the Land, the Israelites who had notgone into Exile and developed the particular form of pietism that grew there,Yahudim would have been from the very beginning a geo-religious term, thename for a group of ‘Jews’ and not co-extensive with the entire People ofIsrael. The group would, thus, have been from the very beginning marked intwo ways, geographically and religiously. Moreover, as the state of Judeaexpanded, more and more people became Israelite non-Yahudim.27

When he turns to the Fourth Gospel, basing himself on the unre-mitting hostility of the evangelist towards the � �ı�ÆEØ (the innergroup), Boyarin concludes that

the Israelite community within which the Fourth Gospel was produced werenot and never had been Ioudaioi, but always had been members of that semi-out-group known as ‘the People of the Land’. It can easily be imagined thatsuch groups would harbor feelings of resentment toward the Ioudaioi as wellas to the priests and the Levites in Jerusalem who were their leaders.28

How, in that case, could the Johannine group have been expelledfrom the synagogue by the Ioudaioi, as 9: 22 appears to suggest theywere? To this objection Boyarin responds that the term aposynagogos‘simply means thrown out of the synagogue, not excommunicatedfrom the Synagogue!’29 But this will not do. The expulsion referred toin 9: 22 is more than a matter of a single ejection consequent uponsome minor misdemeanour. It indicates a resolution to expel everyindividual member of the group who professed faith in Jesus as theMessiah. From the perspective of the Johannine group, at any rate, itrepresented a permanent exclusion, a true excommunication. Thesynagogue within which the Johannine group started its existencemust have belonged to the inner group of the Ioudaioi.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah, representing the official positionof the powerful party that Boyarin agrees with me in identifying as

27 ‘Ioudaioi in John’, 227. 28 Ibid. 234. 29 Ibid. 218 n. 10.

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‘the Jews’,30 evince (as do the books of Chronicles) an overridingconcern with the Temple and its appurtenances. Much later, variouspieces of evidence testify to the abiding importance of the Temple andthe hostility provoked by what was seen as the endemic corruption ofits administrators. On the positive side, a second-century authorspeaks of ‘those who live round Solomon’s great temple’ in a passagewhich singles them out as pious (�P����E�) and their ancestors as just(��ŒÆØØ).31

On the negative side, various sectarian documents point to a deepdistrust, if not of the Temple itself, at least of the rites enacted there:I Enoch, the Testament of Moses, the Damascus Rule.32 One is ledto reflect how little would be known of the alternative religiousgroups outside the Judaean establishment if we had to rely onwritings sanctioned or canonized by the rabbinical schools startedby the Scribe, according to tradition, during the Second Temple era.Both inside and outside Palestine there is abundant evidence—thebest known and most impressive being the Elephantine papyri33—of

30 In going back ‘to the very beginnings of the history of Israel after the return fromthe Babylonian exile as narrated, in particular, in the book of Ezra’, he claims to bedoing something that to his knowledge had not been done with respect to this issue(‘Ioudaioi’, 222–3). But this is exactly what I did, though more tentatively, in the 1stedn. of Understanding (152–5).

31 Sib. Or. 3. 213 ff.; cf. 702–4 and 573–9, where the sacrifices offered in the Templeare listed, including ºØ�fi B �� Œ ���fi B �� M�� ÆPŁ� ƒ�æ�E� �ŒÆ����ÆØ� (a conflation of Homer, Il.9. 500 and 23. 146). A fragment of Polybius also mentions ‘those of the Jews who inhabitthe so-called holy place of Jerusalem’ (�H � �ı�Æ�ø Q ��æd �e ƒ�æe �e �æ�ƪæ�ı��� � ��æ��ºı�Æ ŒÆ�ØŒF ���, Polyb. 16. 39. 5). Josephus, who quotes this (AJ 12. 136) readsƒ�æ� as a reference to the Temple, not as an adjective qualifying � ��æ��ºı�Æ.

32 1 Enoch 89: 73; Test. Mos. 5: 1–6 (‘They will pollute the house of their worship withthe customs of the Gentiles; and . . . their city and the bounds of their habitation will befilled with crimes and iniquities’); CD 4. 16–18; 5. 6–7. Some criticisms of the temple cultare also to be found in the Psalms of Solomon, usually regarded as stemming fromPharisaic circles: Pss. Sol. 1. 8; 2. 2, etc. G. W. E. Nickelsburg thinks that such passagessimply reflect ‘halakhic discussion between Pharisees and Sadducees’ (Jewish Litera-ture, 212). There is a hint of a similar attitude in Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritanwoman, John 4: 20–4; and more than a hint in Stephen’s militantly challenging speechin Acts 7. But Jesus himself, for all his anger with the buyers and sellers within theTemple precincts (if the Gospels are right about this), continued to worship there, asdid his earliest followers. Some indication of the (increasing) disaffection of the Johan-nine group from the official religion of the central Jewish party may be seen in theGospel’s heavy-sounding insistence on the Jewishness of Jewish feasts and customs (2:6, 13; 5: 1; 6: 4; 7: 2; 11: 55; 19: 42). J. L. Martyn suggests a plausible paraphrase:‘Passover, the feast of the Jews who celebrate it, in distinction from the members of ourcommunity, who do not do so, being no longer ‘‘Jews’’ in the sense in which weourselves use that term’ (‘Gentile Mission’, 126).

33 See A. Cowley (ed.), Aramaic Papyri.

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continual and flagrant violations of the deuteronomic code.34WithinPalestine there is perhaps a distinction to be drawn between the rigidconservatism of Judaea itself and the greater flexibility of otherregions, more receptive to Hellenistic influences of a recognizablynon-Jewish kind (such as public gymnasia).35 This may be a furtherargument in favour of a firmly orthodox temple-party with consid-erable authority over a fairly small area.

Two centuries later there is no likelihood of any greater uniform-ity. If the Judaism we know today is a single tree (albeit with anumber of branches), at the time of Jesus it was a jungle. Josephusspeaks of three religious sects (ƃæ���Ø�) or philosophies (�غ���ÆØ)—Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes—plus a fourth, generally iden-tified with the Zealots, not so much a religious sect as a liberationmovement. He tells us that there were roughly 6,000 Pharisees and4,000 Essenes36 (among whom, many scholars now think, were theQumran group). If the other two sects were comparable in size,the four between them would account for only a small proportionof the country’s inhabitants, probably several hundred thousand atthis time.37 As with a badly damaged fresco, our confidence that theoriginal picture was much bigger than the surviving fragments givesus no real hope of being able to restore it with any accuracy.

That there must have been many more sects than those named byJosephus is now widely held: ‘the number of types and varieties couldprobably be reckoned in dozens’.38 Two somewhat later (second-century) lists give some indication of the extent of our ignorance.They have three names in common: Pharisees, Sadducees, andGalileans. Then they diverge. Hegesippus39 names in addition Esse-nians, Samaritans, Hemerobaptists, and Masbotheans; Justin (himself

34 The evidence is conveniently gathered together by Morton Smith in ch. 4 (headed‘The Survival of the Syncretistic Cult of Yahweh’) of his brilliant, if controversial, bookPalestinian Parties and Politics, 82–98. Smith explains the spread of what he calls ‘theYahweh-alone party’ in the diaspora as consequent upon the syncretistic cult, andinstances the letters from the Jerusalem community to the Jews in Egypt urging themto observe Hanukkah in 2 Macc. 1: 1 ff. (96 n. 89).

35 Cf. J. Goldstein, ‘Jewish Acceptance and Rejection of Hellenism’, 64–87.36 AJ 17. 42; 18. 20; cf. Philo, Quod Omn. Prob. 75.37 Cf. M. Broshi, ‘Population’. His article is intended to demonstrate ‘that the

population of Palestine in antiquity did not exceed a million persons’ (7). But hemakes it clear that it was probably not far short of this number at peak periods.

38 M. E. Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions, 58.39 Cited by Eusebius, HE 4. 22. 7.

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hailing from Samaria) makes no mention of Samaritans but namesinstead Genists, Merists, Baptists, and Hellenians.40 What he says ofthem is worth noting: although they would all call themselves‘� �ı�ÆEØ and children of Abraham’ and profess their belief in God, inreality they are not properly speaking � �ı�ÆEØ at all, let alone Chris-tians. Here there seems to be one final use of the term � �ı�ÆEØ to referto a particular religious tradition distinct from all others.

(b) The Late First Century

The effect upon Judaea of the catastrophic rebellion against Rome ishard to imagine. With the destruction of the Temple, the powerfulpriestly caste referred to in the Gospels as ‘the chief priests’ had lostits raison d’etre. It seems likely that the priests regrouped along withthe very influential Pharisees in an attempt to regain control and topreserve what they could of their traditions. The extraordinaryamount of legislation in the Mishnah relating to a defunct temple-cult testifies to their success.41 At the same time the Pharisees mayhave seized their opportunity to divest themselves of a name withisolationist and sectarian connotations. This can be surmised fromthe surprising infrequency of the name in the pages of the Mishnah(it occurs in only three places).42 As A. I. Baumgarten observes, ‘therabbis seem to have been reluctant to call their predecessors‘‘Pharisees’’. . . . They seem to have preferred other names and

40 Dial. 80. 4. Hippolytus (3rd cent.), in a rather obscure passage relating to thePharisees, says that they are all called Jews but also have personal (v.l. appropriate)names because of the singular views they hold: �Æ� �ø �b � �ı�Æ�ø ŒÆºı�� ø �Øa �b�a� N��ø� ��Æ��� Æ� ª ��Æ� O ��Æ�Ø Œıæ�Ø� (v.l. ŒÆØæ�Ø�) K�،ƺı�� ø (Ref. 9. 28).The so-called Tripartite Tractate from Nag Hammadi also speaks of ‘many heresieswhich have existed to the present among the Jews’ (The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. J. M.Robinson, p. 86).

41 ‘More than half of the Mishnah’, remarks Shaye J. D. Cohen, ‘is devoted to oneaspect or another of the temple and its cult, either because the Mishnah is confidentlyawaiting the time of their restoration, or because the temple cult has been ordained byGod and the study of its regulations was now the equivalent of their implementation,or because the rabbis were attempting to create in their minds an ideal and perfectworld to which they could escape from the imperfect world around them’: From theMaccabees to the Mishnah, 219.

42 m. H˙ag. 2: 7; m. Sot

˙a 3: 4; m. Yad. 4: 6–8. It has even been questioned whether the

perushim in these passages should be translated ‘Pharisees’ at all. Cf. E. Rivkin,‘Defining the Pharisees’. If Rivkin is right, the relationship between Pharisees andrabbis becomes even more obscure.

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when the name Pharisees occurs it is usually in the mouth of theiropponents.’43

This alliance of chief priests and Pharisees was evidently deter-mined to establish its authority and to take what advantage it couldof the further fragmentation of the populace that must have followedthe Roman triumph. In trying to stamp out views it regarded assubversive it will eventually have come into conflict with the Johan-nine group: one of the chief targets of the rabbis, as A. Segal hasshown, was the heresy of ‘the Two Powers in Heaven’, a doctrinenowhere more clearly exemplified, in the Christian world at least,than in the Fourth Gospel.44

Those who incurred the hostility of the fourth evangelist, we mayconclude, were not all or any of the many dissenters still on the fringeof what was turning into orthodox Judaism, still less the Jewish raceand nation as a whole, but those who, after the debacle of ad 70, hadsucceeded once again in gathering the reins of power into their ownhands. In the Gospel itself the only clear synonym for the � �ı�ÆEØ is‘the chief priests and Pharisees’ (not ‘Pharisees’ alone).45 Perhaps weare now better placed to understand why this should be so. Thesewere the two groups whose successful alliance in the late first cen-tury enabled them to establish their own traditions as the basis of anew Judaism.

4. family quarrels

It should be observed that when he comes to treat specifically of theenemies of the community, as he does in the Farewell Discourses,chapters 14–17, the evangelist avoids the word � �ı�ÆEØ altogether,

43 ‘The Name of the Pharisees’, 425. Baumgarten argues that there are two plaus-ible derivations of ‘Pharisees’, one meaning ‘separatists’ (zjW: ftq˙´), the other ‘specifiers’(zjW: Ftq˙

¸), which is the interpretation the Pharisees themselves probably preferred.44 There is some doubt about whether the line between the pre-70 Pharisees and the

post-70 rabbis is as straight and uninterrupted as is commonly supposed. Cf. P. S.Alexander, ‘Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament’, esp. 244–5; E. P. Sanders, Pauland Palestinian Judaism, 60–2. The relatively restricted use of the term ‘Pharisees’ in theFourth Gospel may go some way towards reinforcing this doubt. But that the Phariseesplayed some part in the proceedings of the academy at Yavneh is virtually certain. Cf.E. Schurer: ‘It can scarcely be a coincidence that once a Pharisaic party as such cameinto existence, most of the more memorable Torah Scholars proceeded from its ranks’(History, ii. 389; ibid. 381–2 for further references).

45 In John 18: 3 and 12. This assertion will be defended in the next chapter.

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substituting the word Œ���� (world), which has obviously a verydifferent resonance. Certainly there is no rigid distinction betweenthe denotation of the two terms. In John 16: 2 those who threaten toexpel the disciples from the synagogue can be no other than theJudaean authorities. But the characteristic object of Jewish (Judaean)venom in the Gospel is not the community as such but Jesus himself,always in connection with his special revelation. In order to deter-mine more precisely the issues in dispute between Jesus and the� �ı�ÆEØ we need to look in some detail at the passages in whichthe specifically religious argument between the two parties is mostfully deployed.

First, however, we need to consider the range and extent of what issometimes called Jesus’ supersession of the religious traditions of hisadversaries, the ways in which he—or his followers on his behalf—seized on and appropriated different elements in those traditions.Broadly speaking these may be distinguished according to whetherthey relate to (1) family or ancestry, (2) religious practice, the festi-vals, the sacred space, or (3) the law.

We may start with Abraham, the first and the most revered of thepatriarchs. There is nothing in the Gospel, or anywhere else inthe New Testament for that matter, to match the virulence of thedispute between Jesus and ‘the Jews’ in chapter 8, where Jesus deniesthat the latter, though in fact descendants of Abraham, have anyright to call themselves his children, and insists that their true fatheris not God, as they assert, but the devil (8: 37–44). To be emphasizedhere is the complete denial of family and national identity.

Next the festivals. Apart from their structural function in the book,which gives a clear sequence to Jesus’ public career, the festivalsenable the evangelist to illustrate or at least indicate how with thecoming (or rather the passing) of Jesus these key features of Jewishreligious observance had now become superfluous: most forthrightlyin the declaration to the Samaritan woman that ‘the hour is comingand now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spiritand truth’ (4: 23).46 The holy city of Jerusalem, mentioned in theprevious verse, had lost all relevance.

46 Jorg Frey’s exegesis of this verse is subtle but persuasive. If, he says, the twoexpressions are viewed together from the perspective of the early Jesus, then �æ���ÆØuæÆ refers to the community that is to come and F K��� claims for Jesus in person,proleptically, the fulfilment of what is being promised. If, on the other hand, there is ashift in perspective, then from Jesus’ point of view �æ���ÆØ uæÆ looks forward to the

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We cannot say that the evangelist deliberately sets out to chal-lenge the relevance of all the major Jewish festivals. Pentecost, theFeast of Weeks, is never mentioned in the Gospel and there is noobvious take-over of Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication. But thesymbolism of Sukkoth, the Feast of Tents or Tabernacles, above alla water festival, is appropriated by Jesus at the feast itself: ‘if anyonethirst, let him come to me and drink’ (7: 37). More remarkably, whenJesus is taken down from the cross, his body still unbroken, a versefrom Exodus insisting on this is quoted to prove that he and he aloneis the true Paschal Lamb (19: 36; Exod. 12: 46). Most significant of allis Jesus’ self-identification, at the first of the three Passover feasts he issaid to have attended, with what for the Jews was both, physically atany rate, their greatest object of national pride and their cultic andcultural centre: the Jerusalem Temple. That the followers of Jesusshould have seen the destruction of the Temple not as a nationaldisaster but as the foreshadowing of the resurrection of a greatertemple, the body of Jesus (2: 19–21) cannot but have been felt asdeeply offensive by the many Jews who no doubt continued to hopethat the Temple would one day be rebuilt.

According to the Book of Acts the deacon Stephen was arraignedbefore the Council on the trumped-up charge of speaking against theTemple and the Law: ‘for we have heard him say that Jesus ofNazareth will destroy this place, and will change the customs whichMoses delivered to us’ (6: 13–14). Judaism could and did survive thedestruction of the Temple, but what of the Law? More radical thanActs, which suggests nothing more than a modification of the Law,the Fourth Gospel implies that the Law had little value in the firstplace: ‘grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’ (1: 17).

Thus in one way or another all that the Jews held most dear, allindeed that gave them a pride in their own identity, has been sweptaside. They are denied a family, a city, and a sacred space. The Lawitself, to them a signal proof of God’s elective love for his people, hasbeen dismissed as meaningless. Why should they not be angry?

And yet—none of these injurious attacks, heinous as they musthave seemed, constituted blasphemy. None, technically, warranted adeath sentence. The ultimate crime was a challenge to the authorityof God himself. This too was something Jesus was accused of.

worship of God in spirit and truth that follows Easter, whilst from the community’sperspective (what I call the second level of understanding—see Ch. 8) the phrase F K��� refers to the realization of Jesus’ promise. See Frey, Eschatologie, ii. 281.

80 Genesis

To see this we must now turn to consider more three passages inthe first half of the Gospel in which the antagonism of the Jewsreaches murderous proportions.47 A close examination of these willhelp us to sharpen our understanding of what caused the finalbreakdown in communication between the followers of Jesus andthose they call the Jews. These passages occur in chapters 5, 8, and10, and a disinterested bystander witnessing any one of these debatesmight well feel that he had dropped in on one of those fierce familyrows (family, as it happens, is a central issue in the second of theseconfrontations) which so astonish the outsider by their vehemenceand bitterness. Only the reflection that the real reasons for thisbewildering virulence must lie buried in a past known only to theparticipants allows us a glimmer of understanding.

(a) ‘Equal with God’

But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working still, and I am working.’This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not onlybroke the sabbath but also called God his father, making himself equal withGod. (5: 17–18)

Anyone familiar with the Fourth Gospel knows that the discoursefollowing the healing of the cripple in chapter 5 is one of its highpoints. But its very familiarity is liable to obscure the fact thatnothing in the first four chapters (except perhaps the Prologue) hasprepared the reader either for the staggering boldness of Jesus’ claimor the murderous hostility with which it is greeted: ‘This was whythe Jews sought all the more (�Aºº ) to kill him’—yet this is the firsttime in the Gospel that they are reported to seek his death.48

Why then the �Aºº ? And why, indeed, is Jesus thought to beclaiming equality with God simply because he calls him father? It is

47 I leave out of account the allusions to the Jews’ determination to kill Jesus in 7: 1,19–20, 25), as well as the various attempts to arrest him (�Ø��Ø : 7: 30, 32, 44; 8: 20 [?];10: 39; 11: 57). 11: 57 speaks of the final, successful plan of arrest, and the otherinstances, with the exception of 10: 39, are found within the context of less portentousdebates. Broadly speaking, the controversies with the Pharisees stem from a periodwhen the Jewish and Christian groups were still in active dialogue with one another.This is not true of the passages in question here. See E. Bammel, ‘ ‘‘John Did NoMiracle’’ ’, 197. The difference between the two kinds of debate will be given moreextended treatment in the next chapter.

48 On this difference between chs. 1–4 and what follows, see C. J. A. Hickling,‘Attitudes to Judaism’.

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true that the evangelist has already commented, in two closelyrelated passages, upon the role of ‘the only Son of God’(› ½� ª� c�� ıƒ��, 3: 16–21, 31–6); but these are the comments of avoice off-stage, and are no more integrated than the Prologue is intothe story of Jesus’ dealings with the Jews. Moreover, in the precedingchapter (ch. 4) ‘Father’ is simply an alternative name for God. ThatGod was indeed the father of his people is a commonplace in theJewish tradition; ‘sons of God’ is a regular way of speaking of Israel,49

and a little further on the Jews themselves will assert that God andGod alone is their father (8: 41). Why, then, should this seeminglyinnocent remark, ‘My father is working still, and I am working’,precipitate such implacable rage?

To answer this question we must first examine how this linkpassage (5: 17–18) is related to what comes before and after it. Closelyconnected as it is with the miracle story, we can easily see that it hasbeen grafted on to this subsequently by the evangelist.50 The firstquarrel of ‘the Jews’ is with the cripple himself, who breaks the lawby carrying his pallet on the sabbath (v. 10). This complaint is thentransferred to Jesus, who is tracked down51 for having performed anact of healing on the sabbath (v. 16). In his reply, however, Jesusshows no interest in this charge: he simply declares, ‘My father isworking still, and I am working’ (v. 17); and it is this declarationwhich ‘the Jews’ see as a claim to equality with God and consequently

49 e.g. ‘Beloved are Israel, that they are called sons of God’, Pirke Aboth 3: 19. Thekey text in the Old Testament itself is Deut. 14: 1: ‘You are the sons of the Lord yourGod.’ G. Delling cites these and dozens of other instances in his article, ‘Die Bezeich-nung ‘‘Sohne Gottes’’ ’.

50 J. L. Martyn thinks that the evangelist’s expansion of the original story begins at5: 9 (History and Theology1, 49); and it is true that a controversy dialogue has beenappended to the miracle story, as in Mark 2: 1–12 (cf. Bultmann, 239 n. 2). But both thecontent (sabbath) and the tone of 5: 10–16 are uncharacteristic of the evangelist,especially the injunction to ‘stop sinning, in case something worse happens to you’(cf. Bultmann, 243). At the same time John is the only evangelist to call Jesus’adversaries Jews. Perhaps this is a secondary modification designed to pave the wayfor the key statement, v. 18. In all probability the original ending of the story is to befound in 7: 19–24, which, as it stands, contradicts the suggestion (in 7: 3) that Jesus hadnot yet worked any miracles in Judaea. See Excursus IV. For an alternative exegesis ofthis passage, based upon the improbable supposition that the evangelist was deeplyconcerned about the sabbath legislation, see S. Pancaro, Law, 9–16, 54–6.

51 ‘Persecute’ (RSV) is certainly the wrong translation of �Ø�Œ�Ø in v. 16. A. E.Harvey argues that the phrase K��øŒ ÆP�� should be rendered, ‘they sought to bringa charge against him’ (Jesus on Trial, 50 ff. and nn. 11–12). This may be right but ‘theystarted to track him down’ is equally possible. This question receives further treatmentin Ch. 9.

82 Genesis

as a reason for having him killed. The literary welding is particularlyclever, because these transitional verses also serve as an anticipatorysummary of the argument that is about to follow—a profound anddetailed justification of Jesus’ claim. His seemingly simple words arethus loaded with meaning, and his hearers respond to all they imply.One might almost say that on Jesus’ lips the name ‘Father’ containsin nuce the whole of the evangelist’s christology.52 Thus the propercontext of this first report of the Jews’ determination to see Jesusdead, the only one that gives it any real intelligibility, is the whole ofthe debate, now started in earnest, between the two warring sectionswithin the Jewish community: the disciples of Jesus and his enemies.

Especially noteworthy is the skilful use made by the evangelist ofthe theme of healing on the sabbath. In a well-known Synopticsaying (Mark 3: 4 par.) Jesus asks, ‘Is it lawful to heal on thesabbath?’, but receives no reply. Another story, associated withthis, concludes with his assertion, ‘The sabbath was made for man,not man for the sabbath’ (Mark 2: 27 par.). But John, unlike hissource, is no longer interested in this kind of legal debate. Questionsof halakah that still occupy the Synoptists, worry Paul, and absorbthe rabbis, are totally remote from his concern. For him the sabbathhealing is just a stepping-stone to the affirmation of Jesus’ divinity.

In making the transition from one theme to the other he callsattention, Odeberg points out, to the accepted truth that, whereasGod himself observes the sabbath in respect of the physical creation,he never relaxes at all from his work of judgement.53 Accordingly, theconclusion of v. 17 suggests ‘that Jesus stands in the same relation tothe Sabbath as God and is continually active in the same work . . . ofjudgement’.54 This, of course, is one of the two kinds of work reservedfor the creator alone (the other being the bestowal of life) that aresingled out in the discourse that follows. Implicitly, then, Jesus is

52 More so than the ‘Amen-sayings’, pace Heinrich Schlier, ThDNT. i. 338.53 Most of the relevant material has been assembled by Strack–Billerbeck, ad loc.,

and other commentators for the most part realign this in the way that best suits them.Bultmann (246 n. 3) adds a valuable reference to Ep. Arist. 210. In my opinion the twocommentators that shed most light on this passage, each from his own perspective, areDodd and Odeberg. There is a late medieval midrash upon Exod. 7: 1, where Moses istold that he is to be God to Pharaoh. According to this (Midr. Tanh

˙uma B ataf 11b, § 7

(Buber, pp. 22 ff.)) four kings in history blasphemously claimed divine status: Hiran,Nebuchadnezzar, Pharaoh, and Joash (2 Chron. 24: 17). Each paid the penalty for hiseffrontery by being sodomized!

54 Odeberg, Fourth Gospel, 202.

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asserting that he has performed a healing miracle on the sabbathbecause God, as his Father, is associating him with a work that isproperly divine. Consequently his words constitute a claim to equalitywith God, and the enraged reaction of the Jews is fully comprehensible.

The question that now arises is how Jesus’ claim is to be explainedagainst the background of first-century Jewish religious beliefs. Howcould a man, and a Jew at that, possibly claim divine status? It willnot do to appeal to Paul, even though he makes similar claims forChrist, for there is no trace of his influence here. As for the Synoptictradition, it too makes strong claims for Jesus (some of the strongestput in the mouths of devils: Mark 1: 24; 3: 11; 5: 7), but not in waysthat have discernibly affected John. And certainly there is no help tobe found in the picture of pure and unsullied monotheism painted forus in all the ‘orthodox’ Jewish sources. Rather, what we have here issomething akin to a family row, in which any hope of reconciliationhas already vanished and the situation is one of total deadlock. Jesus’subsequent expansion of his remarks contains no hint that he mightbe prepared to modify his claims, to couch them in less offensiveterms, or even to explain his apparent blasphemy in the face of theJews’ understandable outrage.55 For their part, instead of requestingan explanation, the Jews have already determined that Jesus mustdie. The dispute is conducted close to the borders of a shared faith inwhich both parties had laid claim to the exclusive possession of thetruth—a classic instance of odium theologicum, though not one thatthe evangelist’s absolute partiality allows him to acknowledge. Butby this time Jesus and his followers had already crossed the frontier ofthe faith they once shared with the Jews, and they would neverreturn. The irrevocable step had been taken, the ultimate blasphemyuttered.56 On the story level, the determination of ‘the Jews’ to seeJesus dead has the effect of drawing up the battle lines, not merely forall that follows (cf. Mark 3: 6), but also retrospectively (by the �Aºº )for all that precedes. Symbolically, the separation of the Johannine

55 I cannot agree with M. de Jonge when he says that ‘in 5: 17–30 it also becomesevident that, in the opinion of the evangelist, according to Jewish views, anyone whocalls God his Father makes himself equal to God’ (‘Son of God’, 148). In 8: 41 ‘the Jews’themselves speak of God as their father.

56 It is the one singled out by Jesus’ accusers in the passion: ‘We have a law; andby that law he ought to die, because he has claimed to be the Son of God’ (19: 7). Cf.W. Meeks, ‘Divine Agent’, 59.

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community (and, more generally, of Christianity from Judaism) isalready assured.

The explanation, then, for the abruptness of the death threat isthat it reflects the anger of the Jewish establishment at the effronteryof the Johannine group within its ranks. John’s earliest readers willhave readily detected the reference to a hatred whose effects they hadrecently endured themselves; but the nature of the gospel form issuch that this experience can only be alluded to obliquely by theevangelist.

(b) ‘Greater than Abraham’

Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ Sothey took up stones to throw at him. (8: 58–9)

In some respects chapter 8 is a rag-bag. Even after excluding theinauthentic story of the woman taken in adultery, Bultmann splits itinto ten fragments, a couple of them no longer than one verse apiece,and scatters them liberally around 250 pages of his commentary.The short saying that concerns us here concludes a long section(8: 31–59) lumped together by Brown under the unpromising title‘Miscellaneous discourses’, though later he changes his mind andspeaks of ‘a rather homogeneous discourse’.57 Homogeneous it isnot, although much of it is loosely tied together by a single string—the name of Abraham (which does not figure elsewhere in the Gospel).

This exceptionally bitter debate ends in violence. After exchangingangry words for some time the Jews turn from insults to injury, andstart to pick up stones to hurl at Jesus. To his final declaration this isthe only reply they have left: as commentators agree, it is theirresponse to blasphemy.

Once again it is right to underline the peculiarly Jewish characterof Jesus’ claim: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ In every case, thestrongest and clearest of Jesus’ self-revelatory utterances, those

57 Brown, p. 361. For Dodd it is the seventh and last of the series of dialogues whichmake up chs. 7–8 of the Gospel. Commentators like Dodd, whose only concern is withthe final state of the text, are entitled to ignore the dislocations in the interests of anintegral exegesis. (Cf. H. E. Lona, Abraham in Johannes 8.) Martyn, Gospel of John, 109 ff.,is too hasty in assuming that ‘the Jews who had believed’ (8: 31) are involved in thewhole of the subsequent dialogue. This was surely not true of the prehistory of the text.(On this see de Jonge, Stranger, 101 and notes.) For a study of the composition of thewhole passage see B. Lindars, ‘Discourse and Tradition’.

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which immediately elicit the standard response to blasphemy, havean unmistakably Jewish ring: they are made from within the Jewishtradition and cannot be explained in any other way.

Bultmann fails to give this saying of Jesus due weight: he treats itas a simple assertion of pre-existence.58 Of course it is that, but it ismuch more besides. Jesus is aligning himself with God at this point,laying a claim to divinity alongside that of the Father. But if so, how isthe claim being pressed? ‘The general consensus’, according toOdeberg, favours an intentional allusion to the divine oracle, ‘I amhe’ (afe jna). On the face of it this is a straightforward equivalent of‘I am Yahweh’. Odeberg objects to this solution that ‘afe jna as asolemn declaration by Jesus would equal ‘‘I am God’’ or ‘‘I am theFather’’, a declaration that is clearly out of keeping with the generalbearing of Jesus’ self-predicative utterances’.59 In fact with the ex-ception of 1 Chron 21: 17 all the instances of afe jna in its bi-partiteform are divine utterances.60

Rather than in the afe jna, suggests Odeberg, the link is to be found‘on the side of ejea tWa ejea [I am who am], i.e. in the speculationsevolved from Exod. 3: 14’.61 Bultmann counters this by saying thatJesus’ statement would then mean ‘I am the ‘‘I-am’’ ’, the Kª� beingboth subject and predicate. But this is not necessary, provided thatthe Kª� �N�� be taken simply as an echo of the divine revelation.Odeberg cites as a parallel the enigmatic figure of Metatron, ofwhom it is said, ‘He (God) called me the little (lesser) Yahweh’(3 Enoch 12: 5). This text is closely paralleled by a passage fromanother important pseudepigraphical writing, The Apocalypse of Abra-ham, roughly contemporary with the Fourth Gospel. This documentmerits careful consideration.62

58 ‘The Kª� �N��, in 8: 24, 28’, he claims, ‘is of a completely different character fromthe Kª� �N��, in 8: 58. . . . For if the Kª� �N�� was intended as a paraphrase of the divinename the Jews could not ask, ‘‘Who are you?’’ but would have to take offense at whatin their ears would be a gross blasphemy’ (349 n. 3). This is in fact what happens at8: 59, but Bultmann’s exegesis of that passage does not account for the reaction ofthe Jews.

59 Odeberg, p. 310.60 See the discussion in Catrin Williams, I am He, 275–83. The evangelist may have

had two meanings in mind: what Jesus said and what his audience took him to mean.61 Odeberg, p. 309. The Hebrew equivalent of the phrase �æd � `�æÆa� ª� ��ŁÆØ Kªg

�N�� would be, as he says, jkna zetba jnql (308).62 OTPs i. 681–705: a new translation and introduction by R. Rubinkiewicz. Cf.

G. Quispel, ‘L’Evangile de Jean et la Gnose’, 201–2.

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The passage that concerns us (chs. 9–10) follows an introductorysection where we are told how Abraham first sees a number of idolsdestroyed in the house of his father Terah, and then watches as thehouse is struck by lightning and burnt to the ground. Abrahamhimself is saved from destruction by the direct intervention of God.Knowing that Abraham is genuinely seeking for the true God, ‘theGod of gods, the Creator’, he calls down from the heavens in a streamof fire, and says ‘I am he’ (8: 3). Then he tells him to leave the houseso as to avoid being killed.

After this God speaks to Abrahamagain: ‘Behold, it is I. Fear not, forI am Before-the-World and Mighty, the God who created previously,before the light of the age. I am the protector for you, and your helper’(9: 2–3). In all these introductory declarations the characteristic self-proclamations of God (‘I am . . . ’) come through strongly. In whatfollows, Abraham is promised great revelations: ‘I will announce toyou guarded things, and youwill see great things which you have notseen . . . I will show you the things which were made by the ages andby my word, and affirmed, created and reserved’ (9: 6, 9).

At this point another important character puts in an appearance.His name, Yaoel, appears to be a conflation of the two divine names,Yahweh and El (la efej). Subsequently this personage will act as aheavenly guide to Abraham, leading him almost to the point of aMerkavah vision (ch. 18) before silently disappearing from the sceneand allowing God himself once again to speak to Abraham directly.At one point (17: 13) the very same name, Yaoel, is given to God.

It is worth quoting the whole of the passage in which Yaoelintroduces himself to Abraham. From it we can see that, in spite ofobvious differences, Yaoel’s role closely resembles that of Jesus. Hetoo proclaims himself as sent by God and shares in the authority ofhis name (5: 43; 10: 25). God has made him a gift of this name (17: 11)and he has manifested it (17: 1: K�Æ �æø� �ı �e Z �Æ and made itknown to his disciples (17: 26).63 More generally, he introduces themto heavenly things, and offers them the same sort of protection andguidance that Yaoel here promises to Abraham. (I italicize some ofthe most suggestive parallels.) Abraham is speaking:

And it came to pass that when I heard the voice pronouncing such words tome I looked this way and that. And behold there was no breath of man. And

63 Cf. The Gospel of Truth, 38: ‘the name of the Father is the Son’; Hermas, Sim. 9. 14. 5.

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my spirit was amazed, and my soul fled from me. And I became like a stone,and fell face down upon the earth, for there was no longer strength in me tostand up on the earth. And while I was still face down on the ground, I heardthe voice speaking, ‘Go, Yaoel of the same name, through the mediation of myineffable name, consecrate this man for me and strengthen him against histrembling.’ The angel he sent to me in the likeness of a man [cf. Dan. 7: 13]came, and he took me by my right hand and stood me on my feet. And hesaid to me, ‘Stand up, Abraham, friend of God who has loved you, let humantrembling not enfold you! For lo! I am sent to you to strengthen you and tobless you in the name of God, creator of heavenly and earthly things, whohas loved you. Be bold and hasten to him, I am Yaoel, and I was called so byhim who causes those with me on the seventh expanse, on the firmament, toshake, a power through the medium of his ineffable name in me [cf. Exod. 23: 21].I am the one who has been charged according to his commandment, torestrain the threats of the living creatures of the cherubim against oneanother, and I teach those who carry the song through the medium ofman’s night of the seventh hour. I am appointed to hold the Leviathans,because through me is subjugated the attack and menace of every reptile,I am ordered to loosen Hades and to destroy those who wondered at the dead.I am the one who ordered your father’s house to be burned with him, for hehonoured the dead. I am sent to you now to bless you and the land which hewhom you have called the Eternal One has prepared for you. For your sakeI have indicated the way of the land [cf. Exod. 23: 20]. Stand up, Abraham, goboldly, be very joyful and rejoice. And I (also rejoice) with you, for a venerablehonour has been prepared for you by the Eternal One. Go, complete thesacrifice of the command. Behold, I am assigned (to be) with you and with thegeneration which is destined (to be born) from you. And with me Michaelblesses you forever. Be bold, go!’ (Apoc. Abr. 10)

Now even if we could be sure that this text was composed before theFourth Gospel (and this is not certain), there is no question ofarguing to a direct debt. But the parallels are none the less highlysuggestive.

Two further pieces of evidence tend to support the view that thefourth evangelist was influenced by the idea of a revealer-figure sentby God and endowed with the authority of his name.

The first is in a passage from the Babylonian Talmud quoted byAlan Segal:

R. Nahman said: ‘He who is as skilled in refuting the Minim as is R. Idi, lethim do so; but not otherwise.’ Once a Min said to R. Idi: ‘It is written, Andunto Moses He said: Come up to the Lord (Ex. 24: 1). But surely it should havestated, Come up to me!’—‘It was Metatron’ he replied, whose name is similar

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to that of his Master, for it is written, For My name is in Him (Ex. 23: 21). ‘But ifso, we should worship him!’64

Exodus 24: 1 is a notorious crux: why should God say to Moses, ‘Comeup to the Lord’ rather than ‘Come up to me’? It is one a Christian orGnostic might well seize on. In his reply R. Idi sails very close to thewind by alluding to Metatron, whose possession of the divine nameseems to the heretic, not surprisingly, a sufficient reason for wor-shipping him. R. Idi goes on to refute this conclusion with furtherarguments based on the same text; but it is not difficult to detect inthis controversy a claim remarkably similar to the one rejected asblasphemous in John 8: 59. Segal himself concludes that in spite ofthe comparatively late date of this talmudic passage (third century)‘the tradition must be based on older traditions in apocalyptic orproto-Merkabah or proto-gnostic texts where the principal angel hasa theophoric name’ (such as the one from the Apocalypse of Abrahamwe have just been considering).

The scriptural passage taken by R. Idi to indicate Metatron (‘Myname is in him’, Exod. 23: 21) may also lie behind John 17: 11–12:‘Keep them (or I kept them) in the name which you gave me’, thatname which belongs of right to God alone and is in itself the essenceof his revelation. It is also employed in another late pseudepigraphon(the second piece of evidence) to explain and justify Metatron’s othername, ‘the lesser Yahweh’. This is 3 Enoch, dated the fifth or sixthcentury by Philip Alexander65 and the only pseudepigraphon tohave been transmitted by the rabbis. 3 Enoch 12: 5, the text quotedby Odeberg, testifies to the persistence of a strange tradition survivingon the fringes of Judaism, according to which the hallowed name ofYahweh was bestowed on an angelic being, Yahweh-El or the lesserYahweh, sent by God to reveal hidden mysteries to mankind—or atleast to certain chosen souls.

This slightly more extended speculation on the name suggests thatthere may be a link between these sectarian writings and what wascondemned by the Jewish rabbis as the heresy of the ‘two powers’.

The exegetical root of this heresy was the repetition of thename of God in Exod. 15: 3 ‘Yahweh is a warrior, Yahweh is his name’(fmW efej emhlm Wja efej), as has been shown by Alan Segal. Upon

64 Two Powers in Heaven, 68, citing Sanhedrin 38b. See too Segal’s collection ofessays, ‘Judaism, Christianity and Gnosticism’.

65 OTPs 225–9.

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this text was constructed the notion that there were two differentself-revelations of God, one as a young man, appearing at the Sea(the context of Exod. 15), the other as an old man, appearing at Sinai.

Whether or not there was any direct connection between the twogroups of texts, one belonging to a sectarian tradition that can betraced back to 1 Enoch, the other evidence of a heresy within theranks of Judaism, it seems likely that one or both of the ideas behindthem may have made it easier to believe that Jesus the Messiah wasalso the special emissary of God, bearing the authority of his name toreveal to men certain hidden truths.

Perhaps, however, we should be even bolder in our interpretationof this passage, less preoccupied with defending at all costs the thesisthat the fourth evangelist, like all good Jews, was a die-hard mono-theist.66 After all, the easiest andmost straightforward explanation of8: 58, whether the allusion is to Exod. 3: 14 (Odeberg, Schnackenburg,etc.) or to the divine oracle in Deut. 32: 39 and Second Isaiah (Barrett,Harner, Williams), is that Jesus is actually claiming the name ofYahweh for himself. Such a claim is not, as Odeberg argues, tanta-mount to saying ‘I am the Father’. Rather it is an implicit assertionthat the protector or redeemer God, Israel’s tribal deity, is not afterall to be identified with the creator God, El Elyon, but has revisitedhis people in a new guise.67 For the fact is that, despite many resem-blances, the Fourth Gospel differs markedly from the Apocalypse ofAbraham and 3 Enoch. Some of its most important teaching is un-ashamedly controversial. It lies at the cusp between the twin curvesof Jewish tradition, one destined to emerge in rabbinic Judaism, the

66 The initial assumption that the author and first readers of the Gospel weremonotheists spoils Lars Hartman’s otherwise perceptive article, ‘Johannine Jesus-Belief’.

67 Robert Murray has suggested to me (and the suggestion has been confirmed bythe anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt) that religious people regularly require two typesof deity. Following A. Stolz, Strukturen, he calls these ‘Far’ and ‘Near’: ‘the ‘‘Far’’ ascreator and supreme guarantor of cosmic and earthly order, fertility, etc., but hardlyoffering intimate comfort, and the latter, often more anthropomorphically conceived,as being involved with humans and caring for their needs. ’El ‘Elyon was a ‘‘Far’’conceptualization of deity, while YHWHwas a ‘‘Near’’ one.’ He goes on to suggest ‘thatthe post-exilic absolute monotheism, by insisting on the total identity of YHWH with’El ‘Elyon, left people with one (far) God and a doctrinaire insistence that all pluralisticconceptualizations of deity were unreal. But the need for a near God abhors a vacuumand the gap had to be filled.’ This idea, as Murray points out, fits in well with thetheories of political and religious suppression argued in Margaret Barker’s The OlderTestament. It also has a bearing upon the history of Christian doctrine and belief,having special relevance to the cult of the Virgin Mary.

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other branching off in a different direction. It is here that the twocurves meet—and part. The role of the ‘angel interpreter’, structur-ally very similar, has been simplified and streamlined to fit into thestory of the earthly career of Jesus: this is after all a Gospel. But hisclaim to divine status, the terms in which it is couched, and thecircumstances in which it is uttered, all indicate that this is not astrange foreign myth breaking into the Jewish religious tradition forthe first time, but a dangerously novel manifestation of an old andfamiliar theme. It is one thing to speculate upon an angelic figurebearing the name and authority of God when his only purpose invisiting men here below is to transport them back to heaven in anapocalyptic dream. It is quite another to allow this figure to coalescewith an individual human being who has already won a wide follow-ing as the Jewish Messiah.68

Obviously this is not the whole story. A precisely analogous move(and one which is much better attested) is made in regard to thefigure of the Son of Man.69 And had not Jesus already been regardedas a divine emissary exalted to heaven after his death, then it is mostimprobable that he would have been credited with the authority toecho God’s revelation of his own name. When he did so, through themouth, as we may surmise, of one of his followers in the Johanninecamp, it is scarcely surprising that more conservative Jews felt threa-tened and outraged by the apparent blasphemy that was beinguttered in their midst.

(c) ‘Son of God’

The Jews answered him, ‘We stone you for blasphemy; because you, being aman, make yourself God.’ Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your law,‘‘I said, you are gods’’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came(and scripture cannot be broken) do you say of him whom the Fatherconsecrated and sent into the world, ‘‘You are blaspheming,’’ becauseI said, ‘‘I am the Son of God’’?’ (10: 34–6)

On a superficial reading this passage appears quite innocuous: othermen are called gods in scripture; and since this is so, argues Jesus,why should not I, sanctified and sent, claim the title of Son of God?But if there were nothing more to his reply than this then it would be

68 I will expand this theme in Ch. 3.69 This important topic will be discussed in Ch. 5.

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simply and solely a clever but otherwise undistinguished argumentumad hominem, seemingly designed more to reassure his audience thanto establish his own credentials as a messenger from heaven with agenuine claim to divinity. When challenged by ‘the Jews’, as we havealready seen, Jesus does not respond by trying to allay their misgiv-ings: he simply repeats his claims in another way. If indeed he wassuddenly changing his tactics in this passage (‘Don’t worry, allI mean is that I’m a human being with a commission from God’)then the reaction of his audience in attempting to arrest him makesno sense.70

Much depends on the identification of those whom God is con-ceived to be addressing in the psalm that is being quoted (Ps. 82: 6).There are three candidates: (1) unjust judges; (2) Israel; (3) angels.The first two both have rabbinical support;71 but neither is reallysatisfactory, for it is hard to see in either case how Jesus could bemaking a strong enough claim to warrant the response he receives.One commentator, Jurgen Becker, points out that such a readingwould make Jesus out to be a primus inter pares, a special case inrelation to other men similarly addressed by God. This anticipation ofArius is not a theological position found elsewhere in the Gospel, andso Becker is inclined to regard the passage as an editorial intrusion,72

though he fails to explain why an editor should attempt to draw theteeth of John’s argument in this way. Surely it is preferable to lookfirst for a reading strong enough to suit the context: another fierceand trenchant debate with the Jews that actually starts this time(10: 31) with an allusion to their determination to see him dead.

The suggestion that the Ł�� in this passage might really beangels was first made in 1960 by J. A. Emerton,73 who pointed outthat in the Peshitta (Syriac) version of the psalm ‘gods’ (zjela) in vv.1b and 2 is rendered ‘angels’ ( ). This gives the translation:

God stands in the congregation of GodHe judges among the angels. . . . . .I said, ‘You are angels

And all of you sons of the most High’.

70 Contra M. J. J. Menken, ‘Use of the Septuagint’, who bases an elaborate andinteresting argument on the mistaken premise that in explaining his use of Psalm 82

Jesus wants to reassure his interlocutors.71 See J. S. Ackermann, ‘The Rabbinical Interpretation of Ps 82’.72 Becker, p. 336. 73 ‘Interpretation of Psalm 82’.

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In a subsequent article74 Emerton backs this suggestion up withfurther evidence from the Peshitta and a number of targumim thatzjla is sometimes translated ‘angels’ or ‘(sons of ) angels’. He alsorepeats his point that angels are called zjela in various docu-ments from Qumran, and mentions ‘the possibility, according toMr J. Strugnell, that angels are even described as zjela in one text’.

The text in question is part of a series of manuscript fragmentssubsequently grouped together, carefully edited (by Carol Newsom),and published (in 1985) under the title of Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice.What Emerton calls the ‘angelogical vocabulary’ is indeed rem-arkable. It includes angels, spirits, holy ones, ministers, princes(Wft jajUn), chiefs (ftjbd jWat), and a number of other titles. Promin-ent among these are zjla and zjela. In his translation of thesetexts (Dead Sea Scrolls3) Geza Vermes rightly renders the last twotitles as ‘gods’ (usually with scare quotes). They are not merelyangelic messengers but truly divine beings who surround the throneof the ‘King’ or ‘God’ of gods and pay him continuous homage.

Accordingly, although Strugnell speaks of an ‘angelic’ liturgy, itwould be just as accurate to speak of a ‘divine’ liturgy. No doubt thegreat diversity of the terms employed indicates a strong distinctionbetween God and the heavenly court; even so, we are a long wayfrom the austere monotheism of Deuteronomy or Second Isaiah. It isagainst this background that Jesus’ citation of Psalm 82 begins tomake sense, especially if we bear in mind the whole of v. 6: ‘I say youare gods (zjela, Ł��), all of you sons of the Most High (zjela jnb,ıƒeØ ł���ı).’ The big difference is that in the Fourth Gospel thewhole heavenly court is encapsulated in the person of Jesus; apartfrom the Father he alone is given the title (cf. 1: 1; 1: 18, reading� ª� c� Ł���; 20: 28). The enormity of his claim understandablyinfuriates his hearers.

Emerton discusses yet another document from Qumran;75 in thisthe Hebrew zjela of Psalm 82 is identified with Melchizedek, who islater called xjela (thy God). Here we have evidence of a theologicalleap parallel to that made in the Gospel, since Melchizedek, who onceappeared on earth as a man (Gen. 14) is now given what is unques-tionably a divine title. J. A. Fitzmyer, in his careful analysis of thistext,76 acknowledges the difficulty by rendering Ps. 82: 1 as ‘Elohim

74 ‘Melchizedek and the Gods’.75 First published by A. S. van der Woude: ‘Melchisedek’.76 ‘Further Light on Melchizedek’.

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has taken his stand in the assembly of El’, but like Emerton he followsvan der Woude, the original editor, in identifying this Elohim notwith God (which is what the term denotes at this point in the originalpsalm) but with Melchizedek. The Elohim of v. 2 (‘in the midst ofElohim he gives judgement’) is taken by van der Woude and Fitzmyerto refer to Melchizedek’s supporting team of angels, by Emerton torefer to the opposing team, led by Belial.77 Whoever is right (andthere is obviously much uncertainty in the interpretation of thisfragmentary text), there seems little doubt that we have here furtherproof of the existence of a world of religious discourse a long wayfrom the strict monotheism of the Jews who are Jesus’ adversaries inthe Fourth Gospel. No doubt the Gospel is faithful to its Jewishheritage in continuing to distinguish between God and men, but italso sees Jesus (and specifically in the passage we have been discuss-ing) as both ¼ Łæø�� and Ł���. The Qumran fragments and theGospel testify to a boldly speculative alternative theology that ortho-dox Judaism could not absorb—or even acknowledge.

(d) Conclusion

In the Fourth Gospel there are numerous passages in which Jesusclaims divine status. It is no coincidence that some of the strongestand most explicit of these occur in angry confrontations with ‘theJews’: the Gospel has as one of its aims to confirm its readers in theirstand against these. The debates it records are not readily classifiableas controversy stories, but like the Synoptic pericopes they in some

77 Criticizing Emerton’s use of this text to elucidate John 10: 34, M. de Jonge andA. S. van der Woude comment: ‘In the Johannine context there is no reason to think ofangels; v. 33 even makes a clear contrast between god and men. Moreover, nowhereelse in the gospel do heavenly beings like those portrayed in 11Q Melch play a role ofany importance. Emerton finds the tertium comparationis in the commission received bythe angels and by Jesus. Jesus’ commission is indeed mentioned in vv. 36 f., but thecommission received by the Ł�� is not even hinted at’ (‘11Q Melchizedek and the NewTestament’, 314). But nor does the Melchizedek text speak of angels as such; and if theother heavenly beings alluded to scarcely figure in the Fourth Gospel, the fact remainsthat Jesus himself plays a part not unlike the one assigned here to Melchizedek, whoappears to be mentioned in 4Q401 11. 3 as an angel priest. If so, as Carol Newsomremarks (Songs, 134), he would be the only individual angel named in the Sabbathsongs. The Syriac rendering of zjela in Ps. 82 as ‘angels’, the datumwhich first alertedEmerton to the nature of Jesus’ affirmation in John 10: 34–6, may well be a kind ofbowdlerization, a deliberate weakening of an otherwise disquietingly ambiguouspsalm. The fragmentary targum of Job similarly alters ‘sons of God’ to ‘angels’ at Job38: 7. See too the various versions of Deut. 32: 8.

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way resemble, they reflect a period of acrimonious argument be-tween ‘Jews’ and followers of Jesus. Peculiar to the Fourth Gospel isthe way in which so many of these controversies turn upon Jesus’claim to be divine.

The Farewell Discourses teach us that the Gospel in its finishedform was intended for followers of Christ. But this is only part of theevidence. The polemical tone of much of the first half of the Gospel,especially in chapters 5–10, cannot be explained except against abackground of an inter-Jewish row. If the passages we have beenconsidering are catechesis, they are catechesis with a bite—notSunday-school lessons, but sharp reminders of the dangerous obdur-acy of the community’s Jewish adversaries.

It must be stressed too that Jesus’ arguments in these debates aredrawn from a tradition with which his hearers are familiar. He is notburrowing into the Hermetica or chasing Gnostic hares with a view todemanding from his uncomprehending audience a blind adhesion toalien truths. On the contrary, the truth which can set them free,however novel, is one that springs from a well buried deep in theirown soil.78 Had he gone off to teach Greeks, as it is suggested hemight (7: 35), he could not have expected from them the kind of readyacceptance he blames the Jews for withholding. Only by abstractingaltogether from the circumstances of the Gospel’s composition andtreating it as nothing but a repository of revealed doctrine or as atimeless call to faith, as Bultmann does, can one fail to recognize inthese hot-tempered exchanges the type of family row in which theparticipants face one another across the room of a house which allhave shared and all call home.

Some of the arguments used here to give a plausible identity to ‘theJews’ of the Fourth Gospel may appear somewhat tenuous. They arecertainly far from conclusive. But their weakness does not affect themain point of this chapter, which is to locate the Johannine Chris-tians themselves somewhere among the religious dissenters whoproliferated in Palestine in the first century. The hostility betweenthe followers of Jesus and the Jews is at its most intense at preciselythose points where Jesus is unambiguously claiming divine status.

78 This was a well from which Judaism continued to draw, but cautiously andsparingly. To the fastidious it will have seemed a ‘religion of the multitude’ in New-man’s sense—‘ever vulgar and abnormal; it will ever be tinctured with fanaticism andsuperstition, while men are what they are. A people’s religion is ever a corruptreligion’, J. H. Newman, Difficulties of Anglicans (London, 1876), 81.

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And we have seen too that the rows that break out over these claimsare family rows: they concern what are in the first place internaldisagreements within the broad spectrum of the faith of Israel.

It cannot be overstressed that this kind of doctrinal debate wouldbe inconceivable within a tradition as unswervingly monotheistic asthe Judaism we know today (which in this respect has persistedunchanged since the second century). Even if there were no evidenceat all to prove the existence of dissenting groups at the turn of theera, and it is no accident that the bulk of such evidence has beentransmitted by Christians rather than Jews,79 we should still have toposit their existence in order to explain the origins of Christianity.The smooth, rounded monotheism of Jewish orthodoxy afforded aslittle purchase then as it would today for the claims that came to bemade for Jesus. The most startling of these, and none are morestartling than those examined within this chapter, were made withina religious tradition which in the first place made them possible andcontinues to give them intelligibility.

79 ‘By the strangest quirk of fate respecting literature that I know of, large numbersof writings by Jews were completely lost from the transmitted Jewish heritage . . . Notonly the so-called Pseudepigrapha, but even such important writings as those by Philoand Josephus have not been part of the Jewish inheritance from its past; these werepreserved and transmitted by Christians.’ So Samuel Sandmel in a foreword to Charles-worth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. i, p. xi. A quirk of fate?

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Excursus II: ‘Salvation is from the Jews’

In wrestling with the problem of how to reconcile Jesus’ statement tothe Samaritan woman that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ with theportrayal of ‘the Jews’ in the chapters that follow, commentatorsmake a variety of different moves, ranging from Archbishop Ber-nard’s bland comment, ‘the evangelist is not forgetful of the debtwhich Christianity owes to Judaism’1 to Bultmann’s curt dismissal ofthe saying as a gloss: ‘for 1. 11 already made it clear that theevangelist does not regard the Jews as God’s own people, the peopleof salvation (Eigentums- und Heilsvolk)’.2

Although there is no obvious aporia to complicate Jesus’ returnfrom Galilee to Jerusalem at the beginning of chapter 5 (indeed thetransition is quite smooth), the change of mood soon makes itself felt.In the previous chapter the Samaritan woman, initially wary, provesreceptive to Jesus’ message, and chapter 4 ends with the conversionof the Galilean nobleman whose son has just been healed ‘and all hishousehold’. Yet twenty verses or so later ‘the Jews’ want Jesus dead(5: 18). How could the evangelist who has just written a story inwhich Jesus, greeted as a Jew by a woman from Samaria, tells herbluntly that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ continue his narrative with aseries of vitriolic accusations on Jesus’ part that make the Jews’rejection of salvation all too plain?

Commentators such as Dodd, opposed in principle to any sugges-tion that the Gospel is not the seamless garment it was thought to beby Strauss, slide over this difficulty without even noticing it. JorgFrey, too, although aware that 4: 22 is in sharp contrast with thepicture of the Jews as ‘children of the devil’ (8: 44),3 does not budgefrom his general view that ‘priority must be accorded to the syn-chronic approach’, a view which seems to rest solely upon the feebleprop of the stylistic homogeneity of the Gospel.4 Others are moreemphatic in their insistence that the difficulty is easily resolved.Harwig Thyen, for instance, attempts a harmonizing exegesis along

1 Bernard, i. 148. 2 Bultmann, p. 189 n. 6 (tr. modified).3 ‘Das Bild’, 37. 4 Ibid. 35 and n. 10. He refers to his Eschatologie, i.

salvation-historical lines.5DanielBoyarinasserts (rightly, I think) thatthe saying is entirely compatible with his own hypothesis thatƒ � �ı�ÆEØ are an inner group within Israel: salvation ‘is from theJews, but for all Israelites, including Galileans and including theSamaritan woman’.6 He makes things easier for himself, however,by ignoring the identification, in 4: 3, of Jesus as a � �ı�ÆE�. This sitsillwithhis theory that throughout theGospel the Johanninegroupasawhole think of themselves as Israelites by all means, but certainly not� �ı�ÆEØ.

Rather than a gloss, suggests Walter Bauer, ‘it is easier to believethat the original form of a story reworked by John to suit his ownargument is breaking through the surface here to show Jesus takinga Jewish line in his discussion with the Samaritan woman’. This ideais worth pursuing. What exactly is going on in John 4? When we lookat the story closely we can see that it is not an original unity.7 Theprofound discussion of the significance of living or ‘fresh’ water(closely related to the discussion with Nicodemus in the precedingchapter) has been superimposed upon an earlier, simpler story,whose main focus of interest is the relationship between Samaritansand � �ı�ÆEØ. Starting with Jesus’ ‘prophetic’ insight concerning thewoman’s marital status, it continues with her recognition of Jesus asprophet and Messiah, and concludes with the subsequent conversionof many of her fellow-countrymen. In 4: 20–6 ‘the motif of vv. 5–9 isrepeated on a higher level’,8 a transposition that is surely to beattributed to the evangelist himself: in particular the conjunction ofspirit and truth is typical of a work in which spirit is rarely namedwithout some reference to word. But the earlier, simpler tale that hehas taken over is about a missionary journey into Samaria. KlausHaacker9 is right to argue that the salvation phrase, far from beingspatchcocked between repetitions of the theme of worship, was anintegral element of the source. This he reconstructs as follows:

5 ‘Das Heil’. As an extreme example of the contrary view he cites Kreyenbuhl:‘Among the most impossible glosses that have ever distorted a text and even changedit to mean its exact opposite’ (169 n. 30).

6 ‘Ioudaioi in John’, 237.7 The unexpected abruptness of 4: 16 constitutes a small but real aporia that should

arouse the suspicions of any alert reader: ‘go and fetch your husband’ is a decidedlyodd response to a request for water. Several scholars, including Becker and Theobald,argue persuasively that v. 16 must have originally followed directly after v. 9. Forvarious attempts to get round this aporia see Ashton, ‘The Woman at the Well’, 270–1.

8 Bultmann, p. 175. Apart from the arbitrary excision of v. 22 Bultmann offers a veryperceptive analysis and exegesis of the whole passage.

9 ‘Gottesdiest’.

98 Genesis

19 The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20Ourfathers worshipped on this mountain; and you say that Jerusalem is the placewhere men ought to worship.’21 Jesus said to her,‘ . . . 22 You worship what you do not know; we worshipwhat we know, for salvation is from the Jews’ . . . 25 The woman said to him,‘I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ); when he comes, hewill show us all things.’ 26 Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am he.’10

Haacker marshals an impressive case in favour of the thesis that thephrase under discussion has survived from a debate between Jews(� �ı�ÆEØ) and Samaritans, probably centred upon Gen. 49: 8–12,Jacob’s blessing on Judah (which understandably posed problemsfor Samaritan interpreters). In her conversation with Jesus thewoman had already spoken of ‘our father Jacob’, and in fact Jacob’sdying blessing concerned not only Judah but also Joseph, ‘a fruitfulbough by a spring’, himself the father of Ephraim and Manasseh andas such the greatly revered ancestor of the Samaritans.

The controversy between Jews and Samaritans is sharply delin-eated by Ben Sira: ‘With two nations my soul is vexed, and the thirdis no nation: those who live on Mount Seir, and the Philistines, andthe foolish people that dwell in Shechem’ (Sir. 50: 25–6). In theTestament of Levi (7: 2) Shechem, the capital of Samaria (laterNeapolis, now Nablus) is called ‘City of the Senseless’ (��ºØ�I�ı ��ø ). (See too CD 13. 5–14. 2.) Jacob’s well, then, besides beingthe ideal setting for a dialogue about water was also the perfect placefor a conciliatory conversation between a Samaritan and Jew.

In this chapter Boyarin’s proposal concerning the double referenceof the term � �ı�ÆEØ comes into its own. The opposition between thetwo sacred mountains, Gerizim and Sion, allows the double refer-ence, both local (Judaea) and religious (the inner group), and foronce there is no need to discriminate between them.

It will be argued later that John 1: 19—2: 11 is based upon adocument known as the signs source composed with an eye to amission in Galilee. If so it is a plausible hypothesis that behind thestory in John 4 lies another missionary document, focused this timeon Samaria. Both missions belong to the early period of the Johan-nine community.

10 For a slightly different reconstruction, very much along the same lines, seeM. Theobald (seemingly unaware of Haacker’s work): ‘Abraham–(Isaak–)Jakob’,163–72.

Excursus II: ‘Salvation is from the Jews’ 99

2

THE COMMUNITY AND ITS BOOK

1. the book

All we know about the Johannine community is what can be inferredfrom its writings. Such external guides as we have are at bestunreliable, at worst misleading.1 But within the pages of the Gospeland Letters is buried a surprising amount of positive data enabling usto piece together a picture of the nature and history of the commu-nity. Of course the piecing-together cannot be done without conjec-ture. As in all historical study it is important to hold apart the factualevidence and the shaping hypothesis. At the same time Colling-wood’s point concerning the correlativity of the two must not beforgotten.2 Without some hypothesis to inform the material factswith intelligibility there would, properly speaking, be no evidenceeither.

(a) Some Theories Surveyed

As always we must begin with the text, in this case with a book ofsuch consistent intricacy that it could impress Strauss as a seamlessgarment, yet turns out on closer inspection to be full of the awkwardconjunctions and dislocations that have come to be known asaporias or problem spots. No one theory can satisfactorily accountfor all of these; and it has to be said that there is still no generalagreement among scholars as to the best explanation.

Perhaps the least satisfactory of all the theories is (1) the displace-ment theory. No rearrangement yields an order completely free fromthe roughnesses and blemishes exposed by the careful sifting ofSchwartz and Wellhausen. Even Bultmann, who adopted a refinedversion of this theory, was forced to conclude that some of the

1 Contra M. Hengel, The Johannine Question; J. Frey, Eschatologie.2 Idea of History, 278–82.

missing fragments were never recovered. The theory requires thatthe end of each page of the original document coincided with the endof a sentence, which seems unlikely and is not borne out by whatpapyrus evidence we have. A further difficulty is to explain why theauthor or editor made such a poor job of putting the recoveredfragments back together in the right order.

The Grundschrift theory (2), according to which the Gospel beganas a relatively simple single document which subsequently under-went enlargements, alterations, and revisions, has more to be said forit. But it obviously requires further specification. And even if it werepossible to reconstruct this document (Fortna’s Signs Gospel, say,or—more adventurously—Boismard’s C) with any degree of prob-ability, there would still be a lot more work left to do.

The multiple-source theory (3), of which Bultmann is the mostfamous exponent, is really a variation of the Grundschrift theory: if, asis generally assumed, the signs document was a source, then it isconceivable that the evangelist had access to other sources too.Bultmann’s idea of a revelation-discourse source, the keystone ofhis whole theory, will not bear the weight he put on it. On theother hand, it is now widely admitted that there was a written sourcefor the passion narrative; though it is still not clear whether this wasoriginally attached to the signs source, as Fortna thought, to form aSigns Gospel, or whether it was an independent unity. Lindars, whoaccepts the latter suggestion, has also proposed that the othersources of the Gospel consisted of a mass of unrelated traditions orseveral short collections (‘or perhaps both’).3 This alternative viewmerits serious consideration. Another advocate of the multiple-source theory is Jurgen Becker.4 He believes that the evangelist hadtwo sources, a signs source and a passion narrative. He differs fromBultmann not only in his rejection of a discourse source but also inthe much more important role that he assigns to the ecclesiasticalredactor. Much of the material that Lindars thinks belonged to asecond edition is attributed by Becker to this later writer.

Finally (4) there is the multiple-stage theory of the kind advocatedby Brown, Lindars, and, somewhat rashly, Boismard. Like theGrundschrift theory, with which it is easily combined, this requires

3 Behind the Fourth Gospel, 38.4 Besides his commentary, see his discussion of his own and other compositional

theories in TRu 47 (1982), 294–301; 51 (1986), 28–39.

The Community and its Book 101

further specification if it is to work properly. In general, the moreelaborate and detailed a theory is, the more useful it is to theinterpreter, but at the same time the more vulnerable it is to criticalscrutiny. We may think either in terms of small and gradual rework-ings, minor revisions, and piecemeal alterations or, as Lindars pre-fers, of at least two major editions of the Gospel. These are notmutually exclusive alternatives. An interesting suggestion ofBrown’s that may be taken on board at this point is that at onevital stage in its history the Gospel consisted of independent homilies,subsequently cobbled on to already existing material. Lastly weshould remember the possibility of a final redactor, ecclesiastical orother, whose contribution might be quite extensive, as Brown thinks,or relatively insignificant, like that of a sub-editor. The majority ofscholars agree that at least chapter 21must have been added on afterthe body of the Gospel was completed.

One of the weaknesses of Bultmann’s theory was its assumptionthat the evangelist introduced drastic modifications into a documentwith which he was in radical disagreement. Why did he not simplydiscard this and start afresh on his own account? Other theories thatrely upon a similar hypothesis, such as those of Wolfgang Lang-brandtner5 and Udo Schnelle6 are open to the same objection. Theymust also assume that the evangelist botched the job badly; other-wise he would have removed all traces of the views that he found sooffensive. Altogether this type of theory is probably the weakest andleast plausible of the many that have been advanced.

(b) A Theory Adopted

A fully rounded theory concerning ‘the Johannine community andits book’ must integrate the study of both of these into a comprehen-sive account of the Gospel’s growth, the successive stages of compos-ition corresponding to the changing situation of those for whom itwas being written. I say ‘written’, but the oral stage of the Gospelsmay have extended much further, lasted much longer, than theapplication of source and form criticism might lead us to suppose.7

5 Weltferner Gott. See the criticisms of Raymond Brown in Community of the BelovedDisciple, 180–2.

6 Antidoketische Christologie.7 Harry Gamble (‘Literacy, Liturgy’) argues convincingly that the proportion of

literate Christians in the 1st cent. is most unlikely to have been greater than the rest

102 Genesis

The evangelists themselves may have been active preachers beforetheir work was finally committed to writing. It is known that Mat-thew and Luke (and probably John too) made use of written sources;but they may have done so in the first place for the benefit of alistening rather than a reading audience. Certainly the great revela-tion discourses, which set the Fourth Gospel so strikingly apart fromthe rest, are best thought of as built upon the words of a preacheraddressing a responsive audience and not simply the work of a writertoiling away with calamus and papyrus.

Any theory in which the main arguments all lean on one anotherruns the risk of circularity. But we can to some degree circumventthis risk by making our incisions into the text at the points indicatedby the problem spots. The pericopes thus disclosed can then beexamined along literary and form-critical lines: in searching for aSitz-im-Leben we must bear in mind that the ‘life-situation’ soughtout in such imaginative reconstructions is already satisfactorilylocated within the bounds of the Johannine group. After the publi-cation of Brown’s commentary (1966–8) there was a great upsurge ofinterest in the Johannine community; consequently one might won-der why there have been so few properly form-critical studies of theGospel. (Dodd’s Historical Tradition and Herbert Leroy’s Ratsel undMissverstandnis, to be discussed below, are honourable exceptions.)The reason for this neglect lies partly in the relatively advanced stateof the various materials that go to make up the Gospel: it is a longway from the Kleinliteratur of classical form criticism. But it is alsotrue that the enterprise bristles with difficulties: it can only stand up ifsupported by theories of compositional development which them-selves seem to rest on very shaky foundations. Since Bultmannthe only commentaries actually controlled by the compositionaltheories of their authors are the dense and detailed study of JurgenBecker and the splendidly idiosyncratic work of Boismard, whosevery explicitness lays it open to the ruthless assaults of criticalknives and hatchets. Though Boismard is right in principle tomarry his compositional theory to the story of the community’sbirth and development, there are far too many weak links in hislong and elaborate chain. We must rest content with a more flexibletheory.

of the Greco-Roman world, i.e. about 1 in 10 of the population. This being so, there wasevidently a continuing need for a strong oral tradition.

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1. The signs source. Faure’s suggestion, dating back to 1922, hasundergone various revisions and withstood various attacks. Itremains, of course, a hypothesis, but if rejected it would probablyhave to be replaced by an equally hypothetical missionary docu-ment, conceivably composed by the evangelist himself, designedto promote belief in Jesus as Israel’s promised Messiah.8 As hasalready been pointed out in the Introduction, both its defendersand its detractors often wrongly assume that the viability of thetheory depends on the possibility of demonstrating significantstylistic differences between source and redaction.9 The cuttingand pasting observable in the use Matthew and Luke make ofMark is the exception, not the rule. If Fortna is right to regard thesource as a Signs Gospel it must have been composed—presum-ably in Palestine—before the formation of the Johannine group asthis is generally conceived nowadays. It contained none of thehigh christology characteristic of the finished Gospel. Its extentremains uncertain, but is unlikely, I think, to have been as con-siderable as Fortna supposed. This source and its nature will bediscussed in more detail in the next chapter and in Excursus III.

2. Alongside the signs source are to be postulated (a) a passionsource (which may or may not have been combined with thesigns source in the first place) and (b) an indefinite number ofSynoptic-type traditions, which certainly included sayings andmay have included short narratives.

3. The synagogue which gave a welcome to the signs source and itsmessage was made up of people of differing views. Among thesethere must have been an inner group belonging to ‘the Jews’(whose essential characteristics have been outlined in the preced-ing chapter). Those who championed the gospel had traditionalbeliefs of their own which affected their understanding of themessage concerning Jesus. This in turn led them to reappraisetheir own faith.

4. If many proved sympathetic to the gospel, others were sceptical,even hostile. The radical questioning of this group promptedJesus’ followers to reflect upon their new faith and to develop itin unexpected ways.

8 ‘Missionary document’, in fact, is a better description of the source than ‘signssource’, in so far as it establishes its missionary character from the beginning, beforethe first sign, the miracle at Cana, is recounted. Nevertheless, in order to avoidconfusion, I continue to employ the more familiar term.

9 Above, pp. 35–6.

104 Genesis

5. Consequently the leaders of the Christian group performed tworoles, acting both as apologists and as preachers (or prophets). Inwhat Brown calls the second stage of the Gospel’s composition thethemes now regarded as distinctive of this Gospel were woven intoan impressively cohesive conceptual pattern. Meanwhile certainof the group’s new insights were embodied in narratives anddiscourses that reflected the contrasting situations, of controversyand prophecy, in which they arose. Some of these will have beenattached to episodes of the signs source or constructed roundtraditional sayings available from elsewhere. ‘Since the generaltraits of Johannine thought are so clear, even in the units thatbetray minor differences of style, we should probably think of aclose-knit school of thought and expression. In this school theprincipal preacher was the one responsible for the main body ofthe Gospel material.’10 Moreover, in spite of the obvious cracksand joins in both narrative and discourse, it is virtually impossibleto find a passage free from all elements of the typically Johanninevocabulary and style. This can be seen from even a cursory exam-ination of the work of any scholar (e.g. Bultmann, Fortna, Bois-mard) who has attempted a detailed reconstruction of theprehistory of the Gospel. The perplexity such an examinationmay induce should not lead us to abandon our efforts to tracethese earlier stages, still less to conclude that they never existed;but it does help to vindicate Brown’s view that for the actualwriting-down of the Gospel one man was responsible. To achievethe stylistic unity that is such a marked feature of the Gospel hemade numerous adjustments throughout, some quite minor,others involving considerable displacements. Only in the case ofreally major breaks, such as those at the end of chapters 5, 9, and14, is it reasonable to speak of separate editions. At the same time,we cannot suppose that the evangelist was anxious to avoidinconsistencies at all costs. It is likely that between the signs sourcethat preceded the birth of the community and its expulsion fromthe synagogue not one of the dialogues or discourses in the Gospelwas originally composed in precisely the form that we now have it.

6. Towards the end of this second stage the Johannine groupwas expelled from the synagogue. The first edition of the Gospelincluded reminders of this experience, now built into dialogue

10 Brown, p. xxxv.

The Community and its Book 105

(chs. 5, 8, and 10) and narrative (ch. 9). But it certainly did notcontain all the material at the disposal of the evangelist. At leastthe narrative section of chapter 6 was not in the first edition, andthe public ministry terminated at the end of chapter 10. Chapters15–17 were also missing.11

7. The second edition incorporated more material: it shows evidenceof tension within the Johannine community itself (ch. 6) andperhaps a slackening of hostility towards ‘the Jews’ (ch. 11). Thecommunity devotes more attention to its own internal affairs.The allegories of the vine (ch. 15) and those of the door and theshepherd (10: 1–18) belong here. The cleansing of the Temple,which originally led into the passion narrative, is now displacedto its present position in chapter 2. Brown, for whom the secondedition involved a relatively minor reworking, assigns most of themajor changes to a final redaction. Nevertheless he agrees that‘the adaptation of the Gospel to different goals meant the intro-duction of new material designed to meet new problems’.12

Clearly much depends upon one’s view of what these problemswere. The most important question is how far the evangelisthimself was responsible for the various editions. Commentatorsdiffer on the extent to which he would have tolerated the disloca-tions and doublets in the present text. Brown, for instance,believes that quite a substantial part of the Farewell Discoursewas inserted by the redactor: ‘That this . . . was the work of theredactor and not of the evangelist seems likely from the fact thatthe original ending of the Last Discourse in 14: 31 was not tam-pered with or adapted to the new insertion.’13 But even such a badtransition as this is not proof that the evangelist himself had nohand in it. Certainly, there are no stylistic differences to supportsuch a hypothesis. Once his work existed in some recognizableshape he may have been reluctant to make more alterations thanhe was compelled to.

8. Even so it is hard to dispense completely with the theory of a finalredactor, responsible at the very least for the addition of the lastchapter. Brown, who attaches considerable importance to theredactor’s work, insists that ‘the fact that this material wasadded at the last stage does not mean that it is any less ancient

11 On this see especially Lindars, Behind the Fourth Gospel.12 Brown, p. xxxvi. 13 Ibid. p. xxxvii.

106 Genesis

than material that found its way into earlier editions’.14 In assess-ing the redactor’s contribution to the Gospel as we have it weshould be particularly on our guard against theological parti pris.In addition to chapter 21 he may have added little more than a fewtouches intended to make the Gospel more intelligible to non-Jewish readers. Thus the only major section of the Gospel thatcannot be directly accredited to the evangelist (unless we insist onretaining the signs source) is the concluding chapter in its presentform.

2. the community

Martyn begins one of his programmatic essays by comparing theGospel to an archaeologist’s tell. It contains, as he says, ‘numerousstrata, and to some extent these strata may be differentiated from oneanother’.15 The cracks and joins known as aporias indicate thepresence of such strata, but to decide which is the earlier informationof a different kind is required. Unlike the tell, as we have seen already,the Gospel does not display its strata one on top of the other in agiven order. Consequently it is not always easy to relate the differentstrata to the successive stages of the Gospel’s composition. Some-times these are so intricately connected that there is no discernibleliterary seam, but even if for the sake of argument one were to grantthe presence of separate strata we are still faced with the task ofdeciding which came first. Even the signs source, the most credible ofthe Grundschrift theories, as the foundation charter of the commu-nity and the earliest written expression of its faith, cannot be recon-structed with any confidence.

Martyn distinguishes three periods in the history of the commu-nity, early, middle, and late. The early period involves ‘the concep-tion of a messianic group within the community of the synagogue’.16

In the middle period ‘part of the group is born as a separatecommunity by experiencing two major traumas: excommunication

14 Ibid. 15 Gospel of John, 90.16 Ibid. 93. In the foregoing discussion I have retained the term ‘synagogue’ because

it is the word used in the Gospel itself. If the Johannine community was located outsidePalestine, it may still have attended a local synagogue. But the word may equally wellrefer to a local Jewish religious assembly, and this is how it should be understood in thepresent chapter: a Jewish community viewed from a religious perspective.

The Community and its Book 107

from the synagogue and martyrdom’.17 The late period is character-ized for Martyn by a ‘movement towards firm social and theologicalconfigurations’.18 Here Martyn diverges from Brown in assigning tothis late period the writing of the Gospel ‘in its first and secondeditions’.19

In what follows, whilst retaining Martyn’s division of the historyinto three periods, I have categorized these somewhat differently. Inparticular, I believe that the charge of ditheism is likely to havepreceded (and indeed precipitated) the expulsion from the syna-gogue. Martyn speaks of this charge and the persecution that ac-companied it as ‘the Second Trauma’ that followed upon the initialexpulsion.20

(a) The Early Period

Before the foundation of the community, even before the compositionof the signs source, there was a dispute between the disciples of Jesusand those of John the Baptist. Since, however, John already figures asa witness to Jesus in the signs source itself, the earliest discerniblestratum of the Gospel, we must relegate this dispute to the prehistoryof the community. Accordingly, I follow Martyn in beginning withthe foundation of ‘a messianic group within the community of thesynagogue’. But what kind of synagogue are we speaking of here?And what was the gospel which it first heard?

The second of these questions I defer until the next chapter(‘Messiah’). The first presents us with considerable difficulties. Theevidence is scanty and ill-defined, and we must proceed with somecaution.

In discussing the origins and background of the community in thelast chapter I avoided the term ‘Jewish sectarianism’ for two reasons,one connected with the adjective, the other with the noun. To speakof the Johannine group as � �ı�ÆEØ is to fail to take seriously thedeliberate alienation-effect of the use of this term in the Gospel. Suchis the negative valency the term has acquired within the Gospel thatit can hardly be applied to the followers of Jesus without confusion.When, to take only the most obvious instance, the evangelist says of

17 Gospel of John, 102. 18 Ibid. 107. 19 Ibid.20 As Jorg Frey says: it is impossible to believe (unglaubhaft) that the Gospel’s high

christology was evolved simply in response to (Reflex) the expulsion from the syna-gogue (‘Bild’, 40 n. 37).

108 Genesis

the disciples that they kept the doors shut after Jesus’ death ‘for fearof the � �ı�ÆEØ’ (20: 19), then he is ipso facto distancing them (andhimself) from those he calls by that name. In commenting upon theGospel one should respect this deliberate dissociation. We know thatthe Samaritans, descendants of Jacob, repudiated the name � �ı�ÆEØ

(as attested in John 4); and although there are no strong reasons foridentifying the Johannine group directly with the Samaritans,21 it isobvious that they too, for the most part, thought of themselves asnon- � �ı�ÆEØ. We need to acknowledge that in almost all the con-texts in which ‘the Jews’ play an active role in the Gospel (i.e. in chs.5, 7–10, 18–19) they are the object of fear, anger, or hatred.

The objections to the term ‘sectarianism’ are of a different order.The fact is that we are sure of the names of only three sects incontemporary Palestine: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Ofthese only the Essenes, believed by many scholars to have includedin their ranks the members of the Qumran community, exhibited allthe features of what modern sociologists would call a sect, in theirisolationism and their uncompromising rejection of all other claimsto be the rightful heirs of the promises of Israel. The vast numbers ofpeople who, as we must suppose, neither belonged to one of thesegroups nor supported the Judaean establishment were men andwomen without a name and, more significantly, without an organ-ization—rather like the fringe members of a political party who feeldissatisfied with the party line but who, for the moment, havenowhere else to go. This is the phenomenon of political (or religious)dissent. It represents a groundswell of opinion that can remainundetected until it has pushed to the surface and the wave crumblesand falls. Without it there would be no breakaway groups either inreligion or in politics: it is a condition of their (future) possibility.

The presence of such dissenters among a Jewish community inPalestine or the diaspora, though perhaps not in Judaea itself, wherethose whom we have identified as the inner-group were too strong,helps to explain (a) why the gospel concerning Jesus could receive awelcome in the first place and (b) why those who did so welcome itultimately fell foul of the powerful representatives of the establish-ment: ‘He came to his own home, and his own people received himnot. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, hegave power to become children of God’ (1: 11–12).

21 This question is discussed in Ch. 4.

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The original message proclaiming Jesus as Messiah was certainlymuch weaker than the one later rejected as blasphemous by ‘theJews’. Otherwise it would never have gained a footing among themin the first place. To make sense of what evidence there is we havetherefore to postulate a period of development in which the followersof Jesus moved from a low to a high christology. But that came later.For the present, as Martyn suggests apropos of the homiletic materialin John 1: 35–49,

the preacher takes for granted that his hearers already held certain well-formed messianic expectations, and these expectations constitute in his viewa sort of launching pad for the heilsgeschichtliche christological trajectorywhich has its fulfilment in Jesus of Nazareth. He is the Mosaic prophet, theeschatological Elijah, the expected Messiah. The preacher of the sermon,therefore, like John the Baptist, points to Jesus, so that those who have beenbrought up on the traditional Jewish expectations may now find the one solong expected.22

I agree with this summary, with the caveat that the preacher isunlikely to have had any clear idea of the christological trajectoryahead of him.

The foundation document of the Johannine community wasroughly equivalent to what I have called the signs source. I shallargue in the next chapter that this was mainly designed to promotebelief in the messiahship of Jesus, a relatively modest claim, neitherunprecedented nor blasphemous. Though unlikely to make muchheadway among the die-hards of the Judaean/Jewish establishment,this claim was put forward within a broadly based context of reli-gious expectation. There were many varieties of messianic hope, buttheir very diversity testifies to an eager readiness, in large sections ofthe populace of first-century Palestine, to embrace any claim thathad a measure of plausibility and could somehow be corroborated.Much of the progress of the new faith would be conditioned by thekind of corroboration that was sought and the way in which chal-lenges from non-believers were actually met.

(b) The Middle Period

If we compare Martyn’s version of the history of the community withBrown’s version (in his commentary) of the history of its book, we

22 Gospel of John, 96.

110 Genesis

shall find that they diverge at one important point. Only at stage 4

(the second edition of the Gospel) does Brown speak of ‘an adaptationof the story of the blind man to the new situation in the late 80s orearly 90s which involved the excommunication from the Synagogueof the Jews who believed in Jesus as the Messiah’.23 For Martyn thefirst edition of the Gospel was not published until after this traumaticevent. Here, though I think Brown is right to suggest that there wasan earlier version of the story of the blind man (see below, p. 120), wemust side with Martyn. Any version of the Gospel written before thesplit with ‘the Jews’ must have looked completely different from theone we know.

However this may be, it is evident that Martyn’s middle periodcovers many years of hidden history. Brown speaks of his secondstage as ‘lasting perhaps several decades’.24 Throughout this time wemust suppose that the Johannine group was not only in contact withthe synagogue but belonged to it and took part in its worship. Thismiddle period ended abruptly. Its dramatic close has been impres-sively charted in Martyn’s book. But on what happened in theintervening years he has much less to say.

In the last chapter three short passages of the Gospel were selectedfor close scrutiny, all exemplifying the blazing ‘family rows’ thatpresaged the final severance of relations between the Johanninegroup and ‘the Jews’. The ultimate flare-up was one from whichneither side could back down, but it was preceded presumably by alongish period of more or less acrimonious debate. The claims putforward on behalf of Jesus were naturally probed and prodded bysuspicious Pharisees, but at the same time they were seized upon bythe religious dissenters and excitedly assessed in the light of theirown ancient traditions and beliefs. There were then two distinctimpulses towards a fresh and creative formulation of the traditionsconcerning Jesus: first the need to defend the faith against challengesfrom within the synagogue; secondly the growing awareness thatJesus was in his own person the fulfilment of much more than themessianic claims that had originally been made on his behalf. Com-prising as it did at least two groups with differing religious traditions,the synagogue itself furnished the crucible within which old beliefs andnew loyalties were fused into the glowing affirmations of the FourthGospel. To be sure, this was more than a simple chemical reaction.

23 Brown, p. xxxvi. 24 Ibid. p. xxxiv.

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Bearing as it does so many signs of a gradual and complex coming-together, the shining silver of the finished product also carries thehallmark of genius, most probably of an individual genius who mayor may not have drawn upon the work of other, less gifted preachersthan himself.25

Several otherwise puzzling features of the Gospel, especially the‘Jewish and anti-Jewish’ paradox that has baffled so many commen-tators, are explained by the presence within the same congregationof two different groups. We can see how on the one hand Bretsch-neider,26 Weizsacker,27 and Wrede28 could conclude that the Gospelwas dominated by an anti-Jewish polemic, and why on the otherhand modern scholars are convinced that it was primarily intendedfor the edification and consolation of a Christian community. Finallythe—on the face of it—rather zany theory that the Gospel was amissionary document compiled to further belief in Jesus’ messiahshipamong the Jewish community receives much support from the signssource. This theory works well for the early years of the Johanninegroup—though not otherwise. For a considerable time the followersof Jesus lived and worshipped quite comfortably alongside ‘the Jews’.The Jesus group was forced to rethink and reformulate those beliefsfor which the Pharisees, suspicious and hostile, wanted proofs andguarantees. Martyn expresses the challenge with characteristicverve under the heading ‘To the Bet ha-Midrash!’:

Some of the persons exposed to the Signs Gospel, specifically some of thepotential Jewish converts for whom, at least in part, it was written, reactedquite reasonably by saying, in effect, ‘Very well, if your claim that Jesus wasthe Messiah is to be sustained, it must stand up under careful and intensivemidrashic examination, carried out by those whose training equips them forsuch work.29

25 Pace D. E. Aune, there is no conflict between the idea of a single creative geniusand the belief that the Gospel’s theology, as he puts it, ‘is the forthright expression ofthe Johannine community developed in response to its internal and external situations,experiences, values and beliefs’ (Cultic Setting, 65). Individual genius emerges out of aparticular culture and society and expresses beliefs and attitudes held in common, forthe most part, with that society. It is because of their exceptional ability to portray theideas and aspirations of their own culture that historians rely on creative artists to tellthem about the spirit and temper of the age. Compare what T. S. Eliot says of theartist’s relation to the past in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays3

(London, 1951), 13–22: ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.’26 Probabilia (1820). 27 Untersuchungen (1864). 28 Charakter (1903).29 ‘Source Criticism’, 104. Martyn invites us to consider in particular John 5: 39;

6: 30 ff.; 7: 17.

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Martyn is right, as we shall see, to draw our attention to the elementof ‘challenge and response’ in the development of the Jesus group’sreligious convictions. But at the same time there was, it seems, aprophet in their midst, speaking in the name of Jesus and offeringnew insights into who he was and what he represented. So we find,as we should expect, both controversy and revelation, polemic andexhortation, apologia and homily, the various kinds of discourse heldtogether in the text of the Gospel, where they were united by thewriter we think of as the evangelist (who may also have played adouble role as prophet/preacher and spokesman/advocate).

(c) The Late Period

In the second edition of History and Theology Martyn inserts a clausebriefly summarizing the consequences of the break between Chris-tians and Jews: ‘what had been an inner-synagogue group of ChristianJews now became—against its will—a separated community of JewishChristians’.30 The traumatic experience of excommunication put aseal on what must have been a growing sense of alienation and, nodoubt, isolation. If Martyn is also right in supposing that the rupturewas followed by a period of persecution (‘the hour is coming whenwhoever kills you will think he is offering service to God’: 16: 2), thenthe community will have taken even longer to come to terms with itsnew situation. There is some evidence of a change of focus in itsconcerns, of splits within its ranks,31 and of efforts to establish closerties with other groups who acknowledged the lordship of Jesus.

30 History and Theology2, 66. Daniel Boyarin, among others, has warned that it is fartoo early to speak of a definitive break between Jews and Christians (‘JohannineIoudaioi’, 217, 233). But it remains true that the beliefs of the Johannine communitywere close to those that were later to mark out Christianity from Judaism.

31 In his later contributions to Johannine studies Raymond Brown has adopted asimilar approach to Martyn’s, and in one article, ‘ ‘‘Other Sheep Not of This Fold’’ ’, hedistinguishes no fewer than six groups in what he calls ‘the Johannine religiouspurview’. What he has to say concerning the apostates of John 6: 60–6 is of greatinterest but does not radically alter our picture of the community itself. The sameis true of the ‘crypto–Christians’, for which the evidence is very slight: 12: 42–3 andperhaps ch. 9. Brown’s main difference of opinion from Martyn is his view thatthe community included Gentiles. Cf. ‘Johannine Ecclesiology’, 391 ff. Later still (‘AGentile Mission?’) Martyn has argued, to my mind convincingly, that ‘the other sheep’were groups of ‘Jews’ who professed faith in Jesus, not, as most interpreters assume,Gentile Christians.

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During its long association with the synagogue the Johanninegroup continued to hope for converts. Finding itself alone and con-fronting persecution it had two choices. It could either look forsupport elsewhere or huddle self-protectively in a small knot. Per-haps it did both these things, but the evidence is stronger for thelatter. The community’s concern for its own survival found expres-sion in a series of allegories (door, shepherd, vine) which are eloquenttestimony of the sustenance it continued to derive from its totalcommitment to Jesus.

In a later essay32 I have argued that the first appearance of theshepherd theme, as a metaphor rather than as a parable or allegory,was in 10: 26–9. The break between chapters 9 and 10 is so abrupt thatthe opening section of chapter 10, containing the images of theshepherd and the door, must come from a later period, after theJesus-group had broken away completely from the parent comm-unity. While the two groups still worshipped together the synagogueauthorities cannot have been regarded as total outsiders (Iºº��æØØ)—thieves and robbers with no right of entry to the fold and threateningthe flock from without. The violent enmity implied in 10: 1–7 musthave flared up later.33 Verse 16, which Bultmann rejects as a gloss,opens new vistas for the community by speaking of ‘other sheep’, notof this fold, which are to be gathered together to form a single flock.

Now at this stage the Johannine community was shut off not justfrom the synagogue but from the world at large. This is clear from thevery negative use of Œ���� throughout the Farewell Discourses, withchapter 17 affording only a partial exception. Were it not for thesingle verse (10: 16) on which Martyn builds so much, one might be

32 ‘The Shepherd’.33 Martyn too (Gospel of John, 115–21) offers a strong reading of the allegories in

10: 1–18: the sheep stand for the Johannine community; the strangers, thieves, robbers,and wolf represent the Jewish authorities (a really dedicated allegorist would be evenbolder at this point); the hireling’s cowardice reflects that of the crypto–Christians, thesecret sympathizers among the ‘rulers’ of 12: 42; while the shepherd, of course, is Jesus.Contrast Bultmann, who stubbornly resists all efforts to allegorize the passage. For himthe �ÆæØ��Æ of 10: 6 is neither allegory nor riddle, but simply parable (358) orcomparison (371; cf. 370 n. 4 and passim throughout his exegesis of this passage).This accords with his view that the Gospel gives general answers to the humanpredicament, not a response to a particular historical situation. The parable/allegoryis probably a secondary expansion of the metaphorical use of the shepherd theme in10: 26–7. Bultmann compares ‘the way in which the theme of the discourse on thebread of life is introduced by a metaphorical expression in 6: 27, and similarly thetheme of the discourse on the light in 9: 39–41’ (358 n. 3).

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tempted to think now in terms of a Christian ghetto. But we shallsee that in this Gospel universalism and isolationism go hand inhand: the Jesus worshipped by John and his community is still thelight of the world even when the world is blind.

3. the community in its book

In demonstrating how the nature of the Johannine community isexhibited in the Gospel I shall confine my illustrations to the middleperiod, in particular the period of growth and development precedingthe final rupture with the synagogue. Throughout this time theJohannine group had two preoccupations and faced in two direc-tions. On the one hand, it was forced to respond to challenges fromthe establishment party in the synagogue (the Pharisees). Hence thecontroversial tone of so much of the Gospel material. Some of thesechallenges will be discussed in Chapter 4 (‘Son of God’). Others will begiven some consideration in what follows.

On the other hand, the group held many ancient beliefs of its ownand, more important still, was inspired by new stories about Jesusand collections of his sayings. Partly in response to the externalstimulus afforded by the uneasy scepticism of the Pharisees, thecommunity welded these into a new faith. I attempt some analysisof this process in Chapters 4 (‘Son of God’) and 5 (‘Son of Man’). Thepresent discussion is limited to two small but easily detachablegroups of sayings, the ‘Amen’ and the ‘I am’ sayings.

Altogether three aspects of the life and teaching of the Johanninegroup will be considered: universalism, particularism, and polemi-cism. To these correspond three different literary styles or modes ofdiscourse: revelation, riddle, and debate. If we wish to avoid taking aone-sided view of the Gospel and to do justice to all its rich variety, weshould begin by recognizing that the community looks both out-wards and inwards, sometimes addressing itself to the world whichGod loves and wishes to save (3: 16–17), at others hiding itself awayfrom a world it has come to regard as alien and threatening. TheGospel itself acknowledges the potential paradox of a distinctionbetween open and closed, even while freely availing itself of it. Soon the one hand Jesus is advised by his brothers that ‘no man worksin secret (K Œæı��fiH) whilst seeking to be in the open (�Æææ���fi Æ). Ifyou do these things, manifest yourself to the world (�Æ �æø�

The Community and its Book 115

��Æı�e �fiH Œ���fiH)’ (7: 4). On the other hand it indicates the import-ance of the distinction by introducing it into its own structure. Notfor nothing does Bultmann have two main sections in his commen-tary: there are strong reasons, especially the solemn introduction ofchapter 13, for making a break between chapters 2–12, ‘the revela-tion of the ���Æ (glory) to the world’, and chapters 13–20, ‘therevelation of the ���Æ before the community’. At least the farewelldiscourse was composed after the rupture with the synagogue; buteven before this there are signs of a marked esotericism which maybe reasonably linked with the growing estrangement between theJohannine group and the establishment. Even so, it is unlikely thatthe community will have lost all sense of the universality of itsmessage as soon as it became preoccupied with its internal affairs.

(a) Controversy

The presence of controversy material is often enough signalled dir-ectly and unambiguously: ‘You enquire of (Kæ�ı A ¼ Wt

¯d=Wt

¯d) the

scriptures . . . but their witness is of me’ (5: 39). Here, however, I wantto examine some less obvious passages, whose controversial natureis indicated first simply by the presence of the Pharisees. ‘The Phari-see-passages’, writes Ernst Bammel, ‘reflect controversies betweenthe Christian community and shades of opinion within the Jewishworld. They represent old, valuable tradition.’34 Part of this material(7: 32, 45–52) is discussed in Chapter 4. Putting this to one side, we areleft with two passages of particular significance: 8: 13–20 and 9: 1–41.To these must be added a third, 5: 31–40, thematically linked with thefirst and responding to the same objection.35

(i) 8: 12–2036

Reduced to its bare essentials, the challenge to Jesus’ authority readslike this

34 ‘John Did No Miracle’, 197. From this generalization we must except the con-junction ‘chief priests and Pharisees’ (7: 32, 45; 11: 47; 18: 3). This is always employed inthe context of a resolve to arrest Jesus and to put him to death; it belongs to a differentredaction from the passages under consideration here.

35 The theme is witness. Cf. especially J. Blank, Krisis, 109–230; J. Beutler, Martyria,254–71.

36 This short passage has been combined with what follows (8: 21–30) to make arecognizable unit. But it too is already composite, comprising at least three differentelements: (a) v. 12, ‘a fragment of a revelation-discourse, comparable to 7: 37. It isrelated to the feast of Tabernacles by the illumination ceremony, and it appears to

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So the Pharisees said to him, ‘You are testifying on your own behalf; yourtestimony is invalid.’ Jesus answered, ‘Even if I do testify on my own behalf,my testimony is valid.37 . . . In your law it is written that the testimony of twomen is valid; I testify on my own behalf, and the Father who sent me38

testifies on my behalf as well.’ (8: 13–14a, 17–18)

We may start by observing that the Pharisees’ challenge has noparticular bearing on Jesus’ claim to be the light of the world (8: 12). Itis directed not to the content of his prophetic utterance but to itsform. The Pharisees want proof that Jesus has a right to speak as a

belong with the theme of chapter 9’ (Lindars, p. 313)—or perhaps it was an independ-ent prophetic saying (see below); (b) vv. 13–14a, 17–18, a debate on Jesus’ credentialsand the validity of his self-witness; (c) 14b–16, the question of Jesus’ origins and destinyand his role as judge. What interests us here is the second element (b). The question ofJesus’ origins and destiny (c) may seem to arise naturally out of a reflection upon thesource of his authority: ‘I know whence I have come and whither I am going’ (8: 14b).But these two questions are themselves distinct and their eventual association is amatter of great theological significance. Bultmann, p. 280, appeals to Gnostic influ-ences at this point; but the conceptual assistance needed for the move from origin todestiny was ready to hand in the tradition of Jesus’ exaltation/resurrection. The sharpdistinction Bultmann makes between Jesus’ origin and his knowledge of that origin,justified though it may appear from a literal reading of 8: 14, is not really Johannine. Inthe passage under consideration the various themes have been woven together veryskilfully. In particular, the reference to Jesus’ destiny (�F �ªø) is fully expanded inthe next section, 8: 21–30. That this was originally an independent pericope is clearfrom 8: 20, an obvious conclusion (note too the shift from ‘Pharisees’ to ‘Jews’). Itshows that the theme of Jesus’ dying into glory, the special meaning of �ª�Ø , wasitself a subject of controversy. This theme is first sounded in 7: 32–6, where it is clearlyout of place. Its presence there, as in 8: 14, can be attributed to the conceptualtransition effected by the evangelist from the question of Jesus’ origins to that of hisdestiny. For the extent to which the two themes can be understood as a simpleextension—mission and return—of the role of the messenger, see Ch. 4, pp. 211–31;cf. J.-A. Buhner, Der Gesandte, 123–37, under the heading ‘Der Weg des Boten’.

37 The valid or admissible testimony (�Ææ�ıæ�Æ Iº�Ł��) is distinguished from thetrue judgement (Œæ��Ø� Iº�Ł� �, v. 16). That ‘valid’ is the correct translation here isshown by the parallel passage in 5: 31, where it is evidently absurd to say, ‘If I givetestimony on my own behalf, my testimony is not true’. The point is not that theevidence is false, but that it is inadmissible or invalid. See J. Beutler,Martyria, 256, withreferences to earlier commentators; A. E. Harvey, Jesus on Trial, 20, 56–7. Nevertheless,Iº�Ł�� must be allowed to retain a smidgeon of its usual meaning. English, unfortu-nately, cannot carry the ironic ambiguity.

38 The name given to God here, ‘the Father who sent me’, is thoroughly Johannine,and conflates, as will be argued in Ch. 4, the two originally distinct motifs of missionand sonship. But though probably introduced at the compositional stage, it is unques-tionably appropriate at this point, as a profound theological reflection upon the sourceof Jesus’ authority, which is at the same time the source of his being. The wholeparagraph is a copy-book example of the way in which a theological development canbe aided by an external stimulus, in this case, as Martyn puts it, the summons to theBet ha-Midrash.

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prophet. This is in itself a perfectly reasonable request; it correspondsmoreover to a well-attested tradition: ‘As Jesus was walking in thetemple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came tohim, and they said to him, ‘‘By what authority are you doing thesethings, or who gave you this authority to do them?’’ ’ (Mark 11:27–8). Elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel the same word, ‘authority’(K�ı��Æ) is employed in the same sense (5: 27). According to theSynoptic version Jesus dodges the question by posing an unanswer-able question of his own; the Fourth Gospel exhibits a profoundunderstanding of why the question cannot be answered directly.And by the same token the Pharisees exhibit their misunderstandingby challenging the validity of Jesus’ self-witness. Jesus himself spellsout the juridical basis of their challenge, repudiating it as he does so:‘in your law it is written that the testimony of two men is valid’; butthen he goes on, ‘I testify on my own behalf, and the Father who sentme testifies on my behalf also’ (8: 18). Thus he ironically underminesthe apparently solidly based position of the Pharisees: of the ‘twomen’ to whom he appeals, he himself is one (so that de jure histestimony has no validity)39 and the other is no man at all, but God.

(ii) 5: 31–40This episode, like the preceding one, is predominantly concernedwith the theme of witness and records an alternative reply to thesame challenge.40 It must have existed independently before beingplaced where it is now. Jesus’ adversaries are nowhere named in thelong discourse 5: 19–47; and although this is formally addressed to‘the Jews’ (cf. 5: 18) this datum is irrelevant to the prehistory of thepassage.41

39 Cf. Num. 35: 30; Deut. 17: 6; 19: 15.40 Bultmann too links these two episodes, but for him the link-word is not ‘witness’

but ‘judge’. In his commentary 8: 13–20 rounds off an important section headed simply,‘The Judge’ (247–84), which also includes 5: 19–47 and 7: 15–24. That these passages areclosely connected thematically is certain—though it is less clear that the resemblancesentitle the commentator to detach them from their present context. But in ch. 5 thetheme of judgement is abandoned after 5: 30 and is only briefly touched on in ch. 8(v. 16). There are strong reasons for believing that the discourse in ch. 5 was composedof at least three distinct elements: vv. 19–29, 31–40 (joined by v. 30), 41–7. Even Dodd,Interpretation, 387, sees vv. 41–7 as an appendix.

41 Conversely, the allegories of the shepherd and the door (10: 1–18) appear in theirpresent context to be spoken to the Pharisees, since there is no change of addresseebetween 9: 40 and 10: 19. But at their close it is the Jews who are divided in theirresponse. The evangelist was evidently unperturbed by such minor inconsistencies.

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There is a formal contradiction, noted by many commentators,between 5: 31 (‘if I give testimony on my own behalf, my testimony isnot valid’) and 8: 14 (‘even if I do give testimony on my own behalf,my testimony is valid’). And even though there is no material con-tradiction (Bultmann is clearly right about this), the difference issufficiently marked to make it improbable that the two passagesever stood side by side in a continuously composed text. The passage5: 31–40, where the defence is much fuller, seems to be slightly theearlier of the two, originating at a time when there was still somedependence on the testimony of John the Baptist.42 As the argumentprogresses, the significance of this testimony comes to be discounted:‘I do not receive testimony from (any) man’ (v. 34). What testimonyJesus does allow comes from (a) his works (v. 36), (b) the Father(v. 37), and (c) the scriptures (v. 39),43 though these are not reallythree witnesses, but two, Jesus and the Father, as in chapter 8. Forjust as there is no real distinction between the testimony of God andthat of the scriptures he inspired, so there is no real distinctionbetween the testimony of Jesus and that of his works. Alternativelythe witness may be seen as just one—the witness of the Father,inseparably associated not only with the scriptures that he promptedMoses to write but also with the works he gave Jesus to do.44

For the community’s theology the most relevant development isthe move from the avowed dependence upon John’s testimony soprominent in the signs source (especially ch. 1) to a formal disavowalof any evidence outside the actual revelation of Jesus. Clearly thismarks a new, deeper understanding of that revelation. In the finalanalysis all truth is self-justifying. However many witnesses swear tohave seen the Loch Ness monster, ultimately only ‘Nessie’ herself canprove them right. But in religious matters questions of testimony andevidence are especially delicate, and challenges to establishedauthorities especially threatening. ‘You search the Scriptures’ Jesustells the Jews/Pharisees, ‘because you think that in them you havethe new life; yet it is to me that they bear witness’ (5: 39).The Johannine Christians have accepted the invitation to the Bet

42 Contra L. Schenke, who thinks that the author of 5: 30–37a used 8: 13–19 as aVorlage: ‘Der ‘‘Dialog Jesu mit den Juden’’ ’, 574–7.

43 On this verse see Str.–B. 2. 467 and any commentary (especially Schlatter, Dodd,Boismard).

44 On the difference between the plural �æªÆ in 5: 36 and the singular �æª in 17: 4,see A. Vanhoye, ‘L’Œuvre du Christ’.

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ha-Midrash and in so doing acknowledged the authority of thescriptures. But they surprise their opponents by whisking the bookout of their hands. Implicitly the whole point and purpose of theappeal to midrash is being challenged and denied. Perhaps the mostimportant lesson they have learnt from this brush with rabbinism isthat they must go their own way, taking the scriptures with them.

(iii) 9: 1–41Along with most modern commentators, Bultmann treats chapter 9as a unity; but it was not always so.45 The sardonic query, ‘Surelyyou are not eager to become disciples of his?’ (9: 27) originallybelonged to an old debate, focused upon a division within the syna-gogue between the followers of Jesus and the establishment, whodeclared themselves disciples of Moses (9: 28; cf. 5: 46–7).

The first step towards reconstructing the earlier formof the debate isto bracket out the central section, 9: 18–23,which is a detachable scenebetween the blind man’s parents and the Jews. We are then left with9: 13–17 and 9: 24–34.46 Together, these constitute a long dialoguebetween the blind man himself and the Pharisees. In the conclusion,9: 35–41, the moral of the story is drawn with great art and dexterity.

The central section, in which ‘the Jews’ interrogate the blindman’s parents on their son’s cure, recalls their crucial decision toexpel from the synagogue anyone confessing Jesus to be the Mes-siah.47 Behind this laconic aside, interjected by the evangelist as anexplanation of the intransigence of ‘the Jews’, lies hidden the story of

45 Martyn refers in a note (History2, 32 n. 33) to the theory of Wellhausen and Spittathat the evangelist added vv. 18–23 to his source. This view seems to me correct (cf.p. 111 above). Nevertheless at the level of the final redaction Martyn’s theory may bebasically right. Our concern here is with the significance of the story at an earlier stageof the community’s history, at a time when the expulsion of the man born blind(K���ƺ , v. 34) did not necessarily imply excommunication.

46 The introductory words in v. 24 have been added to effect a transition back to thedialogue between the blind man and the Pharisees, but the demand ‘Give God thepraise,’ follows naturally upon the argument broken off at v. 17. (Matthias Rein arguesstrongly, but not, to my mind, convincingly, for the unity of the passage, Die Heilung,80–165.)

47 It may seem odd that this anathema should have been provoked by a simpleprofession of faith in Jesus’ messiahship. For we have to suppose that it was as Messiah,and perhaps prophet, that Jesus had won adherents within the synagogue in the firstplace. This is argued at length in the next chapter. The answer to the puzzle is that bythis time the simple term ‘Messiah’ had collected larger and more threatening conno-tations—which may themselves, ironically, have come about as a result of attempts tosatisfy questioners from the Jewish establishment. The extent of the accretions to the

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a lengthy debate between the followers of Jesus and those of Moseswhich has now been definitively broken off. But in the earliest form ofthe story, contained in the exchange between the Pharisees and theblind man himself, the debate is still very much alive.

There are several indications of the primitive nature of this debate.First of all there is an allusion to the infringement of the sabbath rest(9: 16; cf. 5: 16 ff.; 7: 22 ff.), though the writer is clearly impatient withthe legalistic simplicity that would end the matter there. Secondlythere is the continuing interest in the probative value of Jesus’ signs(9: 16; cf. 10: 21). Thirdly the blind man’s own declaration of faith, ‘Heis a prophet’ (9: 17) is perfectly consistent with the simple creedcontained in the signs source. Finally the passage includes whatmay well have been the earliest formulation of the affirmation ofJesus’ divine origin. Subsequently this would be asserted quite cat-egorically and be based on Jesus’ exclusive knowledge of heavenlythings. Here it figures in an argument of unmistakably rabbinicflavour: ‘ ‘‘We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for thisman, we do not know where he comes from.’’ The man answered,‘‘Why, this is a marvel! You do not know where he comes from, andyet he opened my eyes’’ ’ (9: 29–30).

It is important to recognize that the distinctively Johannine (high)christology is absent from this debate. It utilizes simple arguments ofthe kind that did in fact carry weight with some of the Pharisees:‘How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?’ (9: 16). On readingthe story for the first time one might conclude that it was designed toshow no more than that Jesus was (a) a prophet and (b) from God—claims with little difference of meaning. Only in the very last scene,the encounter between Jesus and the man he has cured, is the muchstronger title of Son of Man introduced, abruptly and unexpectedly.And this may well be an addition to the original story.48 Basic-ally what we have here is a straightforward argument based on a

notion of Jesus’ messiahship may be gauged from the exchange in ch. 10, where ‘theJews’ ask Jesus to tell them plainly if he is the Messiah and receive a reply culminatingin the statement, ‘I and the Father are one’ (10: 30).

48 As M. de Jonge says, ‘Titles like ‘‘prophet’’, ‘‘king’’ or even ‘‘Messiah’’ do notcorrespond completely with the real status and authority of Him to whom they point.The terms are not wrong but insufficient; they may be used in a wrong context and are,therefore, in need of further definition’ (Stranger, 83). On three separate occasions thetitle ‘Messiah’ is supplemented by that of ‘Son of Man’: 1: 51; 9: 35; and 12: 34. (Like1: 51, the section 9: 35–41 may be a subsequent addition.)

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miraculous cure and designed to demonstrate to Pharisees of goodwill the truth of the earliest claims made on Jesus’ behalf by hischampions within the synagogue.

(b) Revelation

Most discussions of early Christian prophecy tend to steer clear of theFourth Gospel. In an important article attacking Bultmann’s as-sumption that a great deal of spirit-inspired prophecy has found itsway into the Synoptic Gospels, J. D. G. Dunn avoids any closeexamination of the Fourth: ‘It must suffice to point out that thediscourses in the Fourth Gospel have more of the character of mid-rashim or meditations on original Jesus-tradition (such as the wordsof the Last Supper or the parable of the lost sheep) than of propheticutterances.’49 David Hill is equally sceptical, insisting on the cleardifferences between the Gospel and the Book of Revelation:

In the first place the author of Revelation identifies himself as a prophet; thecomposer of the Johannine discourses does not. Secondly, in the ‘I’-words ofRevelation the exalted Lord speaks, whereas the discourses of the FourthGospel are presented as the sayings of Jesus. . . . The view that the homilies ordiscourses in John’s Gospel derive from a Christian prophet, presumablywithin the Johannine school or circle, remains at best a hypothesis and ahypothesis dogged by some difficult questions.50

David Aune, in an even more comprehensive survey,51 omits theFourth Gospel altogether.

Those scholars who do accept the thesis that prophets operatedwithin the Johannine community usually confine themselves toestablishing the principle without seeking examples of the practicewithin the text of the Gospel itself.52

49 ‘Prophetic ‘‘I’’ -sayings and the Jesus tradition’, 196.50 New Testament Prophecy, 149.51 Prophecy in Early Christianity. Aune’s omission is particularly surprising in view

of his earlier observation that ‘if the ‘‘I am’’ sayings are regarded as a thoroughlyChristian product, then their origin can only be adequately accounted for by consider-ing them the products of Christian prophecy, whereby the risen Lord speaks in the firstperson singular through inspired Christian prophecy within a cultic setting’ (CulticSetting), 72; cf. 88–9. Moreover, all the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospelmatch the first of the five criteria Aune outlines in his later book (p. 317) and manyfulfil one or more of the other criteria as well.

52 e.g. G. Johnston, Spirit-Paraclete; D. M. Smith, Johannine Christianity, 15–16, 244;M. E. Boring, ‘Influence of Christian Prophecy’; M. E. Isaacs, ‘Prophetic Spirit’.

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There is something strange about this reticence. Perhaps it stemsfrom a proper awareness of the very complex literary character ofmost of the dialogues and discourses. For obviously the Gospel had tobe written down. But a reader’s overwhelming impression is not ofwriting (which may be taken for granted and ignored) but of speech.The Gospel itself does not mention writing until the very end. Ofcourse this is satisfactorily explained on one level as a response to thedemands of the gospel form, which in the nature of the case mustassign most of the spoken words to Jesus. Still, if Jesus did notactually pronounce more than a small fraction of the words attrib-uted to him in the Gospel, it seems reasonable to ask who did. Werethey all written words, right from the start? And if not, in whatcircumstances would they have been spoken? What kind of manwould consciously imitate the few ‘Amen’ sayings that he found inthe tradition or deliberately utter any or all of the great ‘I am’sayings? Or are we to suppose that a phrase like ‘I am the light ofthe world’ was a secondary invention of the evangelist, recalling asermon in which he had pronounced (or heard pronounced) thewords, ‘He is the light of the world’?

The Fourth Gospel is full of individual sayings and extended dis-courses that deserve to be called prophetic in a broad sense of the term.But when it comes to detecting particular logia that might qualify ascharismatic prophecy in the strict sense, uttered within a context ofChristian worship, this very richness is a source of embarrassment.Someof the prime candidatesmayhave been inserted into lengthyandcarefully constructed discourses that are most unlikely to have beendelivered as impromptu declamations in a charismatic gathering.

(i) ‘Amen’ sayings53

One possible clue is the use of the word ‘declaim’ (Œæ��Ø ) to intro-duce what have all the appearances of being prophetic sayings.54

The most famous of these is Jesus’ proclamation on ‘the great day’ ofthe Feast of Tabernacles: ‘If any one thirst let him come to me, and lethim who believes in me drink. As the scriptures said, ‘‘Out of hisheart shall flow rivers of living water’’ ’ (7: 38).55

53 See especially K. Berger, Amen-Worte, 95–117.54 There are four occurrences of this word in John: 1: 15 (of John the Baptist); 7: 28;

7: 37; 12: 44.55 The punctuation of this verse is notoriously uncertain. Besides the commentar-

ies, see K. Haacker, Stiftung, 50–1.

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Another such saying affords an additional clue: ‘He who believesin me, believes not in me, but in him who sent me. And he who seesme sees him who sent me’ (12: 44–5). For here, as P. Borgen argues,we have a saying of Jesus with a firm place in the tradition, occurringin one form or another no less than seven times in the FourthGospel.56 This is not the place to discuss this important text in detail.It could easily have been appropriated from the tradition by a Chris-tian prophet in a cultic setting in order to claim, indirectly butunmistakably, the same authority to speak on behalf of Jesus asJesus claimed when he spoke on behalf of the Father. Elsewhere adifferent form of the same logion is used to underline this lessondirectly: ‘Amen, amen I say to you, whoever receives anyonewhom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives theone who sent me’ (13: 20). In both cases the sending is a propheticmission and its reception a listening with faith. And so in a sayingthat employs an additional device (the introductory ‘Amen’) to in-voke the personal authority of Jesus, the prophet establishes his claimto be heard in terms even closer to the Synoptic tradition. For anyonebold enough to apply it this tradition affords an explicit justificationof a practice attested not just in the Johannine group but throughoutthe early Christian churches.

Closely connected with this saying, and fitted into the same con-text, is another saying, with a clear formal resemblance to the first:‘Amen, amen I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, noris an agent (I����º�) greater than the one who sent him’ (13: 16; cf.Matt. 10: 24–5).

Of the other ‘Amen’ sayings in the Fourth Gospel (they total nofewer than 25) two (3: 3, 5) look like Johannine adaptations ofSynoptic sayings,57 whilst the rest have apparently been furnishedwith this solemn introduction by the Johannine prophet himself.Most figure in contexts of major christological affirmations; indeed,they form the nuclei of a whole series of discourses, small and large.

Consequently, while it might be going too far to assert that all therevelatory discourses in the Gospel originated in sayings of the

56 John 5: 23; 8: 19; 12: 44–5; 13: 20; 14: 7, 9; 15: 23. Cf. Matt. 10: 40; Mark 9: 37; Luke9: 48; 10: 16; plus further parallels in rabbinic writings, e.g. Mek. on Exod. 14: 31(Lauterbach, i. 252) and Sif. Num, 103 on 12: 8. See P. Borgen, ‘Use of Tradition’. J.-A.Buhner offers a different analysis of John 12: 44 ff. in Der Gesandte, 173.

57 Matt. 18: 3; Mark 10: 15; Luke 18: 17. Lindars (‘John and the Synoptic Gospels’)argues that this was an authentic saying which the fourth evangelist received in atradition independent of the Synoptic Gospels.

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Johannine prophet, most of them appear to have been built roundsuch sayings. Here the authentic logia, with close parallels in theSynoptic tradition, will have furnished the charismatic prophet withvaluable models of the form, enabling and inviting him to constructsimilar sayings on his own—similar, that is, in both form and con-tent. And if this account suggests too much deliberation, it must beremembered that all human speech, even the most inspired, drawsinstinctively upon a huge stock of models lodged in the individual’smemory and immediately available to him in the appropriate cir-cumstances. In this case the Synoptic parallels give us clear examplesof a quite distinctive type of saying, and these may be thought tohave generated many other similar sayings within the sort of culticsetting that would call them forth.

(ii) ‘I am’ sayings58

To appreciate the force of the ‘I am’ sayings we must first of allunderstand their deep structure and the social context which origin-ally gave them point. In other words, we need to enlist the services ofform criticism. Of the many scholars who have pored over thesesayings only J.-A. Buhner has succeeded in discovering their trueorigin. The Sitz-im-Leben is prophecy and in particular the prophetas messenger. The broader background is not properly religiousbut political and social—the convention obtaining throughout theAncient Near East whereby one man was entrusted by another with

58 Here I confine myself to the predicative sayings; 6: 35, 41, 48, 51; 8: 12; 10: 7, 9, 11,14; 11: 25; 14: 6; 15: 1, 5. The absolute sayings (8: 24, 28, 58; 13: 19) are in a differentcategory; so are the apparently straightforward cases of self-identification. Bultmann(225 n. 3) distinguished four classes of sayings: (a) the ‘presentation formula’, whichanswers the question ‘Who are you?’; (b) the ‘qualificatory formula’, which answersthe question ‘What are you?’; (c) the ‘identification formula’, in which the speakeridentifies himself with another person or object; (d) the ‘recognition formula’, in whichthe Kª� is not subject but predicate, and answers the question, ‘Who is the one who isexpected, asked for, spoken to?’ By classing most of the ‘I am’ sayings as ‘recognitionformulae’ (he excepts only 11: 25 ‘and perhaps 14: 6’, both ‘identification formulae’) heempties most of them of any real content. ‘In the context of the Gospel’, he says, ‘theKª� is strongly stressed and is always contrasted with false or pretended revelation.’This is a good illustration of how Bultmann’s theological programme works. ‘In thesource’, he admits, ‘they were perhaps intended as presentation or qualificatoryformulae’ (which would mean that they were saying something positive about therevealer). But as it is, they assert nothing more than the bare that: they are simplyaffirmations of the event of revelation that takes place in Jesus. Even if this were right,would it not alter our appreciation of these sayings if we thought that their true‘source’ was the Johannine prophet himself, i.e. the evangelist?

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a task to perform or a message to deliver in a different place. Themessenger first received his errand, then carried it out, and finallyreturned to report on it.

In presenting himself to the recipient of the message the messengercould begin by announcing the purpose of his mission: ‘I have come(to perform such and such a task).’ Alternatively he might start byidentifying himself: ‘I am (so-and-so).’ Abraham’s servant, for in-stance (‘the oldest of his house, who had charge of all that he had’),informs Laban that he will not eat until he has told his errand, andthen opens by saying simply, ‘I am Abraham’s servant’ (Gen. 24: 34).These two formulae correspond, Buhner suggests, to the two basicforms of prophetic speech in the Fourth Gospel: the ‘I have come’sayings (qºŁ -Spruche) and the ‘I am’ sayings.59

Sometimes the name itself can be significant. The angel Raphaelsays to Tobit in the apocryphal book of that name, ‘God sent me toheal you and your daughter-in-law Sarah’, and continues, ‘I amRaphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers ofthe saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One’(Tob. 12: 14–15). The point here is that the name Raphael means ‘Godheals’, so that the errand is actually contained in the name.

Now there is an important formal characteristic of the ‘I am’sayings: like the beatitudes, they are followed (or in one or twocases preceded) by an explanation or justification.60 This states the

59 Buhner’s discussion of the ‘I am’ sayings (Der Gesandte, 166–80) comes in achapter of his work headed, ‘The cultural–historical presuppositions of messenger-traffic in the Ancient Near East’, and builds upon the form-critical work of the first part,‘the human messenger as the exemplar of the divine’. (An English version of this,minus footnotes, is available in the 2nd edn. of my collection, The Interpretation of John,207–18.) See now C.Williams, I am He. Earlier studies of the ‘I am’ sayings, suggesting aGnostic background, are less convincing. See E. Schweizer, EGO EIMI, also offered as ‘acontribution to the problem of the sources of the Fourth Gospel’; H. Becker, Reden(1956). Becker, and to some extent Schweizer also, remains enmeshed in the toils ofBultmann’s Mandaean hypothesis. G. MacRae, ‘The Ego-Proclamation’, uses docu-ments from the Nag Hammadi Library, much closer in time to the Gospel. But for himthe most convincing parallel comes in the Egyptian hymns to Isis, where ‘the purposeof the many ‘‘I am’’ sayings is to state the universality of the goddess Isis; she is knownby many names, she is the source and origin of the manifold religious aspirations ofmen’ (153). The Gnostic texts adduced also belong to revelation discourses and resem-ble the Gospel’s ‘I am’ sayings in form; but they are very different in mood and tone.For revelation speeches closer in mood to those of the Gospel we have to turn to theOdes of Solomon. Becker in discussing Ode 33 (16–18), simply assumes its Gnosticprovenance. But the relatively sober language of the Gospel ‘I am’ sayings contrastsstrongly with the lush exuberance of the Odes.

60 In ch. 6, where four sayings in quick succession have been built into an elaboratedialogue, only one (the internal citation of v. 41) omits the explanation altogether. In

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purpose of what is really a divine commission, e.g. ‘I am the bread oflife; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes inme shall never thirst’ (6: 35). In the course of the same dialogue Jesushas already affirmed: ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in himwhom he has sent’ (6: 29)—and the reader already knows that beliefin Jesus is what ensures life (cf. 3: 15, 36, etc.).

If, turning from form to content, we enquire what it is that the‘I am’ sayings affirm, we find further surprising resemblances. All ofthem, directly or indirectly, contain a promise of life (the Gospel’scentral metaphor for the attendant benefits of faith). Consequentlythey are all miniature Gospels; they affirm simply and graphically thepurpose for which the Gospel was written, ‘that you may believe, andbelieving, have life in his name’ (20: 31). What is more, they do thisby compressing the affirmation into a statement that identifies Jesuswith the purpose of his coming (‘that they may have life’, 10: 10). Thesupreme examples of this compression (‘I am the resurrection andthe life’, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’) are not different in kindfrom the rest, as Bultmann holds, but expressions of an insightcommon to them all, especially concise in that the purpose andconsequence of the reception of Jesus’ message (life) are drawnback into his self-proclamation.

One further feature of the ‘I am’ sayings makes them all butunique in the New Testament61 and distinctive enough in religiousliterature generally. This is their strikingly bold use of symbolicimagery. Here is where the Gnostic parallels have seemed to someso convincing, especially in contexts which imply a self-revelation of

ch. 10 there are two sayings, each repeated (‘I am the door’ in 10: 7, 9; ‘I am the model(ŒÆº��) shepherd’ in 10: 11, 14). The explanation of the door-saying is regular, but onlygiven once (v. 9); the shepherd-saying has three explanations, one preceding (v. 10, theothers following, with two significant departures from the basic form: ‘the modelshepherd lays down his life for his sheep’ (v. 11) and ‘I know my own and my ownknow me . . . and I lay down my life for my sheep’ (v. 14). Similarly the explanation ofthe vine-saying in 15: 2 (‘Every branch, etc.’) is the starting point and key of anothervivid allegory. Finally, not only is the ‘light of the world’ saying in 8: 12 apparentlyquoted in 9: 5 (though its precise relationship to the whole story is hard to determine)but it appears to inform the important development in 3: 16–21, where the light/darkness antithesis symbolizes the nature of judgement. These observations are merelythe beginnings of a proper analysis of these complex passages, but they perhapssuggest how an ‘I am’ saying constituted a natural core round which a full revelationdiscourse could grow. A major weakness of E. Schweizer’s treatment (EGO EIMI) is itsfailure even to mention the justifying explanations that are an essential element of theform.

61 The nearest parallel is Rev. 22: 16: ‘I am the root and offspring (ª� �) of David.’

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a divine being. But the actual symbols used in the Fourth Gospel are,with one exception,62 abundantly attested in the Old Testament, andthe form, as we have seen, is simply an extension of the messengerformula. It seems likely that the Gnostic texts are mostly independentvariants upon the same tradition. For instance, one of the longestand most impressive of these (The Thunder, Perfect Mind) commenceswith an announcement of mission (‘I was sent forth from thepower’), followed by an ‘I came’ saying (‘I have come to those whoreflect on me’), before embarking on a long series of ‘I am’ sayingschiefly remarkable for polarity and paradox (e.g. ‘I am the whore andthe holy one’).63 Few of these are as colourfully evocative as the‘I am’ sayings of the Gospel: extraordinary as these symbolic affirm-ations are, it was perhaps not beyond the powers of the Johannineprophet to invent them. But it must be admitted that, if he did, he wasveering as close as he ever got to a typically Gnostic style.

However that may be, the content of the sayings puts them at theheart of the Gospel’s teaching. All of them represent a distillation ofone of its main themes. Just as in the case of Raphael what is assertedof the messenger (the predicate) anticipates and includes the contentof the message. And that content is life.

Such pregnant formulae as these are not likely to have been hit onall at once. Like the Gospel itself, which is both an instance of thegospel form and a comment upon it, the ‘I am’ sayings sum up andexpress insights which can only have been reached through a pro-found reflection on the essence of Jesus’ message, a reflection cul-minating in the realization that what Jesus came to bring wasnothing other than himself. (So Bultmann was not after all verywide of the mark.)

The majority of these sayings are now embedded in discourses anddialogues which, however prophetic in tone, are clearly the productof deliberate composition. Even so, given the formal background ofthe sayings, it is likely that before being incorporated into one orother of the Gospel’s set pieces they were first uttered in a properlyprophetic milieu. This is probable not just because of the history ofthe form, its origins as a messenger-formula, but also because itremained peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of prophetic

62 ‘I am the door’ (10: 7, 9). Lindars, p. 358, comments that this saying ‘does nothave the rich overtones of a revelation-formula, but is a pointer to the interpretation ofthe parable’.

63 The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. J. M. Robinson.

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speech: it both identifies the speaker and contains, in a remarkablysuccinct form, the kernel of his message.

It is not possible to locate each individual saying precisely withinthe history of the community. But one may observe that, for all theirformal and material similarities, they do not all make the same pointin the same way. Some seem wholly positive: the invitation is open toall. ‘I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk indarkness, but will have the light of life’ (8: 12). Later on, when thecommunity had become more inward-looking and isolationist, whatis basically the same invitation (‘I am the door’) has a conditionattached to it—one must come into the fold: ‘whoever enters by mewill be saved’ (10: 7–9). This slightly ungenerous interpretation reallydepends on the Gospel’s own exegesis of the passage in v. 16. It couldnevertheless be wrong, but even if it is, a door of its very nature is aless universal symbol than a light. For a door can be shut as well asopened, whereas a light shines out its welcome for all to see, withoutany hint in this context that the world is naturally dark andunreceptive.

In chapter 6 the ‘bread of life’ saying (a paradoxical example of thecoincidence of revelation and riddle) is the occasion of division andmisunderstanding. As for the vine, ‘every branch that bears no fruithe [the Father] removes (ÆYæ�Ø), and every branch that does bear fruithe prunes (ŒÆŁÆ�æ�Ø)’, or cleanses so that it becomes clean (ŒŁÆæ�)(15: 2). We are reminded that Jesus has already told his disciples,‘You are not all clean’ (13: 11): the vine passage belongs in a setting ofpotential and actual apostasy.

Finally, while the ‘I am’ sayings are all revelatory in the full sense,whether addressed to the world at large, to contemporary Judaism, orto the Christian community, they all contain an implicit answer to therepeated requests for some evidence of Jesus’ prophetic status. That hismessage should be a source of life is the best possible proof of anauthorization from above—no longer an appeal to an external sign,but testimony to the essential nature of the message itself: ‘You havethe words of new life’ (6: 68). Despite the distinction between contro-versy and revelation (a distinction still worth making), in theexperience of the Johannine group the two went hand in hand: thechallenge of the Pharisees prompted reflection on the meaning ofbelief in Jesus, whilst the group’s living out of its faith found expressionin prophetic utterances that were in themselves an irrefutable answerto demands for corroboration of the claims which that faith implies.

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(c) Riddle

The aim of the riddlemay appear to be diametrically opposed to that ofthe revelatory sayings we have just been considering: ‘To you hasbeen given the secret (�ı���æØ ) of the kingdom of God, but for thoseoutside the whole universe comes in riddles (K �ÆæÆ�ºÆE�) so thatthey may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but notunderstand; lest they should turn again and be forgiven’ (Mark4: 11–12.). In the strange dictum that follows the parable of thesower in Mark’s Gospel the essentially divisive function of the riddleis clearly underlined: it separates out the outsiders from the insiders,the ignorant and foolish from the cognoscenti. And althoughMark andJohn differ in the place they assign to the riddle in their Gospels, theyagree not only on its function but upon its central importance; forwhat is Jesus’ self-revelation in the Fourth Gospel but the Johannineversion of the kingdom of God? So the content of the riddle is the sameas that of the prophetic sayings; the riddle encloses, as in a box, whatis to be revealed. It is thus the quintessence of apocalyptic. Some havethe key to this box; others are kept permanently in the dark.

The paradoxical association between riddle and revelation is soclose that in one case, as we have seen, the two are combined in asingle saying: ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall nothunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst’ (6: 35). Herewe have an ‘I am’ saying—a prophetic logion that gathers up thepreceding midrash on the manna into a phrase formally indistin-guishable from all the other ‘I am’ sayings that we have just beenlooking at. But the context is now one of challenge and debate. Thebread of life is a variant for the bread of heaven, a consciouslyambiguous expression that to Jesus’ interlocutors, ‘the Jews’, canonly mean the manna given in the desert (¼æ�� KŒ �F PæÆ F,Exod. 16: 4; ¼æ�� PæÆ F, (LXX) Ps. 77: 24). Only in its hiddenesoteric sense can it refer to Jesus’ self-revelation—a paradoxstrongly reminiscent of the purpose assigned to the parables byMark. The saying is consciously and deliberately divisive, and theconsequent incomprehension expected and allowed for.

The best and most thorough treatment of the riddle is in H. Leroy’sRatsel und Missverstandnis.64 Leroy is not the first to have noted the

64 Leroy is often criticized for taking too narrow a view of Johannine irony.Cf. F. Vouga, Le Cadre historique, 32 n. 58, who regards his conclusions as ‘trivial’;R. A. Culpepper, ‘too rigid a definition’ (Anatomy, 154). But Leroy does not pretend to

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deliberate ambiguity of certain expressions in the Gospel; but no onebefore him had attempted an explanation of the ensuing pattern ofmisunderstanding along form-critical lines.

All riddles are designed to throw people off the scent, but this canbe done in a number of different ways. In its Johannine form theriddle is a statement in which one word or phrase bears two mean-ings, one surface meaning and one hidden meaning which is con-cealed from all but the speaker and those who are also ‘in the know’.In the everyday form of the riddle the solution rarely depends uponaccess to a special source of information, though the wit and ingenu-ity of the audience may indeed be taxed beyond reasonable bounds.But in many societies (the Druids are a good example) the possibilityof a correct interpretation depends entirely upon a special revelationthat is reserved to a select group of initiates. In this kind of socialsetting the in-group is distinguished from outsiders by the possessionof a key which is jealously guarded. The same pattern operates innumerous myths and fairy-tales.

It is easy to see that many of Jesus’ utterances in the Fourth Gospelhave the flavour of a riddle. ‘Destroy this temple’, said Jesus (2: 19),whereupon the evangelist remarks that he was referring to thetemple of his own body. But how could his hearers, standing asthey were within the Temple precincts, possibly know this? ‘If youknew . . . who it is that is saying to you, ‘‘Give me a drink,’’ you wouldhave asked him, and he would have given you living water’ (4: 10).Living water—o�øæ �H —the first meaning of this phrase is runningor flowing water. How could the Samaritan woman be expected toknow that Jesus was going to understand the word literally (livingwater) and apply it to his own revelation? Or how could the bewil-dered Nicodemus, confronted with a remark about being born ¼ øŁ�

(which he took to mean ‘a second time’) be expected to take itstraight away to mean ‘from on high’?

We should be careful not to assume that the function of the riddle iseverywhere the same. Leroy, possibly influenced by earlier form-critical studies on the New Testament, suggests two different lifeset-tings: preaching and catechesis. Thus when Jesus tells his disciples,‘I have food to eat which you do not know’ (4: 31–4), their naturalmisunderstanding is immediately corrected. For Leroy this is an

offer a complete survey of all John’s ironical devices. R. Brown’s review in Bib 51 (1970),152–4, misses the point of Leroy’s form-critical enquiry.

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instance of how a teacher, when instructing catechumens, couldbolster his own authority by appealing directly to the preaching ofJesus. He points out that, although this riddle is formally identicalwith the rest, the fact that Jesus’ hearers are now his own disciplesindicates a different Sitz-im-Leben.65 Certain of Jesus’ interlocutors,notably Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, get off more lightlythan the Jews en masse. Jesus continues to converse with them andtheir misunderstanding may be partially dispelled. In the structure ofthe Gospel, moreover, these two characters appear before the disputeswith Jesus erupt into violence. No doubt the readers of the Gospel,already in the know, are intended to smile over the bewilderment ofNicodemus and the Samaritan woman as they grope around for thehidden key. But we know even so that Jesus is in fact offering the keyto anyone who wishes to take it. From a form-critical view theseriddles (¼ øŁ� , a second time/from above and o�øæ �H , fresh/livingwater) proceed from catechesis rather than controversy. They shouldbe seen as belonging to the initiatory procedures that assistedwith theintegration of new members of the community.

In chapter 5 the mood changes dramatically, and in chapter 8

debate degenerates into abuse. Here the effect of the series of riddles isnot merely to widen the gulf between the two sides but also to rangethe readers among the happy few capable of grasping the meaning ofall Jesus is saying. Besides reassuring them of their privileged status,their ability to interpret what baffled the Jews increased their sense ofisolation. The riddle here centres upon the term �ª�Ø . In ordinaryspeech this means to retire or withdraw. In John’s special language itdenotes the Easter-event, comprising Jesus’ passion, death, and res-urrection—his departure from this world and his return to theFather. Out of thirty-two instances of the word in the Gospel, seven-teen have the special meaning. There is some precedent for using theterm to refer to the passion (Matt. 26: 24; Mark 14: 21) but none forthe mystery with which it is surrounded in the Fourth Gospel.

The special meaning is found in two series of texts: (a) where Jesusis talking with the Jews, a series confined to chapters 7 and 8; (b)where Jesus is talking with his disciples, a series confined to theFarewell Discourse, chapters 13–16. The word also occurs once in acomment of the evangelist, 13: 33, where, as we should expect, heuses it in its special sense.

65 Ratsel, 154.

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Now it is important to recognize that these two series of texts aredistinguished from one another not merely by their relative positionsin the Gospel and by the fact that in one case Jesus is conversing withhis enemies and in the other with his friends, but also by the kind ofmisunderstanding that is exhibited in the two cases. In the first seriesof texts the misunderstanding is total. Jesus is using the word in itsspecial sense, of his impending departure from the world, and hislisteners, initially at any rate, take him to be using it in its ordinaryeveryday sense. In the second series the disciples realize that Jesus isspeaking of his departure from the world but they have not yetgrasped what this entails. When they ask, ‘Where are you going?’(13: 36) or say that they do not know where he is going (14: 5), theyare at least on the same wavelength: unlike the questions of ‘theJews’ in chapters 7–8, their remarks are really directed to what Jesushas said. Finally, whereas Jesus tells ‘the Jews’ emphatically thatwhere he is going they cannot follow him (8: 21; cf. 13: 33), thedisciples’ inability to follow is only temporary: ‘you cannot followme now, but you shall follow afterwards’ (13: 36).

The differences between the two series of texts are significant. In thesecond series the evangelist has adapted the traditional theme of themisunderstanding of the disciples to make the point (also found inMark) that there can be no full comprehension of Jesus’ message aslong as he is still in theworld. The implied division is one of time: beforeversus after. In the first series of texts the division is moral—betweenJesus and ‘the Jews’. The readers of the Gospel are naturally presumedto share the evangelist’s privileged understanding throughout, but inthe one case they do so because they have the benefit of hindsight, orrather because of the unseeing faith that has been blessed by Jesus;in the other case they are enabled to look down scornfully on theignorant Jews from their citadel of knowledge high above.

In the second series of texts, then, the evangelist has used the riddleform to illustrate an essential aspect of the gospel form. In the firstseries, more typical of his general practice, he exploits the riddle toexpose the yawning gulf that separates the knowledge and wisdom ofJesus (and therefore of his disciples also) from the ignorance of thelistening ‘Jews’: over against the assured omniscience of Jesus hisinterlocutors seem a dull, even a stupid lot. The riddle triggers off animmediate misunderstanding, and this persists.

It is important not to confuse the three very different functions ofthe Gospel’s riddles.

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(d) Conclusion

No attempt has been made in the preceding pages to present a fullyrounded portrait of the Johannine community. Nothing has beensaid of its sacramental life66 and little enough of the nature of itseschatological expectations. The alternative challenge to Jesus’ au-thority presented by the Moses tradition has been largely ignored.Even Wayne Meeks’s suggestive theory of harmonic reinforcementbetween theology and social experience has been left untouched.Were this chapter primarily concerned with the community assuch, these would be serious gaps. As it is, they will be partially filledin later chapters. What I have aimed to do here is to give someimpression of how and why the community’s teaching was shapedin the way we know it. More detailed and intensive form-criticalstudy would, I believe, serve to nourish and strengthen this impres-sion. This should centre upon the words of Jesus, in discourse anddebate. It was in these, after all, that the fourth evangelist and hiscommunity sought and found ‘spirit and life’.

4. a local habitation and a name

Nineteenth-century Christian commentators had nothing to say onthe problems raised so far in this chapter. They were much moreinterested in the name of the evangelist and the place where he wrotehis Gospel, questions which might seem to afford a welcome respitefrom windy theory, with answers fabricated from something moresubstantial than airy nothings. But is this so? Calling the evangelistJohn will not help us to understand his work, and the site of his homeis of interest only in so far as it can indicate something about thenature of his community.

In the first edition of this book I adopted a suggestion of KlausWengst,67 who argued that the community’s home was neitherEphesus, Antioch, or Alexandria (hitherto the most widely favouredlocations), but in what used to be the tetrarchy of Herod’s son

66 See now the excellent discussion of David Rensberger, Overcoming the World,ch. 4.

67 Bedrangte Gemeinde, 80.

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Philip, specifically the region of Batanea and Gaulanitis—roughlythe area of Syria known as the Golan heights, occupied by Israelsince 1967. In the second half of the first century it formed part ofthe kingdom of Philip’s nephew, Agrippa II. Unfortunately though,the everyday language of this area (Transjordania) was not Greekbut Aramaic, and so like Judaea itself it must be left out of thereckoning. Jurgen Becker has argued that one important reason forexcluding Ephesus is that the traditions relating to a writer calledJohn in Asia Minor are a historically valueless fabrication (Kunst-produkt) that can all be traced back to Justin Martyr,68 who does infact associate the Book of Revelation with the apostle John (Dial. 81.4) but never mentions the evangelist and may not have known hisGospel. One might think it unlikely that a group or communitylocated in Ephesus and confessing belief in Jesus could remain freefrom Pauline influence. Yet Revelation, which takes no cognizanceof Paul’s letters, was composed for communities in Asia Minor, andit has been argued that Ephesus was so huge (the theatre alonecould accommodate 24,000 people) that small communities consist-ing of a few households might well have existed in the same areawithout actually knowing one another.69 Alexandria is excludedbecause the only evidence comes from the large number of papyrusfragments discovered in Egypt: they survived there and nowhereelse simply because of the preservative qualities of the dry desertair. What evidence points to Samaria comes from John 4. But thissuggests a missionary trip and not a fixed location. Becker con-cludes, though without being prepared to risk his neck on it, thatSyrian Antioch (where the language at the time was Koine Greek)remains at least a real possibility.70 Knowledge, as opposed tospeculation, would be useful, because the social conditions prevail-ing in any particular locality must have affected the people livingthere. But it is anyone’s guess how much these would tell us aboutthe Community and its Book.

68 Johanneisches Christentum, 47–60.69 R. Schnackenburg, ‘Ephesus’, 60. U. B. Muller (‘Heimat’), though fully accepting

the unreliability of the patristic evidence, argues nevertheless that the description inActs 19: 1–7 of the adherents of John the Baptist in Ephesus is close enough to what isimplied about these in the Fourth Gospel to suggest that the Gospel originated in thesame area.

70 Johanneisches Christentum, 80.

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Excursus III: The First Edition

Anyone who is convinced (a) that the awkward transitions in theGospel require some explanation and (b) that the displacement the-ory is unsatisfactory must choose between two alternatives: eitherthe evangelist has produced different editions of the Gospel (Brown,Martyn, Lindars) or somebody else, an editor or redactor, has madesubstantial additions to his work (Schnackenburg, Becker). Thesetwo hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, since a final redactionmay have been made after extensive revisions on the part of theevangelist himself. This is in fact my own view: I agree with Brownand Martyn, against Lindars, that the appendix, chapter 21, is un-likely to have been composed by the evangelist. In this excursus,however, I am interested only in what, following Lindars, I conceiveto be the first edition of the Gospel and I shall not concern myself withthe problem of how and when the later material was composed orredacted.

If Lindars’s theory that there were (at least) two editions of theFourth Gospel is basically correct, as I believe it to be, it should bepossible in principle to suggest what the first edition looked like, todetermine, that is to say, its scope and nature. It is important forme to try to do this because the main purpose of the present bookis to explain the genesis and elucidate the message of the Gospelwhen it was first presented to the Johannine group as an authenticrecord of its faith. I shall consider Lindars’s proposals in turn,starting from what is widely agreed and moving to what is morecontentious.

chapter 21

Four modern scholars who defend the authenticity of chapter 21 areThyen, Minear, Frey, and Keener. The great majority, however,continue with good reason to regard it as an appendix, a view Iargue for in Excursus I.

chapters 15–17

Wellhausen (1907) has won increasing support for his opinion thatthe Farewell Discourse originally terminated at the end of chapter14.1 His arguments have been tightened and improved by subsequentcommentators: they do not require further discussion here. Suffice itto say that chapters 15–16 presuppose a very different situation; thecommunity has become a ghetto, and the commandment of faith inchapter 14 (see below, Ch. 10) has been replaced by a love command-ment that is markedly less universal than the ‘love your enemies’ ofthe Sermon on the Mount.

chapter 6

Having discussed in some detail in Excursus I the problems presentedby the position of this chapter, I will say no more about them hereexcept to remark upon the surprisingly widespread neglect of Lin-dars’s excellent solution.

chapter 112

Compared with what precedes and what follows, the attitude of ‘theJews’ in chapter 11 is relatively relaxed and unthreatening, a factthat Lindars recognizes when he alludes to Brown’s telling observa-tion that here and in 12: 9, 11 ‘the Jews’ are ‘the people of Jerusalemwho are favourably disposed to Jesus’.3 This feature is an additionalargument in support of Lindars’s proposal that chapter 11 too shouldbe classed among the supplementary material that did not figure inthe first edition. Here the argument is more intricate, since Lindarsalso suggests that the evangelist rearranged some of his material inorder to accommodate the new episodes (to which the sequel to the

1 Erweiterungen (1907).2 Brown (pp. xxxvii, 427) holds that chs. 11–12 as a whole belong to the second

edition, but the arguments with which he supports this view hold for the Lazarusepisode only, plus a few verses in ch. 12. It is improbable that any edition of the Gospelwas published without some form of transition between the public ministry and thepassion narrative.

3 p. 381; cf. Brown, p. 428.

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Lazarus story in 11: 54–7 and the comment in 12: 9–11 also belong).The original order, he believes, following upon chapter 10, was this:the triumphal entry (12: 12–19); the cleansing of the Temple (2: 13–22); and the priests’ plot (11: 47–53). Then follows the story of theGreeks (12: 20–6) and the sayings grouped round the last passionprediction (12: 27–36a); next come the anointing at Bethany (12: 1–8)and the first of the two epilogues (12: 37–43). Lindars is inclined tothink that the second epilogue (12: 44–50) is a subsequent addition.

Lindars’s case is a persuasive one. The suggestion that the templeepisode has been displaced is not new. W. Wilkens,4 like Lindars,combined it with the hypothesis of a second edition, and if theLazarus episode is omitted some suggestion of this kind is requiredto account for the priests’ hurried consultation, followed as it is by animmediate decision to secure Jesus’ execution. This decision is mucheasier to understand if the Synoptic order is preferred, since theraising of Lazarus, unlike the cleansing in the Temple, has no overtlypolitical overtones that might account for the sudden urgency to getJesus out of the way. Thus, although the present position of thetemple episode suits John’s purposes quite well, one can scarcelybelieve that this is where he found it in his source.

Lindars remarks concerning the end of chapter 11 that ‘11: 54 issimilar to 7: 1 just as 11: 55–57 corresponds with 7: 2–13, implyingthat the comparatively independent story of 11: 1–44 has beeninserted subsequently, just like the story of chapter 6; in fact, 11: 54makes a suitable continuation from 10: 42.’5 Actually, 11: 54 followson much more naturally from 10: 39. The strange little commentconcerning John the Baptist in 10: 40–2 (‘John did no signs’) isprobably another editorial insertion,6 made easier by the gap thatnow separates the natural ending to the account of Jesus’ publiccareer (‘Again they tried to arrest him, but he escaped from theirhands’) from the transition passage, 11: 54–7, which moves the story

4 Entstehungsgeschichte. 5 Lindars, p. 381.6 See E.Bammel, ‘ ‘‘JohnDidNoMiracle’’ ’, 181–202. Bammel plausibly regards 10: 40–2

as a fragment of ancient tradition stemming from the period inwhich the Christian groupwas being challenged about its credentials by the Pharisees within the community: ‘Itscontents, based on a Jewish scheme, reflect the Christian–Jewish discussion rather thanthe Christian–Baptist one’ (200). He adds that the passage gives the evangelist ‘theopportunity tomove Christ to a place where he is to receive the call to set out for Bethanyand the events of the passion story’ (201)—referring, of course, to the anguished plea ofMartha and Mary on behalf of their sick brother (11: 1–3). Thus 10: 40–2 belongs, byeditorial decision, to what follows rather than to what precedes.

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on to the passion narrative. The very last verse of the chapter, 11: 57,implying as it does that the decision to have Jesus killed had alreadybeen taken, belongs to the second edition. In the first edition, 11: 56may have been followed by 12: 12, which also alludes to ‘the feast’. Itis possible, however, that the last three verses of chapter 11 all belongto the later edition, because the connotation of ‘the Jews’ in 11: 55 isthe relatively favourable one that we have seen to be typical of theLazarus episode.

There is also much to be said for the suggestion that the anointingat Bethany originally belonged more or less where Mark places it,immediately before the Last Supper (except that in John it is the lastscene of the Book of Signs, coming just before the epilogue, 12: 37–43).The end of chapter 11 finds Jesus in ‘a town called Ephraim’ not farfrom the desert (11: 54). From the Ephraim we know, near Bethel,there is no need to pass through Bethany, the location of the anoint-ing, in order to get to Jerusalem. Traditionally, however, Jesus startedhis final journey to Jerusalem from Bethany (Mark 11: 1; Luke 19: 29),which may help to account for the present position of the story in theFourth Gospel. Read immediately before John’s account of the LastSupper, the anointing of Jesus’ feet reflects and anticipates Jesus’ ownaction in washing the feet of his disciples. Here again John probablyknew the sequence of events found in Mark, where the anointing isseen as a symbolic anticipation of Jesus’ burial (14: 8). ‘Verbal linksbetween 12: 4–6 and 13: 29’, adds Lindars, ‘indicate that John intendsthe reader to gain an insight into the character of Judas, whichwill help to account for the theme of his treachery which dominatesthe last supper.’7 If the two episodes were originally contiguousthese verbal links would have been more striking and effective. Asfor the verbal reminiscences of the other versions, especially the æ�� �Ø��ØŒ� (12: 3) that John shares with Mark 14: 3 and the�º��Ø��, reminiscent of the �Ææ��Ø�� in Matt. 26: 7, we may explainthem along with Lindars as the result of subsequent contamination ofthe text.8

7 Lindars, p. 415.8 Ibid. 414. But it is just as likely that these phrases simply stuck in the evangelist’s

memory. Some time ago I saw Boucicault’s play, The Shaughraun. All that I canremember of it is a rough outline of the plot and a single line: the eponymous hero,‘the vagabond’, urged to give up drinking, stipulates that he be allowed ‘a thimbleful[of whiskey] a day—to take the cruelty out of the water’.

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What about the editorial comments, 11: 45–6; 12: 1b, 2b, 9–11,17–18, which, according to Lindars, ‘can easily be removed withoutdamage to the rest of the material’?9 In Mark’s version the womanwho does the anointing has no name, quite paradoxically in view ofthe prophecy that ‘what she has done will be told in memory of her’(14: 9). It is likely, therefore, that the name, along with other modi-fications identifying her as Mary, the sister of Lazarus, was added byJohn. The comment in 11: 45–6 is puzzling inasmuch as it alludes tothe Pharisees alone. This, I think, is a slip, for without the activecollaboration of the priests mentioned in the following verse, 11: 47,the Pharisees had no power to take decisions involving life and death.Elsewhere ‘the chief priests and Pharisees’ act in collusion, and itmay be that the three verses that now conclude the first epilogue (12:41–3) are a late insertion as well.

The half-verse that immediately precedes the first epilogue, ‘Withthese words Jesus went out and hid from them’ (12: 36b), must beretained. It provides an explicit and formal conclusion to the story ofJesus’ public career, but would be equally appropriate following uponthe anointing scene, where it would reinforce the allusions to theLast Supper by providing a dramatically effective counterpart to thedeparture of Judas.

further problem sayings

Certain passages ascribed by Becker10 to the ecclesiastical redactor(3: 31–6; 10: 1–18) should be attributed rather to a later, morereflective stage of the evangelist’s own composition. Like other sec-tions of the Gospel for which Becker invokes this hypothesis, notablychapters 15–16, the peculiarities of these passages are betteraccounted for by the changing circumstances of the community.Both stylistically and theologically they are characteristic of thefourth evangelist. One has only to compare them in both respectswith the First Letter to see how much greater the differences have tobe before one can confidently speak of a different writer. Chapter 17 isharder to categorize but there are no good reasons to think that itwas composed by anyone other than the evangelist.

9 Lindars, p. 381. 10 Becker, p. 35.

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3

MESSIAH

1. the notion of messiah

(a) John and the Synoptists

As soon as we turn to a close study of the christology of the FourthGospel, we come face to face with one of its greatest puzzles. Lookingback over the long Christian centuries, we may be astonished to seehow quickly Paul and John, who surely never met in life, came to bejoined together after death in other people’s writings. And we may besurprised too at the extent to which this comfortable yoking hasdominated Christian theology ever since. No doubt the SynopticGospels held their place; but for them Christianity might well haverapidly vaporized into some form of speculative Gnosticism. It didnot; the parables of the kingdom and the Sermon on the Mountcontinued to be regarded as indispensable elements of the Christianmessage, and—more importantly—the Jesus who preached themremained ever present to the Christian consciousness. And if theair-space of theology and the floor-space of worship were both largelyoccupied by a pre-existent divine being unimagined by the Synopt-ists, this did not really matter until the tensions and inconsistenciesbetween the two figures were explicitly acknowledged and began tocause an increasing discomfort among the faithful, a discomfortwhich persists to this day.

Following up the arguments of Bretschneider (1820) and D. F.Strauss (1835), numerous authors, led by F. C. Baur (1847), havebeen at pains to stress the differences between John and the Synopt-ists, and in particular the transformation of the portrait of Jesus.1 To

1 One of the most brilliant examples is in Kasemann’s Testament of Jesus (8–10).Besides Baur, Kasemann refers to G. A. P. Wetter (1916) and E. Hirsch (1936). See alsoW. Bousset, Kyrios Christos (1913), whose phrase ‘der auf Erden wandelnde Gottessohnoder Gott’ (159) strikingly anticipates Kasemann’s better-known ‘der uber die Erdeschreitende Gott’. But the idea goes back at least as far as Bretschneider, who heads thefirst section of his book with the words: ‘Jesus, quem depinxit quartum evangelium,valde diversus est a Jesu in prioribus evangeliis descripto.’

most modern eyes the portrait painted by the Synoptists (there are ofcourse three, but the divergences are not felt as intolerably great) isboth simpler and more attractive. It is the portrait of a man with aspecial relationship with God, whom he addresses by the intimatename of Abba, Father. He is the promised Messiah, and he has beenappointed by God to preach the kingdom, and thereby to fulfil thepromise of the Old Testament. His birth was miraculous and hisresurrection from the dead, after appalling suffering, unique. Butfor all that, he was a man of his time; his teaching and preaching,even his healing miracles, can be readily placed in the context of first-century Palestinian Judaism. If he were suddenly to reappear as hereally was he would no doubt seem to us, in Albert Schweitzer’sphrase, ‘a stranger and an enigma’, but a recognizable human beingnone the less.

Not so the Johannine Christ. He does not belong to this world at all:it is almost true to say that he enters it with the purpose of leaving it,or descends in order to ascend. He is a pre-existent divine being,whose real home is in heaven. He enters an alien world with anunprecedented confidence and assurance, knowing precisely who heis, where he comes from, and where he is going. And this too is hismessage, that he knows both his origin and his destiny, and becauseof this knowledge he enjoys a special relationship with the Fatherthat verges upon total identification. No doubt he is portrayed assubject to human weaknesses, hunger, fatigue, grief; but these in noway diminish the extraordinary control he exercises upon his ownfate. He even orchestrates his own passion; condemned to death, heappears as the judge of the one who condemns him: he can readPilate’s heart, just as he can read the hearts of other men andwomen. There is in him no trace of that uncertainty, that helplesssense of being flung into the world which Heidegger, with pictur-esque concision, calls Geworfensein, that incomprehension and be-wilderment which ordinary human beings can never entirely escape.Master of his fate, captain of his soul to an extent even W. E. Henleynever dreamt of, his head bloody but unbowed, he never had toconfront either the fell clutch of circumstance or the bludgeoningsof chance.

In the light of these differences a number of questions arise. Ina subsequent chapter I will attempt to explain how and why theoriginal object of Jesus’ preaching, the kingdom of God, was replacedby the promise of eternal life. But a more important question, how

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the Synoptic portrait of Jesus developed into the Johannine portrait,cannot be answered without a close study of Johannine christology.This will take up the next three chapters, each focused on a parti-cular title—Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man—around which areclustered a number of other titles and motifs. Chapter 6 will bedevoted to a quasi-title, Messenger of God.

(b) Messiah: A Promise Fulfilled

It is not customary to distinguish cleanly between the twin titles ofMessiah and Son of God, if only because the evangelist himself heldthem together so closely. Just as Mark places the two titles at thebeginning of his Gospel, and uses them at climactic moments in hisstory,2 so John places them at the end of his, to sum up the content ofthe faith he wishes to promulgate and foster: ‘that you may believethat Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that, believing, youmay have life in his name’ (20: 31).

Roughly, and perhaps a little schematically, one may say that thefirst of these titles looks back: to a glory achieved and a prophecyfulfilled. It is exclusively Jewish in conception, unintelligible exceptwhen viewed against the background of a long religious traditionthat is generally summed up in the New Testament as ƃ ªæÆ�Æ�—theScriptures (literally ‘the Writings’), a term covering more or less thebook Christians now know as the Old Testament. The second title,Son of God, is very different. Although once closely associated withMessiah (an association which can be confusing), it does not lookback to the Jewish past but forward to the Christian future.3 In the

2 The first climax in the Gospel occurs at Caesarea Philippi, when Peter confessesJesus to be the Messiah (8: 29); the second at the crucifixion, when the title ‘Son of God’(surely not just a son of God) is pronounced by the centurion (15: 39). The customaryrendering of the opening of the Gospel obscures the programmatic significance of ‘thegospel of Jesus, Messiah, Son of God’. The words ıƒF Ł�F are missing from some MSS.But some of the better MSS have them, and if they were actually inserted by a latereditor he must have known his Mark thoroughly. N. Perrin rightly comments: ‘In viewof the importance of this title for Mark one is tempted to say that if it was not part of theoriginal superscription it should have been, and the scribe who first added it wasMarkan in purpose if not in name!’ (‘Christology of Mark’, 182 n. 22).

3 This distinction is not of course made by the evangelist himself. An alternativeway of indicating the difference between two christologies running throughout theGospel is to distinguish the ‘vertical’ connection between heaven and earth from the‘horizontal’ messianic line. This is done by J. Willemse, Het vierde evangelie (HuversumandAntwerp, 1965), 264–71. (I owe this reference to de Jonge, ‘Jesus as Prophet’, 71 n. 6.)

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strong sense it comes to assume in the Fourth Gospel it constitutes(unlike Messiah) a claim to divinity; and it is scarcely surprising thatthis claim was rejected by the parent Jewish community as totallyunacceptable—blasphemous in fact. Even among Christians them-selves the title proved increasingly contentious, until eventually theweak interpretation defended by Arius was condemned by the Coun-cil of Nicaea. So behind each of these two simple-sounding titles,Messiah and Son of God, lies a rich and complex range of meaning.The study of the first of them, its background and significance, willtake up the remainder of this chapter.

It is necessary to insist from the outset that there is nothinginherently blasphemous in a claim to be the Messiah. Some Christianreaders, thinking possibly of the words and actions attributed to thehigh priest during the trial before the Sanhedrin, have erroneouslysupposed that he was provoked simply by Jesus’ refusal to disownthis title.4 But we are surely meant to understand that Caiaphas wasreacting against Jesus’ whole reply: ‘ ‘‘Are you the Messiah, the Sonof the Blessed?’’ And Jesus said, ‘‘I am; and you will see the Son ofman sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the cloudsof heaven’’ ’ (Mark 14: 61–2). There were other messianic pretendersroughly contemporary with Jesus, none of them, as far as weknow, accused of blasphemy.5 So it is a mistake to lump togetherall the claims made by the early Jesus movement as ‘messianic’without further ado or distinction.6 Certainly there came a stage inthe history of the Johannine group when the status it accorded to

4 On this point see P. Lamarche, ‘La Declaration de Jesus’.5 See R. A. Horsley, ‘Popular Messianic Movements’, pointing out that leaders such

as Athronges, Judas son of Ezekias (both 4 bc), and Menahem (ad 66) ‘claimed thekingship’, ‘were acclaimed as king’, or ‘set the diadem on their heads’ (BJ 2. 55, 57; AJ17. 272–3, 278–9; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5. 9). Horsley also discusses the messianic movementfocused on Simon bar Giora, who dressed himself in royal robes when he eventuallysurrendered to the Romans, and was tortured before his execution (BJ 7. 26–36; 154). Ina later article, ‘ ‘‘Like One of the Prophets of Old’’ ’, he contrasts these with propheticfigures such as Theudas (AJ 20. 97 ff., mentioned in Acts 5: 36–7 along with Judas theGalilean), the Samaritan pseudo-prophet (18. 85 ff.), and the Egyptian (20. 167 ff.),none of whom is said to have claimed messianic status. No doubt this distinction isimportant for the historian, but as Horsley himself acknowledges, the expectation ofmessianic deliverance exhibited in literary circles, Ps. Sol. 17 and Qumran, as well asthe New Testament, is rather different. Besides, Theudas and ‘the Egyptian’ at any rateshowed that they believed they had a part to play in an approaching liberation thatcould be loosely qualified as messianic. Cf. D. Hill, ‘Jesus and Josephus’ ‘‘MessianicProphets’’ ’.

6 This is one of the major flaws in W. Wrede’s Messiasgeheimnis.

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Jesus began to be felt as intolerable by the parent community, whoconsequently decided to expel Jesus’ followers from their midst. But ifthese claims had been associated with the charge of ditheism rightfrom the beginning, the group would hardly have been allowed toremain within the synagogue in the first place.7 Precisely at whatpoint in the group’s history it came to insist upon Jesus’ divine statuswe cannot know. But had it done so from the outset it would nothave lived any part of its history as a group of disciples of Jesus stillrevolving within the orbit of the faith of Israel.

In the second place we need to recognize the broader significanceof the confidence exhibited throughout the Fourth Gospel thatthe evangelist and his readers are the rightful inheritors of thewhole biblical tradition. Of course this conviction was not confinedto the Johannine circle; it was and is shared from the beginning byeveryone who professes faith in Jesus; and apart perhaps from thestrange letter of James it pervades the whole of the New Testament.But it is of particular importance in the Fourth Gospel, for there thedominant impression is of an alien Christ moving among Jews as astranger. In overemphasizing this impression or in isolating it fromthe data within the Gospel that confirm Jesus’ essential Jewishness,one can cut the ties which keep the Johannine Christ pinned down tothe ground and allow him to drift off in the direction of docetism.Some members of the community appear to have done precisely this,so provoking the alarm and hostility of the author of the Johannineletters. Yet much of the Fourth Gospel is concerned to vindicatemessianic claims, and if, as is possible, most of this material stemsfrom a signs source, taken over by the evangelist, it was neverthelessassumed into his Gospel and, although modified, never repudiated.So if one is to preserve a proper balance, this material must beaccorded its due weight.

One of the most illuminating stories told in the Acts of the Apostlesconcerns a visit by Paul and Barnabas to the remote Lycaonian townof Lystra. Paul healed a cripple, in full view of the populace, and wonan immediate response: the crowds, Luke tells us, ‘lifted up theirvoices, saying in Lycaonian, ‘‘The gods have come down to us inthe likeness of men’’.’ Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul because

7 On the humanity of the Messiah, in the Old Testament at least, see for instanceS. Mowinckel, He that Cometh, 162, 284–5; F. Hahn, Titles, 147. Gradually, however,Christians came to attach divine prerogatives to the title !æØ����; John 9: 22 shows howfar this process had gone by the time the two communities split.

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he was the chief speaker, they called Hermes (Acts 14: 11–12). Deeplyconscious of the religious importance of what they had just witnessed,they had only one way of making the scene intelligible to themselves,and that was to set it in the context of their own religious traditions,which, as it happens, are familiar to us from Greek mythology.8

Convinced then that they were dealing with gods, the people wereon the point of decorating their two visitors with garlands andoffering sacrifices—oxen, no less—on their behalf. Paul was horrifiedand made a little speech, which, remarkably, contains not a singleelement of the Christian kerygma. The ‘good news’ Paul profferedwas simply that of the creator-God, and the ‘witness’ to which heappealed God’s beneficent providence. A little later, in the famousdiscourse on the Areopagus (Acts 17: 22–31) Paul did include thecentral affirmation of the Christian faith, the resurrection, and, as apoor substitute for the Jewish Scriptures, a phrase from the obscureGreek poet Aratus. But mention of the resurrection elicited no otherresponse from his audience than a grumpy bewilderment from someand a puzzled curiosity from others.

The point is that the intelligibility of the Christian gospel dependedfrom the first upon the framework in which it was set, that is, theframework of contemporary Judaism.9 Without this, ‘the Son of God’must have appeared to the Gentile world either, like Paul and Bar-nabas, as a member of the Greek pantheon, or as a magician like theunfortunate Elymas (Acts 13: 6–11), or as a healer or exorcist, or evenas a foreign deity coming, as Dionysus did to Thebes, to initiate a newcult whose chief appeal lay in its very strangeness. But cults likethese (which may be compared with that of Hare Krishna in thecapitals of the West) are essentially ‘mystery’-cults: they require nolanguage except the ravings of maenads on the hills or the mutter-ings of devotees in incense-filled rooms.

8 Stephen Mitchell, in an exhaustive study, argues that the evidence of an associ-ation between Zeus and Hermes in the region is such that it ‘confirms the historicalprecision of this episode’:Anatolia: Land,Men and Gods in AsiaMinor, ii (Oxford, 1993), 24.

9 Intelligibility here means historical intelligibility. This is very different from thephilosophical and specifically existential intelligibility required by Bultmann, for whomnothing in the Christian message can be understood except in so far as it gives someanswer to the universal questions human beings are continually asking about theirown lives and destinies. Given this, according to Bultmann, no other sort of intelligi-bility is required. ‘The scandal of particularity’ is a stumbling-block to him just as itwas to Kant or Lessing, and he is uneasy with any attempt to ‘explain’ the Christianmessage along historical lines.

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The Christian religion is different. Even the tongues of fire atPentecost were, we are told, ‘articulated’, �ØÆ��æØ���� ÆØ (Acts 2: 3),and certainly the whole point of the discourse that followed was thatit could be understood by its differently tongued hearers. So it isimportant to insist that the Fourth Gospel shares this intelligibility,this rootedness in a rich cultural heritage, the sense that, as Nils Dahlputs it, ‘what matters in the history of Israel is the existence ofwitnesses to Christ before the coming of Christ’.10 Here is wherethe study of Jesus’ messianic titles belongs, since with their necessaryemphasis upon fulfilment they balance out the ideas of strangeness,alienation, and unbridgeable distance that have to be included in anycomplete account of Johannine christology.

(c) Messianic claims in the Fourth Gospel11

‘It is a remarkable fact,’ comments Dahl, in the study just quoted,‘that the title Christos in the Fourth gospel has not been madeobsolete by predicates like ‘‘Logos’’, ‘‘Son of God’’, ‘‘Saviour of theWorld’’.’12 Yet the major commentaries contain little discussion ofthe messianic titles. They are absent from Brown’s key words, andalso from his appendices. Schnackenburg, who had earlier written along article on ‘the messianic question in John’s Gospel’, no morethan grazes the topic in his massive three-volume commentary(although the third of his eighteen excursuses, ‘The Titles of Jesusin John 1’, partly covers the ground). Bultmann, it is true, discussesbriefly a few of the subsidiary titles, but he barely glances at ‘Mes-siah’. (Neither "����Æ� nor !æØ���� figures in the useful index ofGreek words in the English edition of his commentary.) In view ofhis bias against the Old Testament, this may not be surprising, but

10 ‘Johannine Church’, 135.11 The titular use of ‘the Anointed One’ is rare in contemporary Jewish literature.

Cf. M de Jonge, ‘Use of the Word ‘‘Anointed’’ ’, and more generally J. Neusner et al.(eds.), Judaisms and their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era. Instead of limitingmyself to this title, however, I shall explore the other titles used of Jesus in the FourthGospel to portray him as the fulfilment of Jewish expectation. Justification for thisprocedure comes from a remarkable document from Qumran (4Q175 or 4QTest),entitled by Vermes ‘A Messianic Anthology or Testimonia’, which groups togetherfive different passages from Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and the apocryphal‘Psalms of Joshua’ that refer in turn to prophet, king, and (by implication) priest.The signs source was not alone in drawing upon biblical passages with a variety ofdifferent provenances to construct a cumulative argument.

12 ‘Johannine Church’, 127.

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what of Dodd, whom Bultmann takes to task for exaggerating theimportance of Old Testament influences on John?13 One of the sec-tions of his earlier work is actually headed ‘Messiah’,14 but it ismostly given over to a discussion of one relatively insignificanttitle, that of ‘Lamb of God’.

This apparent neglect may well arise from a feeling (not alwaysexpressed) that Jesus’ messianic claims are not after all very import-ant to the evangelist. If this is so, how far is such a feeling justified?Well, these claims lie at the heart of the confrontation with theSamaritan woman in chapter 4, and of the great debate withthe Pharisees in chapter 7; they are, apparently, the occasion of theexpulsion from the synagogue of the man born blind (ch. 9), and theyfigure importantly not only in the great confessions of Peter (6: 69)and Martha (11: 27) but also in the summary statement of thepurpose of the Gospel (20: 31). Finally, after the Prologue, messianicclaims and titles take up virtually the whole of chapter 1. Quite animposing list, and by no means an exhaustive one.15 Nevertheless,with the partial exceptions of chapters 4 and 7, the theme of Jesus’messiahship is not really one that excites the evangelist’s interest orstimulates his theological imagination.16 His main speculative devel-opments centre upon the nature of Jesus’ relationship to God, onjudgement and revelation, on the nature and purpose of the gospelgenre. Important as it is, the messianic status of Jesus prompts John’stheological creativity much less than the title of Son of Man or thenotion of Jesus’ divine mission. No doubt John is not alone in this.Paul, too, appears to have had little interest in messiahship as such.The title of Messiah has been so devalued in his writings that itappears there mostly as part of a proper name, ‘Jesus Christ’.17 Butif all the ideas of fulfilment of promise are to be included under the

13 In his review of The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in NTS 1 (1954/5), 77–91,esp. 78–9, 82.

14 pp. 228–40.15 The title ‘King of the Jews’ for instance is the key to some significant develop-

ments in the trial before Pilate.16 Cf. M. de Jonge, ‘Jewish Expectations’: ‘Titles like ‘‘Prophet’’, ‘‘teacher sent by

God’’, ‘‘king’’ or even Messiah’, he concludes, ‘do not correspond with the real statusor authority of them to whom they point. The terms are not wrong but insufficient’(83).

17 This is also partly true of the Johannine Epistles, and even of the Gospel itself intwo instances (1: 17; 17: 3). De Jonge argues (Stranger, ch. 7) that the titles ‘Messiah’and ‘Son of God’ are used synonymously in the Epistles. ‘Interchangeably’ would bebetter.

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general rubric ‘messianic’, then Paul is clearly absorbed by thisquestion in a way that John is not. Fulfilment themes do have someplace in his Gospel but they are not at the heart of his theologicalconcerns.

To explain why this should be so we must return to the question ofthe successive stages of the Gospel’s redaction. For all its compact-ness and self-allusiveness the Gospel is neither a unified and seamlesscomposition, as Dodd and other conservative commentators wouldhave us believe, nor, as Bultmann suggests, a patchwork piecedtogether by an intelligent compiler. Rather, we have to think interms of successive editions and reworkings. At every stage therewill have been additions and (more difficult to spot) omissions, somevery short, others quite lengthy. It is obviously impossible to producea totally convincing reconstruction, and the graveyards of NewTestament scholarship are littered with discarded skeletons. Never-theless I am convinced that this is the right kind of solution, and thatthe continual reworkings are best explained as practical responses tothe changing conditions of the community and the pressures, fromboth within and without, to search for answers to the problems towhich the new situations had given rise.

In this chapter we shall be concerned with what Martyn calls ‘theearly period’, in which the Johannine Christians, still very muchassociated with the local synagogue, are distinguished from theirfellow-Jews by their profound belief that, in Andrew’s words, ‘Wehave found the Messiah’ (1: 41).18 This early stage is representedroughly by what remains of the so-called signs source, in which thereare no high christological affirmations, but stories portraying Jesusas a wonder-worker fulfilling the traditional Jewish expectations of aMessiah.19 Whether this source was a source in the proper sense ofthe term or whether it was in effect the first draft of what was later tobecome the Fourth Gospel does not matter for our purposes. Whatcounts is to see that its interests are really very far from thoserepresented by the final version, with its resounding affirmation, onthe lips of Thomas, of Jesus’ divinity: ‘My Lord and my God’ (20: 28).‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ asked the guilelessNathaniel (1: 46). ‘Yes indeed’ is the response, a response addressed,

18 See especially Gospel of John, 93–102.19 Robert Fortna argues for this position in The Fourth Gospel and its Predecessor. His

early article ‘Source and Redaction’ is less satisfactory.

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presumably, to all those members of the local Jewish communitywho were genuinely ready to receive and welcome the invitation to‘come and see’.

(d) Early Messianic Communities?

Is it reasonable to hold that even at the earliest stage of the Johan-nine community faith in Jesus involved nothing more than an af-firmation of his messiahship? I have already emphasized the a prioriunlikelihood of any firm belief in Jesus’ divinity making immediateheadway within a community dominated by the ‘Jewish’ establish-ment. But there are more positive arguments available.

In the first place, some evidence in the Acts of the Apostles seemsto point in this direction. This evidence is hard to isolate from other,stronger theological motifs, especially those of the ‘kerygmatic’ dis-courses. Luke insists as an undeviating principle that Paul mustpreach first in the synagogues and only then to the Gentiles. Paul’sspeech at Pisidian Antioch concludes with a clear programme: ‘Itwas necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you.Since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy ofeternal life, behold we turn to the Gentiles’ (Acts 13: 46). Luke saysthat immediately after his conversion Paul began to proclaim in thesynagogues of Damascus that Jesus was the Son of God; this ismuch the same as ‘arguing’ (�ı��Ø��ø ) that Jesus was the Messiah(9: 20). This conjunction may be purely coincidental but it perhapssuggests that the two titles spring from the same source. Muchlater we are told how Paul, having, ‘as was his custom’, gone intothe synagogue at Thessalonica, spent three successive sabbathsexplaining the Scriptures to the Jewish worshippers and citing texts(�ØÆ �ªø ŒÆd �ÆæÆ�ØŁ��� �) to show that the Messiah had to dieand then rise from the dead (17: 3; cf. Luke 24: 26). Later still, Silasand Timothy arrive at Corinth from Macedonia to find Paul ‘testify-ing that Jesus was the Messiah’ (18: 5). At Ephesus too he debatedvigorously with the Jews and proved from the Scriptures that Jesuswas the Messiah (18: 28). We know from Paul’s own writings that hispreaching was fuller and richer than Luke’s account of it, but whatconcerns us here is the evidence in Acts of a bedrock belief that isusually ignored because it is for the most part effectively concealed bythe thick overlay of Luke’s developed theology.

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One particularly jagged peak rears up in the middle of the range ofdiscourses in Acts: this is Stephen’s speech in chapter 7. Soundinghostile, even vindictive, Stephen, who starts very evidently from aJewish-Christian position, directs a scathing attack upon the Templeand its cult. More positively, he lays enormous stress upon the role ofMoses, whose story occupies the whole of the central part of hisspeech (7: 17–44). This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, ‘Godwill raise up for you a prophet from your brethren as he raised me up’(7: 37), an allusion to Deuteronomy 18: 15, a text whose significancewill soon emerge. Jesus is the promised prophet, and Stephen’s faithis built upon the fulfilment of this promise. Furthermore, the title ofRighteous One (› ��ŒÆØ�), used only here and in Acts 3: 14 as a title ofJesus, is without question a messianic one:20 Jeremiah ironicallyplays upon the word esdr (righteousness) in order to goad KingZedekiah to live up to his name (Jer. 23: 5–6; cf. 33: 15). Yet in otherrespects Stephen’s theological position, a kind of reformed Judaism, issomewhat jejune, and Marcel Simon rightly comments,

His criticism and rejection of some aspects of the ritual Law could provide thestarting-point for Christian universalism, by disjoining the Christian messagevery clearly from Judaism. But something more was needed to make actualthat universalism than what he, to judge from Acts, was teaching. And hiscriticism could quite as well have made the Church just one more sect amongmany others within Judaism.21

Moreover, if the same author is right in his contention that theHellenists whom Stephen represents are to be identified as Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora, advocating ‘a renewed Judaism basedon the authentic revelation to Moses, rather than a fully new reli-gion’,22 then they cannot have been very far away from the purelymessianic faith in Jesus whose possibility I am here concerned toestablish. Stephen’s dying vision of the Son of Man need not undulydisturb us; for there is no hint here of the conflation of the two figuresof Messiah and Son of Man that we find, for instance, in 4 Ezra and(embryonically) in the trial-scenes of the Synoptic Gospels.

Secondly, clearly deriving from Luke’s account of Stephen’s death,and reflecting a similar strain of Jewish Christianity, is Hegesippus’account of the martyrdom of James, bishop of Jerusalem, the brother

20 Cf. ThDNT s.v. ��ŒÆØ�, ii. 186–7. 21 St. Stephen and the Hellenists, 115.22 Ibid. 111.

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of the Lord.23 Eusebius tells us that Hegesippus belonged to the firstgeneration after the apostles, and although his account depends notjust on Luke/Acts (and Matthew) but also, probably, on John, never-theless it may be taken as fairly representative of one element (andthat an influential one) within the early Church. The Jewish flavourof the writing is unmistakable:

Representatives of the seven popular sects (ƃæ���Ø�) already described by measked him what was meant by ‘the door of Jesus’, and he replied that Jesuswas the Saviour. Some of them came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah:the sects mentioned above did not believe either in a resurrection or in Onewho is coming to give every man what his deeds deserve, but those who didcome to believe did so because of James. Since therefore many even of theruling class believed, there was an uproar among the Jews and scribes andPharisees, who said there was a danger that the entire people would expectJesus as the Messiah. So they collected and said to James: ‘Be good enough torestrain the people, for they have gone astray (K�ºÆ �Ł�) after Jesus in thebelief that he is the Messiah. Be good enough to make the facts clear to allwho come for Passover Day. . . . So make it clear to the crowd that they mustnot go astray as regards Jesus (��æd ����F �c �ºÆ A�ŁÆØ).24

In response, James affirmed his belief in Jesus as the Son of Man whowill come on the clouds of heaven—to the dismay of the scribes andPharisees, who shouted out that ‘even the Righteous One has goneastray’ (ŒÆd › ��ŒÆØ� K�ºÆ �Ł�), and proceeded to stone him. What isstriking about this passage is that the indignation of the Jews couldbe excited simply and solely by James’ teaching that Jesus was theMessiah. The affirmation of belief in the coming of the Son of Manadded to their anger but was not what triggered it off in the firstplace.

The most impressive evidence, however, comes from a curiousdocument known to scholars as the Pseudo-Clementines. This com-prises two versions of a kind of primitive Bildungsroman, in which ayoung man in pursuit of truth eventually arrives at the Christian

23 Eusebius, HE 2. 23: 8–10. James the Just, whose ‘knees grew hard like a camel’sfrom his continually bending them in worship of God’, is portrayed here as a nazir,belonging to an ascetic tradition that flourished long before Symeon climbed his pillar.But he must have rivalled him in perseverance and pungency, for not only was he avegetarian and a teetotaller, but he never had a haircut, never took a bath, and nevermade use of the ancient equivalent of male deodorants.

24 We shall see in the following chapter the significance of the verb �ºÆ A (leadastray). The trans. is taken from the Penguin edn. of Eusebius’s History of the Church(Harmondsworth, 1965), 100–1.

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faith, having discarded on the way a number of less satisfactoryanswers to his quest. The relevant portion of this long and oftentedious narrative is to be found in the first book of the so-calledRecognitions, chapters 33–71.25 This roughly follows the course ofStephen’s speech in Acts 7, emphasizing in particular the promise ofanother prophet modelled upon Moses (36: 2). At one point, referringto the fear of the Jewish priests that ‘the whole of the people shouldcome over to our faith’, the author says that they frequentlyrequested the apostles to tell them of Jesus, ‘whether he was theProphet foretold by Moses, who is the eternal Messiah. For on thispoint only does there seem to be any difference between us who believe inJesus, and the unbelieving Jews’ (43: 1–2, my italics). The Jews’ rejectionof Jesus clearly puzzles the writer, since ‘it was to be expected thatChrist should be received by the Jews, to whom he came, and thatthey should believe in him’ (50: 1). He resolves the difficulty byappealing to the prophecy ‘which said that he was the expectationof the Gentiles’. Thus the natural expectation is reversed, and theGentiles (just as in Acts) become the true heirs of the Jewish promise.Even so, the picture presented is of a predominantly Jewish commu-nity, which has replaced the Temple sacrificial ritual with Christianbaptism but is otherwise theologically conservative and (specifically)non-Pauline. It conducts its debates with Jewish or quasi-Jewishgroups (the Samaritans are included here) and locates itself withreference to them. The use it makes of the Gospels (Matthew andLuke, but probably not John) is surprisingly discreet, and the occa-sional allusions to higher christological views appear only in whatseem to be later insertions.26 This ‘Clementine’ group (a second-century Jewish-Christian church possibly to be located at Pella inTrans-Jordania) endured considerable opposition, amounting topersecution, from the Jewish community, and as J. L. Martynhas brilliantly shown,27 the document exhibits many motifs thatclearly derive from a Sitz-im-Leben in Jewish hostility resembling

25 An English translation of these chapters may now be found in J. L. Martyn, Gospelof John, 122–47. He himself takes it from Thomas Smith’s version made from the Latinin the 1880s. (The Greek original of the Recognitions is not extant.) See now F. S. Jones,An Ancient Jewish Christian Source; R. Bauckham, ‘Origins’.

26 As is argued by G. Strecker, Judenchristentum, 42–3. Shorn of these insertions, thepassage indicates a purely messianic faith.

27 Gospel of John, 55–89. Martyn is less interested in the theology of the group than inestablishing this common Sitz-im-Leben for the two writings.

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that experienced by the Johannine community. Nevertheless, theimplacable resentment towards ‘the Jews’ that is so marked a featureof the Fourth Gospel is missing here. Apparently persecution has notyet totally alienated this author from his own people.

It is uncertain whether the document contains any actual remin-iscences of the Fourth Gospel. Martyn does not entirely reject thishypothesis, although he admits that the arguments in its favour areweak. But what is especially noticeable is that the author betrays noconviction of any special relationship between Jesus and God. Jesusappears throughout as the Prophet foretold by Moses (39: 3);28 andalthough the writer makes use of both Matthew and Luke, he doesnot repeat the special claims they make in their accounts of Jesus’infancy; furthermore, he either does not know or does not want toknow of the implicit affirmations of Jesus’ divinity discernible inMark. So if he speaks on behalf of a second-century Christiangroup, it is one which, from the point of view of later orthodoxy,must be adjudged to be theologically stunted, its growth havingstopped well short of the position represented by any of the canonicalGospels, not to mention Paul. All of these start, as Jesus himself did,from a recognizably Jewish faith: but all of them—even Matthew, themost Jewish—end with a belief that is ultimately irreconcilable withestablishment Judaism, because all, though with differing emphases,preach a Christ who is very much more than a Messiah. The Johan-nine group in particular, though its original beliefs were curiouslyclose to those of the Clementine group, branched off in a startlinglydifferent direction, one which brings us back to Bultmann’s first andgreatest puzzle, to explain how and why the belief of the communitydeveloped as it did.

2. the recognition of the messiah

Answers to this question must be deferred to a later chapter. Mean-while we must consider an important passage that occurs early inthe Gospel. Besides a straightforward account of how Jesus’ first

28 Jesus is also identified as the Mosaic prophet in the other part of the Pseudo-Clementines, the Homilies. The key text from Deut. 18 is quoted, but not verbatim, andthe passage in question (3. 53) might conceivably be a reminiscence of Acts 3: 22. In11: 26 a quotation from John 3: 5 is attributed to ‘the Prophet’; cf. 3: 11, 21; 11: 19; 12: 29;13: 14.

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disciples came to follow him, this gives a picture of the origins of theJohannine group and an apologia for its early faith. Even at thebeginning of the group’s history we have to do with a text thatmust be read on two levels, that of the history of Jesus on the onehand and that of the life of the community on the other. This earlyuse of the principle of two-level interpretation (see Ch. 8) may suggestthat we are not dealing with a mere source here but part of aprimitive Gospel; for as we shall see, this principle is later seen bythe fourth evangelist as the key to his whole work. Howeverthat may be, the passage in question (1: 19—2: 11) shows howthe good news of Jesus’ messiahship first established itself in thecommunity.

In what follows I make use of a reconstruction of part of the earlydocument known generally, since Bultmann, as the signs source.(Exegetical justification may be found in Excursus IV.29)

6There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7He came to bearwitness . . . so that all might believe through him. 19And [this was the witnessJohn bore] when priests and Levites sent to ask him, ‘Who are you’, 20with-out evasion he avowed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ 21So they asked him, ‘Wellthen, are you Elijah?’ And he said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the Prophet?’ And heanswered, ‘No’. 25So they asked him a further question, ‘Why then are youbaptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?’ 26Johnanswered, ‘There stands among you someone whom you do not know . . .31and I did not know him either, but his manifestation to Israel was thepurpose of my coming to baptize.’ 32And John bore witness, saying, ‘I haveseen the Spirit coming down [like a dove] from heaven, and it remained onhim: 34this is the Chosen One of God.’ 28All this took place in Bethanybeyond the Jordan where John was baptizing.

35Thenextday Johnwasstandingonceagainwith twoofhisdisciples, 36andas he watched Jesus walking by, he said, ‘This is the Lamb of God.’ 37And thetwo disciples heard what he said, and followed Jesus. 38Jesus turned, and sawthem following, and asked, ‘What do you want?’ They said to him, ‘Master,where are you staying?’ 39He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ So they went andsaw where he was staying [and spent the rest of the day with him: it was thetenth hour]. 40Now Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the twowho had heard John speak, and followed him. 41He first of all found his ownbrother Simon, and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah,’ 42and he

29 Cf. Bultmann, Boismard, Fortna, and especially Martyn, whose reconstruction of1: 43 (with minor changes) is asterisked in the text. Fortna’s later work does not offer aGreek text and differs only in minor respects from The Gospel of Signs.

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brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, ‘So you are Simon, theson of John? You will be called Peter.’ *Then Peter found Philip and said tohim: ‘We have found Elijah, who will restore all things.’ He brought him toJesus. 43Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me.’ 44Now Philip, like Andrew and Peter,was from Bethsaida. 45Philip found Nathanael, and said to him, ‘We havefound him of whom Moses wrote in the Law [and also the prophets], Jesus ofNazareth, the son of Joseph.’ 46And Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anythinggood come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ 47Now Jesussaw Nathanael approaching him, and said of him, ‘There truly is an Israelitein whom there is no deceit.’ 48Nathanael said to him, ‘How do you knowme?’ Jesus answered, ‘Before Philip called you [from under the fig-tree], I sawyou.’ 49Nathanael answered, ‘Master, you are the Son of God! You are theKing of Israel!’

(a) Structure and Motifs

Although, like the rest of the Gospel, this passage has been seendifferently by different commentators, I believe that even in its fin-ished form, after a new time-structure has been imposed, it fallsnaturally into two distinct but related sections, the first (vv. 19–34)concerning the witness of John the Baptist (which, following Dodd,we may call ‘the Testament’), the second (vv. 35–51) telling of thediscovery of Jesus by his first disciples (henceforth ‘the Recognition’).The third part of the triptych, the marriage-feast at Cana, will bediscussed later. The chapter concludes with a little dialogue betweenJesus and Nathanael, the ‘Israelite in whom there is no guile’. Thestrange prophetic vision in which the mysterious figure of the Son ofMan appears for the first time in the Gospel seems not to belong to thesource, which is what concerns us here.

The basic structure is simple. (1) John the Baptist renounces allclaim to the three messianic titles that he is invited to assume(Messiah, Elijah, Prophet); he justifies his baptismal activity by stat-ing that he has come so that ‘one who stands in the midst of you’may be revealed to Israel. He testifies that he saw the Holy Spiritcoming down upon this man and proclaims him to be the ChosenOne of God. (2) In the second part, after pointing out Jesus to two ofhis own disciples (‘Behold, the Lamb of God’), John retires from thestage, in accordance with the principle he will enunciate later: ‘Hemust grow greater; I must grow less’ (3: 30). So he leaves the disciplesto their gradual discovery of Jesus, who is shown, successively, to beMessiah, Elijah, Prophet; and the passage ends with Nathanael’s

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triumphant acclamation: ‘You are the Son of God! You are the Kingof Israel!’

The two introductory verses (1: 6–7), subsequently detached inorder to splice the Testimony with the Prologue,30 had an importantstructural function. They contain three ideas that dominate the threeopening sections of the signs source (the third being 2: 1–11): witness,revelation, faith. However, it is to be observed that these three keyconcepts (as well as those of mission and coming) are all referred inthe source to the Baptist rather than to Jesus. Whoever inserted themin the Prologue felt it necessary to spell out that the Baptist was notthe light, but although the evangelist took over all five ideas hetotally transformed them by his own special alchemy. Certainly hedid not believe that the Baptist’s witness was primary (this is under-played in ch. 5 and dropped entirely in ch. 8); for him, the reallyimportant mission was that of Jesus himself (and secondarily themission of the Paraclete and that of the disciples); above all, inthe body of the Gospel it is Jesus himself and none other who revealsthe truth and leads men to faith in him. So we find in embryonic forma number of terms and concepts that are in one sense recognizablyand obviously ‘Johannine’, but cannot be said to be employed in away characteristic of John’s mature theology. If nevertheless theywere present in a rudimentary fashion as the Johannine group wasbeginning to form, then it is easier to understand how in the courseof time they could be built into the great conceptual plan of thefinished Gospel.

Even in its truncated form the passage contains a remarkableseries of titles:31 the first three (Messiah, Elijah, Prophet) constitute aspecial case, since they figure in both the Testimony and the Recog-nition (‘the one of whom Moses wrote’ being a clear reference to theeschatological prophet). Besides these we have the two titles given toJesus by John the Baptist, first the Chosen One, secondly the Lamb of

30 The first to suggest that John’s narrative source began with 1: 6 was apparentlySpitta (1910).

31 There is only one term with any claim to being a title that is left out in thereconstruction: › Kæ���� �. WayneMeeks says that it cannot be proved that this was amessianic title (Prophet-King, 90), but the Gospel tradition (Matt. 11: 3; John 6: 14; 11:27) suggests that it was; and in any case it makes little difference whether it was aregular title: there is no doubt that ‘the Coming One’, title or not, alluded to themessianic expectation of the Jews. This series of titles may be compared with thosegiven to the heavenly being in the Parables of Enoch, eventually identified with Enochhimself.

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God, and finally the great triumphant acclamation of Nathanael(‘You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’) to which thewhole passage has been building up. Taken as a whole it representsa declaration of faith on the part of the writer and his readers, butalso a challenge to other ‘Israelites’ of good faith to show the sameopen-minded generosity of spirit as Nathanael.32

Structurally, the title ‘Chosen One’ has a double function: mostimportantly, it forms the climax of the first section and so balancesout the title ‘Son of God’ at the end, and is actually replaced by it inmany manuscripts. Secondly, it stands over against ‘Lamb of God’ atthe beginning of the Recognition. Of the two titles attributed to Jesusby John the Baptist, one is clearly messianic, the other probably so.

(b) Titles

The Messiah, properly speaking, is a man anointed by God and sentby him at the end of time to assist him in establishing his kingly rule.Mowinckel objects to any application of the term outside the sphereof eschatology.33 But the Messiah first appears as the ideal successorto King David, and, generally speaking, whenever ‘Messiah’ is usedwithout qualification in the New Testament (i.e. the Greek word!æØ����, for the transliteration "����Æ� does not appear except inJohn 1: 41; 4: 25) it is either as a proper name or else in reference tothe kingly, Davidic Messiah. According to the tradition, Jesus was atpains to disengage himself from the triumphant political trappingsthat had understandably come to festoon what he himself, the Gos-pels would have us believe, thought of as a purely religious figurewith a purely religious function. It is hardly surprising to find reli-gious fervour going hand in hand with a strong and often bellicosenationalism, as in the Psalms of Solomon: ‘See, Lord, and raise up forthem their king, the Son of David, at the time you [alone] haveknowledge of, so that he may reign over your servant (�ÆE� �ı)Israel, and gird him with strength, enabling him to smash those thatrule without justice’ (17: 21–2). Although idealized, the Davidic Mes-siah was bound to some extent to be associated with very humanhopes for the restoration of the kingdom of Judah.

32 Nathanael performs much the same function in the Fourth Gospel as Joseph (‘thejust man’) in Matthew. Joseph is contrasted with Herod and is signalled out as the typeof the true descendant of David who is ready to welcome the new king.

33 He that Cometh, 3.

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Another important testimony to the continuing resentment atRoman occupation is the War Scroll from Qumran. It used to bethought that this contains no allusion to the Davidic Messiah, but animportant fragment (4Q285) that refers to the Scion of David(djfd hmr) proves that it did.

Elijah did not die like other men, but was taken up to heaven ‘by awhirlwind of fire, in a chariot with horses of fire’ (Sir. 48: 9). Thencehe would be sent forth ‘before the great and terrible day of the Lord’(Mal. 3: 18), and his task would be ‘to calm the wrath of God before itbreaks out in fury, to turn the heart of the father to the son, and torestore the tribes of Jacob’ (Sir. 48: 10). According to Malachi (at anyrate the final version of this, the last of the canonical prophets), andto Ben Sira too, Elijah’s mission was to be one of conciliation, thoughthe Synoptic tradition simply says of him, rather mysteriously, thathe would ‘restore all things’ (Mark 9: 11). But of course he wouldbring with him the memory of his achievements in his previousexistence. A difficulty about this title is that Matthew and Markassign it unequivocally to John the Baptist: there can be no doubtthat in running counter to this tradition the author of this passageintends to assign it to Jesus instead.34 One reason why this ascriptionwas subsequently blotted out may have been the desire to avoid anysuggestion of a double incarnation (for Elijah is the only one of thethree figures who was believed to have lived on earth in times goneby). By the same token the identification of Jesus with Elijah couldhave been one of the sources of the strange concept of pre-existence—later to be associated firmly and unambiguously withthe Logos and the Son of Man.

The Prophet, as is universally agreed, is the one foretold by Moses:

The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you,from your brethren—him you shall heed—just as you desired of the Lordyour God. . . . And the Lord said to me, ‘ . . . I will raise up for them a prophetlike you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth,and he shall speak to them all that I command him’. (Deut. 18: 15–18)

For the Deuteronomist himself the new Moses was undoubtedly ageneric figure—the ideal prophet—but subsequent interpretationlifted him out of this context and gave him a particular identity

34 Once again I am greatly indebted to J. L. Martyn, and I follow his attemptedreconstruction of 1: 43 in Gospel of John, 33–42.

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and a special role. We have already come across him in the Pseudo-Clementines and in Stephen’s speech in Acts 7. The same passage isalso quoted in Acts 3: 22. Wherever he appears in the literature of theperiod it is as an eschatological figure, one who could be said to bemessianic in a broad sense of the term, and in fact even in the OldTestament itself there are two passages in which prophets are said tobe anointed (1 Kings 19: 16—the anointing of Elisha by Elijah and Isa.61: 1–3, an important passage for the Synoptic interpretation of Jesus’miracles). In the Dead Sea Scrolls too prophets are called ‘anointedones’ (CD2. 12; 6. 1; 1QM11. 7).

One question that arises in connection with these three titles ishow far they were thought of as distinct one from another and howfar they were intended to ‘cover all the bases’ in much the samemanner as religious litanies, both earlier and later, both Christianand non-Christian, were designed to avoid giving offence to saint ordeity by including all possible titles to which he or she might bethought to aspire. On the whole it seems likely that they werethought of as distinct (even though they were to be fused in Jesus),especially since the (or a) prophet appears alongside the twin Mes-siahs of Aaron in an important passage from Qumran. The membersof the community are instructed not to show their hardness of heartby abandoning any of the commandments of the Law, but rather tobe guided by the primitive precepts which the community wastaught from its inception, ‘until there shall come a prophet and theMessiahs of Aaron and Israel’ (1QS9: 10–11). These correspond to thetwo anointed ones symbolized by two olive trees (zjvjg

˙h- jnW) in Zech.

4: 11–12. What is more, these three personages, the prophet, thepriest, and the king, may be envisaged in an important collection oftexts with a clear messianic bearing: first a reference to the futureprophet drawn from a proto-Samaritan version of Exod. 20: 21;35 nextthe ‘star of Jacob/sceptre of Israel’ passage from Numbers (Num.24: 15–17) and a further passage with a strong liturgical flavourfrom Deuteronomy (Deut. 33: 8–11). So here once again (4Q175)come the eschatological priest, prince, and prophet. In the interestsof concinnity it would be nice to identify these three with the three

35 This was thought at first to be from Deut. 18: 18; but it was later shown that thethree passages were chosen from three successive biblical books. See P. Skehan, CBQ 19

(1957) 435–40.

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named by John’s interlocutors, but it is doubtful whether the mid-rashic view of Elijah as a priest had yet arisen.36

The Chosen One (› KŒº�Œ���) is not used as a title of Jesus elsewherein the New Testament (except Luke 23: 35; cf. 9: 35: › KŒº�º�ª�� �),although it seems almost tailor-made for the job, especially in aneschatological setting.37 Like ‘Prophet’ it sounds rather vague, but infact the allusion is quite precise. The earliest form of the signs sourcemay well have included some account of Jesus’ baptism, omitted byJohn to avoid any suggestion that Jesus might be the Baptist’sinferior. But in what remains of the source all we have is John’stestimony that he saw the Spirit descending upon Jesus, along withhis conclusion, ‘This is the Chosen One of God’. This is unquestion-ably a reference to one of Second Isaiah’s Servant Songs:

Behold my servant (LXX, › �ÆE� �ı) whom I uphold,my chosen one (MT jtjhb, LXX › KŒº�Œ��� �ı) in whom my soul delights:I have put my spirit upon him,he will bring forth justice to the nations. (Isa. 42: 1)

All three Synoptists allude to this verse in their account of Jesus’baptism (Matt. 3: 17//), though �ÆE� becomes ıƒ�� and KŒº�Œ���

becomes IªÆ�����, literally ‘beloved’. But this does not prove thatthey wanted to identify Jesus as the Servant. Second Isaiah spurnsconvention by calling Cyrus, king of Persia, the ‘anointed’ of the Lord(Isa. 45: 1), but messianic expectation in the proper sense is foreign tothe thought of this prophet: what he longed for and foretold was there-enthronement of Yahweh as king.

36 That this was the view of the rabbis and targumim is shown by A. S. van derWoude, Die messianischen Vorstellungen, 60–1. This scholar argues that ‘the interpreterof the Law’ is to be identified with ‘the high priest Elijah’. But all the evidence for thepriesthood of Elijah is late. If ‘the interpreter of the Law’ were to be identified with anyof the three messianic figures it would surely be with ‘the prophet’. Cf. also Ginzberg,Legends, iv. 195–235; vi. 316–42.

37 Most printed editions retain the majority reading › ıƒe� �F Ł�F; but as Schnack-enburg argues (i. 305–6) the reading › KŒº�Œ�e� �F Ł�F is surely correct: ‘it is found inp5(to judge by the length of the lacuna) a* 77 218 e f2� sysc Ambr; and the electus filius ofa (b f2c) sa shows that an original electus was conflated with filius. Hence ‘‘the elect ofGod’’ is an early reading, found in the various regions where Greek, Latin or Syriac wasspoken. For intrinsic reasons it is undoubtedly to be preferred; the title occurs only herein John and elsewhere only in Lk 23: 35 cf. also Lk 9: 35, › KŒº�º�ª�� �. It is easy tounderstand the alteration from this unusual and peculiar title to the ordinary ‘‘Son ofGod’’.’ Schnackenburg names several scholars who have preferred this reading, in-cluding Spitta, Harnack, Lagrange, Loisy, Windisch, Lightfoot, and Barrett.

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Proof that ‘the Chosen One’ could be used as a messianic titlecomes in a near-contemporary Jewish apocryphon: ‘And then I willsound the trumpet out of the air, and I will send my Chosen One,having in him all my power . . . and he shall summon my despisedpeople from the nations’ (Apocalypse of Abraham 31: 1–2). Oppositionto ‘the Lord and his anointed’ in Psalm 2: 1–2 is interpreted atQumran as directed against the elect of Israel (latuj jtjhb) (4Q1741. 19), and although the writer has the whole community in mindhere (‘elect’ is plural), the interpretation of the Messiah as the chosenones of Israel lends support to the suggestion that another fragmentfrom Qumran (4Q534) containing the term ‘the Chosen One of God’(aela jtjhb) is messianic in intent. This is contested by J. A.Fitzmyer.38 But the text tells of a new-born child of whom a brilliantfuture is predicted, within the context of the divine plan, ‘because heis the Chosen One of God’. J. Zimmermann, in a thorough anddetailed study of all the messianic texts at Qumran, stresses thatthe child is predicted to be learned and wise, knowing the secrets(or mysteries: jgt) of all living things, and sees in him ‘a kind ofmissing link’ between the other Qumran literature and the Book ofParables in 1 Enoch wherein the Messiah and Son of God is alsoidealized.39 At the very least it can be said that he has been ‘chosen’precisely for the purpose of playing a part in the realization of thedivine plan.

Lamb of God, a title conferred on Jesus by John the Baptist on hissecond appearance, the following day, balances (chiastically?) ‘theChosen One’. It is the title the writer selects to introduce his accountof the Recognition, and in spite of the interest it has excited amongexegetes, who are as fond as anybody else of a knotty puzzle, I doubtif it has yet been satisfactorily explained. In my view the phrase ‘whotakes away the sin of the world’ (v. 29) is a later addition (in line, asSchnackenburg argues, ad loc., with the theology of 1 John 3: 5), so itis the title itself that presents the first problem. C. H. Dodd40 is clearlyattracted by the suggestion that the term alludes to the SufferingServant, who ‘was dumb like a sheep (MT, lht

˝; LXX, I� �� before its

shearers’ (Isa. 53: 7). If the author of the source had held the twoServant Songs (Isa. 42 and 53) linked in his mind, and consequently

38 ‘The Aramaic ‘‘Elect of God’’ Text’. 39 Messianische Texte, 203.40 Interpretation, 235–6. See too the literature cited by K. Wengst, Bedrangte

Gemeinde, 107 n. 339.

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intended the two titles (Chosen One and Lamb of God) to have acommon reference, then the suggestion may seem a little less whim-sical. And given the proximity of the two titles in the source (wherethey were, I suggest, separated by a single verse, 1: 28), it might bethought to gain slightly more plausibility—but only, surely, themerest whisker, for it still owes more to ingenuity than to sense.

The interpretation Dodd actually favours may appear at first sighteven more wildly improbable, for the decidedly ruthless lamb of theBook of Revelation seems to have little in common with the humanJesus pointed to by John.41 But it must be remembered that all thetitles in this passage transport us into the world of eschatologicalspeculation. And there is some evidence from pseudepigraphicalsources that the messianic leader of the people could be symbolizedby a lamb (though not, at least not clearly so, in the most importantpassage quoted by Dodd, from the Book of Enoch).42 In the Testamentof Joseph, on the other hand, the lamb shows a fighting spirit it hassubsequently lost: ‘there came forth a lamb (I� ��) and on its left allthe beasts and all the reptiles attacked, and the lamb overcame anddestroyed them’ (19: 8).

A further text, not quoted by Dodd, which may have been com-posed at quite an early date, comes in one of the most extraordinaryinsertions in targumic literature. Its subject is the nature of the fournights of the Passover:

The fourth night: When the world reaches its end to be redeemed (astqhml:dissolved?) the yokes of iron shall be broken and the generations of wicked-ness shall be blotted out; and Moses will go up from the desert and the kingMessiah from on high. One will lead at the head of the flock, and the otherwill lead at the head of the flock, and his Word will lead between the two ofthem, [and I] and they will proceed together.43

41 What is more, the Greek word (Iæ � ) is different.42 The difficulty here is that the passage (1 Enoch 90: 37–8) has been transmitted in

two versions, Ethiopic and Greek, and only the latter contains any reference to ahorned lamb. The latest editor of the Ethiopic text, Michael Knibb (Oxford, 1978)translates the passage in such a way as to make the leader a wild-ox. ‘Possibly’, hesays, ‘we have in these verses a belief in two messiahs—a priestly leader (the white bullof v. 37) and a military leader (the wild-ox of v. 38)’ (216 ad loc.). But he also concedesthat the white bull and the wild-ox might be one and the same. See further B. Lindars,‘A Bull, a Lamb, and a Word: 1 Enoch XC.38’, NTS 22 (1976), 483–6, in favour of thelamb; G. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 403, against it.

43 Codex Neofiti 1/2 (ed. Diez-Macho), 79. For ‘flock’ (anp) in this passage someeditors read ‘cloud’ (annp). But according to R. Le Deaut, this reading has no manu-script support (Sources Chretiennes, no. 256, 98 n. 49). The phrase ‘king Messiah’

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Whether or not this fascinating text clinches Dodd’s case this deriv-ation seems to me marginally more probable than either of the othertwo leading candidates, Suffering Servant and Paschal Lamb.

Son of God may be the most important—it is certainly the mostmisunderstood—of all the titles. Here it is vital to distinguish betweenthe meaning of the source and its interpretation by the evangelist.Schnackenburg fails to do this and consequently stumbles badly inan otherwise smoothly confident article44 criticizing the one-sidedand improbable suggestion of Robinson45 and van Unnik46 that theGospel was a missionary document directed to the Jews.

In all probability this title, like the rest, originally indicated mes-siahship rather than divinity. Mowinckel is suspicious of any sug-gestion that the Jews ever actually called the Messiah by this name:speaking of 4 Ezra 7: 28 etc. and 1 Enoch 105 (Christian?) he remarksthat even if these passages

had originally expressed the idea of the Messiah as the Son of God . . . the Jewswould understand the term in accordance with Old Testament ideas of theadopted son of Yahweh as in Ps. 2, i.e. as indicating not a metaphysicalsonship from all eternity, but rather a divine election for a specially closeand intimate relationship, and a call from Him to be fulfilled in His power.47

In view of the way the king is addressed by God in Psalm 2: 7 (‘Thouare my son, this day I have begotten thee’), and of the assurance toDavid that God would continue to favour his descendants (‘I will behis father, and he shall be my son’ (2 Sam. 7: 14)), the term ‘Son ofGod’ seems a natural one to use of the Messiah, and indeed theprophecy of Nathan is commented upon and quoted extensively inanother fragmentary text from Qumran which goes on to apply theprophecy to ‘the scion of David’ (djfd hzr) who stands alongside‘the interpreter of the Law’ (htfhh utd) an important personage in

(ahjum aklm) is not in Neofiti but has been added by Le Deaut from a fragmentarytargum. See too, by the same author, La Nuit pascale.

44 ‘Die Messiasfrage’. 45 ‘Destination’. 46 ‘Purpose’.47 He that Cometh, 294. The origin of the use of the title within the New Testament is

unclear. The widespread use of the so-called ‘messianic’ psalms, 2 and 110, shows thatit rapidly gathered a messianic connotation. I suspect that in the earliest traditions ofJesus’ activities as an exorcist, the term ‘Son of God’, along with ‘Holy One of God’(Mark 1: 24), indicates an association with the divine beings (holy ones, sons ofGod, watchers) that occupy such an important place in the heavenly world of theDead Sea Scrolls as well as that of apocalypses like Daniel and 1 Enoch. At this point,however, we are concerned exclusively with the signs source.

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the Qumran community: ‘as it is written, ‘‘I will raise up the fallenbooth of David’’ (Amos 9: 11) which will arise so as to save Israel’(4Q174 1: 11–13). What is more, the passage continues by quotingfurther texts, ending with Psalm 2, although unfortunately it breaksoff before reaching the crucial v. 7.

The expression ‘son of God’ (la jd tb) does actually occur in anAramaic fragment from Qumran (4Q246). I quote from F. M. Cross’stranslation:

[And there shall arise a son of man.] He shall be a great [king] over the[whole] earth [and all of mankind] shall serve [him], and all shall minister [tohim.] [The Holy One of the g]reat [God] he shall be called, and by his name heshall be surnamed. Son of God he shall be called, and by his name he shall besurnamed.

*Until the people of God arise and all rest from the sword. [vacat]His kingdom

shall be an eternal kingdom, and all his ways truth. He shall judge the earthwith truth, and all will make peace (with him). The sword shall cease fromthe earth, and all the countries shall worship him. The great God shall be hispatron.48 He will make war for him; people he will give in his hand and all ofthem he shall cast before him. His rule shall be an eternal rule.49

One of the earliest scholars to comment on this text was JosephFitzmyer, who denied its relevance to messianism: ‘There is noindication’, he comments, ‘that the person to whom the titles ‘‘Sonof God’’ or ‘‘Son of the Most High’’ are given in this text is a messianicfigure; we are still looking for extra-NT instances in which such titleshave been applied to an anointed agent of Yahweh.’50 This may beso, but the passage has a strongly eschatological flavour, andFitzmyer himself remarks upon the striking parallels with two ofthe names promised to Jesus by the angel Gabriel at the moment ofthe Annunciation (Luke 1: 32, 35). Subsequent commentators aredivided on the question whether the king in question is good or bad.The obvious references to Daniel 7 (‘his kingdom will be an eternal

48 A difficult line (7). Vermes (p. 377) translates, ‘The Great God is their helper’.Garcıa Martınez, puzzled, has ‘The Great God among the gods (?)’ (p. 138). For eljab

at the end of the line Zimmermann proposes hljab: ‘The great God, through hisstrength . . .’ (Messianische Texte, 130).

49 ‘Structure’, 157–8. Cross argues that there were four main stanzas in this text,1 and 3 on ‘War and the Perishing of Kings’, 2 and 4 on ‘The Coming of the MessianicKing’. I have represented stanza 3 by asterisks, retaining only stanza 2 (very fragmen-tary until the last line) and stanza 4.

50 ‘The Aramaic Language’, 14–15.

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kingdom’) may be thought to tip the balance in favour of theformer.51

That there is no need to look outside Jewish circles for the origin ofthe term ‘Son of God’ is a main contention of a concise and learnedstudy by Martin Hengel, who points out that this Aramaic text‘makes one thing clear, that the title ‘‘Son of God’’ was not com-pletely alien to Palestinian Judaism’.52 Hengel’s little book ranges toowidely for us to follow any further at present; but we have more thanenough evidence already to suggest that the term ‘Son of God’ was, atleast in its early Christian usage, a messianic title. Equally important isthe fact that for establishment Judaism the title had no connotationof divinity in the full sense of ‘metaphysical sonship’.

King of Israel, the last of the titles, confirms John the Baptist’sdescription of the purpose of his own mission, that Jesus ‘should berevealed to Israel’, and recognized as Messiah by one who was ‘trulyan Israelite’, neither deceitful nor deceived. His name suggests thathe stands for those in Israel whom the Father gives to the Son (cf.6: 37; 17: 2–3). There are however two negative facts to be taken intoconsideration here: first that the title ‘Son of David’, so important toMatthew, is entirely missing from the Fourth Gospel;53 secondly that,in contrast with the infancy narrative in Matt. 2: 2: (cf. Luke 1: 32),which performs an introductory function similar to John 1, Jesus iscalled ‘King of Israel’ in this passage and not ‘King of the Jews’.Wayne Meeks comments: ‘Quite possibly there lies behind thisusage a polemical situation in which Christians, over against Jewishopponents, call themselves ‘‘the true Israel’’.’54 It is a comment thatdeserves to be weighed carefully. Although of course Jesus’ messianicclaims extend to the whole of Israel (which must include Judaea),even so the Gospel assumes (7: 41)—and the source at this pointconcurs—that he, like his earliest disciples (or at least the four thatare named here), is a Galilean. Consequently it has to be asked whatwe can learn from the sources about the relations between the Jesusgroup and ‘the Jews’.

51 Both J. J. Collins (‘Son of God Text’) and F. M. Cross (‘Structure’) continue toargue strongly for a messianic interpretation, the latter with full references to otherscholarly literature (151 n. 2). See also, even more fully, Zimmermann, MessianischeTexte, 128–70.

52 Son of God, 45. 53 Cf. G. Reim, Studien, 247 ff. 54 Prophet-King, 83.

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(c) Jesus and ‘the Jews’

It will be observed that neither ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ (1: 19) nor the Pharisees(1: 24) figure in the reconstructed text, which attributes the deputa-tion sent to interrogate John the Baptist to the sole initiative of ‘priestsand Levites’. The term ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ, if retained, must refer, as it some-times does in the Gospel, to the authorities in Jerusalem. We shouldthen have another example of an expression in the source that theevangelist has adopted for his own purposes. But the Greek is some-what overloaded at this point and it is more likely that the source hasbeen expanded in line with the evangelist’s later preoccupations.However that may be, the sudden appearance of ‘(the) Pharisees’ alittle later presents a problem that can scarcely be resolved satisfac-torily by those who insist upon explaining the passage as a unifiedcomposition. For either they are to be understood as a separate groupaltogether (in which case what are we to suppose has become in themean time of the priests and Levites?) or the former group are beingidentified as belonging to the Pharisaic sect (if so, why, and why solate?) or else, finally, the Pharisees are being singled out as the realorganizers of the original mission—but in that case why did not thewriter bring them in at the start of his narrative?55

We should remember, moreover, that the Pharisees were predom-inantly a lay organization, and that although at the time of Jesusthey may have included some priests in their ranks, they will scarcelyhave had the authority to initiate the kind of official enquiry that thestory implies. Only much later, when the Jewish priesthood had lostits political role because of the failure of the Jewish revolt, was thesect in a position to gather the reins of power into its own hands. Itmust also be borne in mind that neither priests nor Levites appearelsewhere in the Fourth Gospel, whereas the conjunction is a com-mon one not only in the Old Testament but also in the Rule of theCommunity at Qumran. The grouping is particularly appropriate tothe context of the Testimony, which centres upon a rite of purifica-tion, and Dodd is surely correct here in his suggestion of ‘a traditiongoing back to the period, before ad 70, when the twofold ministrywas still functioning at Jerusalem’.56

55 On this point, see U. C. von Wahlde, ‘Terms for Religious Authorities’.56 Historical Tradition, 263. In spite of his refusal to enter into the question of a

Johannine signs source, Dodd believes that the Testimony, though not the Recogni-tion, is built upon a narrative taken over by the evangelist. He distinguished here

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If this is so, then we should be careful not to read into this passagethe overtones of mistrust and hostility that the term ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ

carries almost everywhere in the body of the Gospel. The priestsand Levites in this story were conscientiously discharging a perfectlyproper function, and it would be wrong to assume, from what weknow elsewhere of the attitudes of the Pharisees, that this was donewith any malevolent intent.57 What is more, the literary form of theTestimony is very different from the controversy or pronouncement-story familiar to us from the pages of the Synoptic Gospels, in whicheverything leads up to a punch-line that results in the discomfiture ofJesus’ interlocutors (e.g. ‘Render therefore to Caesar . . . ’). If we thenask, as a structuralist critic might, what is the function of the priestsand Levites in the narrative itself (prescinding from any consider-ation of their actual historical role), then we can scarcely fail to seethat their questions serve simply to give John the Baptist a suitableopportunity for uttering his testimony—in the first place, the dis-claimers that pave the way for the Recognition that is to follow thenext day, and in the second place, the positive assertion that ‘this isthe Chosen One of God’. In so far as the priests and Levites may beassumed to assist at the testimony (as they will have done in the firstversion of the story), they are to be credited with a subsidiaryfunction, which is to witness to what they have heard. Consequently,far from being the aggressive questioners prejudice leads us to expect,they serve to authenticate, albeit indirectly, the Baptist’s testimony.

Now given the kind of Sitz-im-Leben I have already postulated forthe source, this should not surprise us. In a missionary tract,designed to promote the new sect among Jewish listeners who maybe conceived to be partly sceptical, partly sympathetic, but at anyrate not yet convinced, it seems unlikely that much weight will havebeen put upon the hostile attitude of the religious authorities inJerusalem. This does not mean that the priests and Levites need tobe credited with any intention of deliberately serving the Christiancause. What must have impressed the listeners first of all is the

between vv. 19–27, in which ‘there is little or nothing which seems to derive from thespecial views of the evangelist’, and vv. 29–34, in which ‘there is evidence of traditionalmaterial lying behind the Johannine presentation, but evidence also of some pragmaticrehandling of the material in the interests of Johannine doctrine’ (ibid. 276).

57 Cf. C. J. A. Hickling, ‘Attitudes to Judaism’. Hickling examines four passages inchs. 2–4 (2: 13–22; 4: 9, 35–8, 46–54) and finds in them ‘a generally affirmative attitudetowards Judaism in material accepted from tradition’ (351).

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sincerity of the convert preachers, their burning conviction thatthey, like Andrew, had ‘found the Messiah’. But we still have to askin what, or rather in whom, the listeners were being asked to puttheir faith.

(d) The Picture of Jesus

We have already seen that no other passage in the Fourth Gospellends more plausibility to the thesis that the Gospel was designed as amissionary tract to draw Jews of the diaspora to the new faith. Forhere we have a Jesus who is presented to the Jews as the one who hascome to fulfil all their hopes: he is the promised Messiah, he is Elijahreturned to earth, he is the eschatological prophet foretold by Moses,he is the Chosen One, the Son of God, the King of Israel.

In all this he plays a curiously passive role, utterly untypical of theJohannine Christ whose powerful presence dominates the remainderof the Gospel. Here by contrast, apart from the single invitation,‘Follow me!’, addressed to Philip, he appears to be content to waitto be discovered. In the first section it is John the Baptist who enjoysthe limelight, and even after he has left the stage, having deliveredhis testimony and pointed out Jesus to two of his disciples, the writeris still anxious to persuade us that Jesus is there to be found if only wecare to look for him. He is the object of testimony, not the one whotestifies. Elsewhere he it is and he alone who leads to the Father andinitiates all the action: even in the passion, as we have noticed, he isnot only the protagonist but also the director.58

Taken together, the Testimony and the Recognition make up atriumphant and delighted description of how the Messiah came to befound by his first disciples. One of these eventually turns to Natha-nael, who fulfils the promise of his name by declaring to the onewhom God had indeed given, ‘You are the Son of God! You are theKing of Israel!’ Implicit throughout is the suggestion that Jesus’ laterdisciples, now actively proselytizing within the Jewish community,are carrying on the work of Andrew, Peter, and Philip, by inviting alltheir fellow Israelites, or at least those ‘without guile’, to ‘come andsee’ for themselves the one of whom Moses spoke.

58 A good instance of this is in the story of the healing of the cripple in ch. 5. Askedthe identity of his healer, the man cannot reply until Jesus finds him in the Temple andenables him to answer.

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But a puzzle remains. Are we not dealing with a signs source, adocument that backs up its belief in Jesus with the irrefutable evi-dence of his miracles? Yet up to now there is no trace of the miracu-lous, and the emphasis is all upon the personal testimony of John andhis disciples. Jesus is found, and his messianic dignity proclaimedbefore he has either said anything about himself or done anything toattract attention. Neither by words nor gesture has he ‘manifested hisglory’. Perhaps we should not fall into the trap of attaching unduesignificance to our own slogans. After all, ‘signs source’ is just a label,and we have no good reason a priori to suppose that it will convey amore accurate idea of the contents than any comparable label stuckupon another package that similarly claims to be full of wonders.Right from the start the writer makes his intentions plain; much laterhe will make them even plainer: ‘these things are written that youmay believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God’ (20: 31).

All the same, in that very passage he writes of signs. And it is truethat, taken in isolation, the twin stories of testimony and discipleshipwe have been considering are incomplete. In so far as John the Baptistcould bear witness he has done so, but the true revelation is yet tobegin. Testimony and Recognition are but two panels of a triptych.Two days have passed but the events of the third have yet to be told.

3. the commencement of the signs

Chapter 2 of the Gospel opens with the phrase ŒÆd �fi B #��æfi Æ �fi B �æ��fi �,which can be translated either, as it usually is, ‘on the third day’ or‘two days later/the next day but one’. In the former case the sugges-tion must be that after the incidents recorded on the two previousdays there is another to be told; if the latter rendering is preferred thereference does not reach back to the first day (the Testimony) but onlyas far as the second (the Recognition). (I am here assuming my ownreconstruction of the preceding sections, for this simple progressionhas been obscured by subsequent additions.) In either case the storyof the ‘sign’ that follows is to be seen as the completion of the openingtriptych.59 Once this is concluded in 2: 11, the signs source is inter-rupted by material hewn from a very different quarry.

59 Given this natural function of the words ‘on the third day’, there is no need topostulate any far-fetched symbolism according to which the words would point either

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Tramping the foothills of biblical scholarship, the exegete is oftentempted to stray from the beaten track, and nowhere more so than inthe course of investigating the marriage-feast of Cana, where one caneasily find oneself waist-high in bracken. The episode is crammedwith teasing little problems. What was Jesus’ mother (never namedMary in the Gospel) doing at the wedding in the first place? Was itbecause, as one tradition held, she was the groom’s aunt? Or had thewhole family recently moved house from Nazareth to Cana? Whoinvited Jesus and his disciples to the wedding? Was it perhaps Natha-nael, who we are told in a later chapter (21: 2) came from Cana? Andat what stage in the celebrations did they turn up? Maybe towardsthe end of the week, when the wine might well have already beenfinished, unless it had run out—an alternative explanation—becauseof gatecrashers to the party. Why did Jesus’ mother become involved,and why was she especially concerned by the shortage of wine? Wasonly a portion of the water in the jars changed, or was it all turnedinto wine to ensure a plentiful supply during the celebrations; andhow many gallons are there in a firkin anyway? What eventuallybecame of the bride and groom? One medieval tradition makes thegroom forsake his bride on their wedding night, leaving the marriageunconsummated, in order to follow Jesus: his name was John, and hewas later to write a Gospel!60 And if none of these questions is easy toanswer or indeed seems particularly relevant, then one can lope offinstead on a hunt of parallels: Jesus goes one better than Moses, whomerely turns the water in the stone-jars of the Egyptians (Exod. 7: 19)into blood! Even Raymond Brown, who is especially good on thispassage, feels free to follow Bernard and others in indulging in suchharmless little divertissements.61 There are, however, some serious

to the resurrection (Dodd) or, still more cryptically, to the giving of the Old Lawrecorded as having taken place ‘on the third day’ in Exod. 19 (Olsson).

60 This choice morsel is to be found in Loisy’s commentary, p. 269. The whole crazyidea seems to have been sparked off by someone’s misunderstanding of a passage inJerome’s Adversus Jovinianum comparing the roles of Peter and John, and concluding,among other things, that ‘exposuit virginitas quod nuptiae scire non poterant’ (1. 26,PL xxiii, col. 259)—a virgin (John) expounded what a married man (Peter) could neverhave known! See the meditation addressed to the evangelist by The Monk of Farne, ed.Dom Hugh Farmer, OSB (London, 1961), 149: ‘If I choose to call you a virgin, the wholechurch will be able to bear witness to what I say, for it was as a virgin that you weresingled out by our Lord and called away from your wedding.’

61 And is rebuked for so doing by Ernst Haenchen, who remarks primly: ‘There isnothing wrong with the critical method, but carried to extremes it can become

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obstacles to a proper understanding of the passage, this time blockingthe main track: they concern the meaning of Jesus’ reply to hismother, �� K�d ŒÆd ��; ª� ÆØ (v. 4) and of the following sentence(statement or question?) concerning Jesus’ ‘hour’. Above all thereis the problem of the significance of the miracle, whose very singular-ity (there is nothing quite like it elsewhere in the Gospels) rendersinterpretation particularly hazardous.62 The following exegesis pre-supposes my own attempted reconstruction of the Cana episode as itstood in the signs source. I have drawn out certain points as ofparticular interest.

(a) The role of Jesus’ mother

It is to be noted first of all that she was present at the wedding fromthe start, unlike Jesus and his disciples, who arrived later, as invitedguests, from the outside. Like the water-jars mentioned later she wasthere (the word KŒ�E occurs twice, once in v. 1 and a second time inv. 6). So although, unlike the jars, she is not exactly part of thefurniture, she is more closely identified with the scene of the weddingitself, and this first impression is confirmed by her opening words:‘They have no wine.’ On the other hand, she says ‘they’ rather than‘we’, and this suggests a certain distancing on her part: not a totalbut only a partial identification with those responsible for mountingthe wedding and the other guests. The writer, it must be stressed,says nothing of her feelings, nor, apart from the simple fact of theshortage of wine, of the reason for her intervention.

In his reply to his mother, Jesus registers a strong protest, whichinitially highlights his independence. Of course her comment is at thesame time a request, a request for decisive action, a request, at leastimplicitly, for a miracle. And it is this that prompts Jesus’ seeminglyharsh rejoinder, which he follows up with a reference to his ‘hour’. Inasking ourselves what Jesus’ words mean, we must bear in mind thefact that she herself did not take themas a total rebuff, for her responseis to turn to the servants with the injunction, ‘Do exactly as he tellsyou.’ Far from allowing herself to be deterred by the apparent rebuke,

ridiculous’ (Kritik is keine schlechte Sache, aber ubertreibt man sie, kann sie lacherlichwerden). Johannesevangelium, 193; cf. ET, 176.

62 For detailed criticism and an attempted reconstruction of this passage see Excur-sus IV.

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she rejects the negative role she is evidently being assigned and takespart in the action, disclosing as she does so a new set of characters,of whom she is in a certain sense the leader. There is a temptation toallegorize at this point—Mother Church and her ministers,ƒ �ØÆŒ� Ø—but there is no obvious justification for doing so.

So the mother of Jesus occupies a mediating position, ranged in thefirst place with the hosts and guests, associating herself with theirneed, and eliciting, by her plea on their behalf, a sharp retort thatcontains a charge of misunderstanding; and in the second place withthe servants, who are waiting to do Jesus’ bidding. This mixture ofincomprehension and compliance is surely part of the meaning of thestory, emerging as it does from a study of the text itself, withoutrecourse to allegory or allusion. In the context of an appeal to Jewishreaders and listeners to come forward and declare themselves forChrist, the significance of Jesus’ mother (or part of it at least) is as arepresentative of those who do just that, those for whom misunder-standing is not a permanent obstacle to discipleship. This is not anallegorical interpretation: one cannot say, ‘for ‘‘the mother of Jesus’’read ‘‘Israel’’ ’. It is rather an interpretation deriving directly fromwhat Olsson calls ‘text-linguistic analysis’;63 and though slighter it isalso a less wayward example of the method than his own.

(b) The Reply of Jesus

‘What have I to do with you, woman?’ Coming so abruptly, the formof address ‘woman’ is startling and unexpected; and as Bultmannremarks, ‘it sets a peculiar distance between Jesus and his mother’,64

a distance already established by Jesus’ opening words, �� K�d

ŒÆd ��; The problem with this expression, as with its Hebrew coun-terpart, Ll

˝f

˝jl: ¯em

¯

, is that it is essentially ambiguous: its meaningneeds to be determined independently in each instance. Only fromthe context can it be determined whether the question about the kindof relation that exists between speaker and addressee expects any sort

63 Structure and Meaning, 8–13. Olsson muddies the clear and invigorating waters oftextual analysis with a strained and complex theory which would make the under-standing of the Cana episode dependent upon a detailed reading of Exod. 19 (and one ofits targumic expansions). He relies heavily upon the work of A. M. Serra, ‘Le tradizionedella teofanica sinaitica nel Targum della Pseudo-Jonathan Es. 19. 24 e in Giov. 1,19—2,12’,Marianum, 33 (1971), 1–39. Neither is worried by John’s general lack of interest inthe contrast between the Old Law and the New.

64 Bultmann, p. 116.

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of positive response. Nor is the expected answer necessarily the onethat is given. In reply to what is clearly a request for a miracle Jesusputs a question-mark over the relationship between himself and hismother—perhaps as Vanhoye has argued, with the intention ofsuggesting that it is time for the relationship to be changed.65 Inany case, though the expression may imply a reproach, it certainlydoes not signify a refusal to have anything more to do with the otherperson. When the widow of Zarephath uses it in angry indignation toElijah after the death of her son, he responds by raising the boy to lifeagain (1 Kings 17: 17–24).

The phrase h�ø lŒ�Ø # uæÆ �ı is almost always translated as astatement: ‘My hour has not yet come.’ Taking it this way, reading itin the context of the Gospel, and knowing what Jesus’ ‘hour’ willmean later, ‘it is unthinkable’, remarks Barrett, ‘that in this verse# uæÆ should have a different meaning, such as ‘‘the hour for me tosupply them with wine!’’ ’66 But why should the fact that it is not yetJesus’ hour for passing to the Father in suffering and glory prohibithim from performing a miracle at the beginning of his ministry? Thisdifficulty appears to me a further reason for retaining the phrase aspart of the original source. On the level of the source, Bultmannunderstands it to mean that ‘the miracle worker is bound to his ownlaw and must listen to another voice’;67 but perhaps the importantpoint is that the phrase shifts the interest for the first time from thespatial to the temporal. Even from the relatively restricted perspectiveof the source the timing of Jesus’ first miracle is important.68 Why?Because of the risk of misunderstanding. The source once againshows a surprising affinity with the Synoptic tradition, which alsosees Jesus as repudiating, in quite harsh terms, the claims of naturalkinship (Matt. 12: 46–50; Luke 2: 48 ff.—the finding in the Temple). Sohere, it is ‘not yet time’ for Jesus to perform a miracle, since there is arisk that it will be misunderstood. The outcome of the story showsthat the fear is ill-founded: Mary refuses to take no for an answer,and by showing her faith opens the way for the faith of others.69

65 A. Vanhoye, ‘Interrogation johannique’, 165.66 Gospel, 159. 67 Bultmann, p. 117.68 For the motif of ‘the right time’ in rabbinical literature, see R. Bloch, ‘Quelques

aspects’, 146 and n. 163.69 The phrase can be rendered in such a way as to give it almost the opposite

meaning: ‘Has not my hour already come?’ Vanhoye, who favours this punctuation,

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(c) Water into Wine

According to the Synoptic tradition, Jesus’ public career began withhis baptism, and after the forty days’ retreat in the desert continuedwith the call of the first disciples; only then did he embark on hispreaching and healing ministry. The Fourth Gospel follows a similarschema with obvious modifications. So before performing his firstmiracle he has already been recognized as the Jewish Messiah andgathered round him a number of followers. But he has not yet shownthe significance of his coming: given any sign of it. This he does in thechanging of water into wine.

Here, unquestionably, is the centre of the story, the event thatcounts as a sign and an invitation to faith. The contextual informa-tion supplied, above all the wedding, the huge volume of wine, andthe fact that the jars were there to comply with the Jewish custom ofpurification70 certainly contributes towards the meaning. Moreoverthe position of the story in the source (as the third panel of a triptych)must also be taken into account. This in itself rules out of court thetheory that the key to the story’s meaning lies in the prodigious, thatJesus’ primary role is that of thaumaturge, and that the content ofthe disciples’ faith is their justified conviction in his power to workmiracles. Rather, the whole context, and not simply the use of ‘sign’,����E , instead of ‘act of power’, �� Æ�Ø�, the word used by the

argues that elsewhere in the New Testament wherever h�ø is preceded by a question(Matt. 16: 9; Mark 4: 40 v.l. �H� PŒ; 8: 17) it introduces a further question. Moreover,this is the only example in the Fourth Gospel in which h�ø, commencing thesentence, is not followed by a connecting particle. But while this rendering beautifullyaccounts for the reaction of Jesus’ mother, it is not very easy to fit it in with whatprecedes, unless Vanhoye is right in understanding Jesus to be making a deliberatesuggestion that his relationship with his mother be changed: up to the present theauthority was hers—now it passes to Jesus. This is something of an overinterpretation,and the parallel in 7: 6 (see the next chapter) tells against it. But if it is right we wouldhave a further example of a theme in the source that the evangelist has adapted for hisown purpose: from being the hour of Jesus’ self-manifestation at the start of his publiccareer, # uæÆ is absorbed into the new theology of glorification and is utterly trans-formed in the process. It may even be the evangelist himself who was responsible forerasing the original question-mark!

70 The phrase ŒÆ�a �e ŒÆŁÆæØ��e �H ��ı�Æ�ø (v. 6) fits badly with the followingŒ���� ÆØ and may well be secondary, as Fortna (Gospel of Signs, 32) argues, and asWellhausen (p. 13) had already suggested. In that case the introduction of ‘the Jews’here would evince the evangelist’s determination to contrast the water of the olddispensation with the wine of the new.

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Synoptists to refer to miracles,71 points to the need of a symbolicinterpretation.

According to Mark, who is very interested in Jesus as a teacher butoften, like John, finds the lesson in the performance, Jesus used theimage of new wine bursting out of old skins when comparing his ownmessage with the customs of the Pharisees (Mark 2: 22). And it maybe significant too that making the same point in a different way hehad likened himself to a bridegroom: ‘Can the wedding guests fastwhile the bridegroom is with them?’ (Mark 2: 19).

Brown is right too to stress the significance of the wedding-feast,the most natural possible symbol of joy, fulfilment, and the promise ofnew life. The Book of Revelation actually speaks of ‘the marriage ofthe Lamb’ (Rev. 19: 7), and in the Old Testament we have no need togo further than the Song of Songs for proof that the most human ofall mysteries could serve as an inspiration for the most divine(though whether this was originally more than a glorious love-song is harder to determine). Israel’s feeling towards God was pro-foundly coloured by the image of God as husband and lover and anumber of Hosea’s key ideas are taken up by a much later prophet ina passage that exploits the earlier images to the full:

You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more betermed Desolate: but you shall be called My delight is in her, and your landMarried: for the lord delights in you, and your land shall be married. For asa young man marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you, and asthe bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.(Isa. 62: 4–5)

But clearly the heart of the passage remains the transformation ofwater into wine, another natural symbol of joyful celebration. ‘Thedays are coming’, runs the consolatory ending of the book of Amos,‘when the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shallflow with it’ (9: 13). Brown cites a number of other passages, the moststriking of which comes from 2 Baruch, where we find ‘an exuber-antly fantastic description: the earth shall yield its fruit ten thou-sandfold; each vine shall have 1,000 branches; each branch 1,000clusters; and each grape about 120 gallons of wine’ (2 Bar. 29: 5).Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see a link between the two images of

71 James M. Robinson (‘Trajectory’, 235 n. 9) reverts to Faure’s original designationof the source as the ‘miracle source’ (Wunderquelle). It will emerge why I think thissuggestion is wrong.

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the wine and the wedding in the beautiful love-song Isaiah imaginesGod singing to his vineyard (Isa. 5).72

All in all, Brown is fully justified in concluding that ‘through suchsymbolism the Cana miracle could have been understood by thedisciples as a sign of the messianic times and the new dispensation,much in the same manner that they would have understood Jesus’statement about the new wine in the Synoptic tradition’.73 Browngoes on to appeal to a verse from the Psalms of Solomon (17: 32) thattells how the Messiah will make the glory of God visible to all theearth. But this is to go too far. The transference of the glory from Godto Jesus is too striking a departure from tradition to see it as justanother messianic allusion. As the passage from Ps. Sol. 17 shows,the Messiah was simply a particular human being chosen by God ashis special assistant in the last days. If ���Æ belongs to the vocabularyof the source (which I think unlikely) then it can have meant nomore than the glory attaching to Jesus’ messiahship, and any sug-gestion of the glory of God’s self-revelation will have been hidden andindirect.74 But this is not necessarily how the evangelist himselfunderstood it.

(d) Conclusion

It seems worth repeating by way of conclusion that the faith of thedisciples that follows the first sign is not just one more example ofthe kind of superstitious awe aroused in any naıvely credulous audi-ence by the tricks of a magician. This miracle, so different from thosethat were to come, resembles them in the most important point, for ittoo suggests by its very nature the kind of faith it is designed to inspire:a faith of fulfilment and of transformation, of joy and celebration.

72 All such suggestions are rejected by Bultmann: ‘the wine of the marriage at Canadoes not come from the Old Testament expectation of salvation but from the Dionysuscult in Syria’ (120 n. 1). For further arguments in favour of this provenance see MortonSmith, ‘On theWine God’. Certainly the early church, as Bultmann shows (p. 119), hadno hesitation in making the connection. But this does not affect the significance theauthor himself attached to the story as a powerful proof of Jesus’ messianic dignity. Cf.M. Rissi, ‘Die Hochzeit in Kana’. M. Hengel’s ‘Interpretation of the Wine Miracle’,though remarkably rich in reference, adds little to the understanding of the passage.

73 Brown, p. 105.74 For the evangelist, the glory that shines out of Jesus’ miracles is very definitely

the glory of God: Jesus, about to raise Lazarus, says to Martha: ‘Did I not tell you that ifyou would believe you would see the glory of God?’ (11: 40). Though there, it is to benoted, vision is preceded by faith.

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Linked deliberately to the accounts of the Testimony and the Recog-nition (‘on the third day’), it completes the triptych with a symbolicaffirmation that ‘the old order changeth, yielding place to new’.

So far, so good: but out of the water-jars of Cana surges a newproblem, for the relationship between miracles and messiahship is farfrom clear, and the significance of the signs recorded in the source isdisputed.

4. signs and wonders

This new problem is not obvious upon a cursory or casual reading ofthe Gospel, where miracles are firmly linked to messianic expect-ation: ‘many of the people believed in him; they said, ‘‘When theMessiah appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?’’ ’(7: 31). But such evidence as there is in Jewish sources of anyassociation between messiahship and the miraculous is very scanty.Schnackenburg declares roundly that ‘Miracles played hardly anypart in messianic expectation in Judaism.’75

In discussing this question, scholars tend to branch off in twodifferent directions: for the sake of convenience these may besummed up as the divine and the prophetic. Of the two it is the divineschool that seems to have attracted the largest following—in fact, socommon is the application to Jesus of the sobriquet Ł�E� I �æ, or‘divine man’, that Dwight Moody Smith, writing in 1976, felt able tosay: ‘The existence of this theios aner is presently regarded as well-established, the only question being at what traditional level thisChristology is to be found.’76 So according to this theory what John(or his source) was doing was to compose something like an aretal-ogy, a compilation of the wonderful achievements of some greatman, and specifically of a Ł�E� I �æ. Now if we ask (with Mark)who, or rather (with Matthew) what manner of man is this theiosaner, the answer is, briefly, ‘a very remarkable one’: ‘He is a man withqualities and abilities far beyond the normal, the darling of the gods,

75 Schnackenburg, ii. 148.76 ‘The JohannineMiracle Source: A Proposal’, in R. Hamerton-Kelly and R. Scroggs

(eds.), Jews, Greeks and Christians: Essays in Honor ofWilliam David Davies (Leiden, 1976),167 (repr. in Smith, Johannine Christianity (1984), 65). The first author to propagate theinterpretation of the Johannine Jesus as a ‘divine man’ was G. A. P. Wetter in hisinfluential book Der Sohn Gottes.

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and a kind of mediator between the divinity and human beings, atonce their counsellor and their ŒÆ�æŁ���� (champion?), to whomthey come drawn from afar.’77 This avowedly crude sketch is allLudwig Bieler offers by way of a general characterization of theeponymous hero of his scholarly study, which is respectfully citedby most subsequent writers on the topic. ‘Superman’, in fact, mightbe a less misleading translation of the term than the usual ‘divineman’, which could carry for the unwary overtones of ontologicaldivinity it rarely has in the Greek. For the ‘divine man’ is seldomdivine in the strong metaphysical sense.78 Bieler himself shows morecaution than some others in assigning superhuman traits to Jewishand Christian heroes.79 In the whole corpus of Jewish-Christianliterature of the period he can cite only one clear instance (Jos. AJ3. 180) of the use of the term, and he remarks later in an aside that itis one for which ‘there is of course (naturlich) no place in the NewTestament’.80

What is very puzzling in this affair is how the consensus of whichSmith speaks was reached in the first place: perhaps the explanation

77 Bieler, ¨�E� I �æ, i. 20.78 As Morton Smith points out, ‘it was natural and 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’:‘Prolegomena’, p. 184. The sheer imprecision of the word should have disqualified itfrom the use to which it has been put by New Testament scholars. Morton Smith doesnot mention the gift of healing. This too, as we know from cases like Apollonius andAsclepius, was thought of, along with their other qualities of wisdom and goodness, asa divine power.

79 Helmut Koester, for instance, in ‘One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels’, has aparagraph headed ‘Jesus as the Divine Man (Aretalogies)’, in which he states categor-ically that in the primitive sources underlying the gospel miracle stories, ‘Jesus appearsas a man endowedwith divine power who performsmiracles to prove his divine qualityand character’ (p. 186). In a vain search for any direct New Testament evidence to backup his contention that Jesus was regarded as a Ł�E� I �æ he lights upon Acts 2: 22: ‘aman attested . . . by God with mighty works and wonders and miraculous signs’. ‘InLucan theology’, comments Koester, ‘ ‘‘by God’’ emphasized the subordination of Jesusto God. But this is not necessarily the original intention of the formula which Luke usedin Acts 2: 22–24’ (188 n. 103). An excellent example, surely, of argument by innuendo!Haenchen is another commentator who assumes without question that the ‘Vorlage’was concerned to give miraculous proofs of Jesus’ divine sonship. He does not acceptthe theory of the signs source as such, but is prepared, in assigning the story of thenobleman of Capernaum (4: 46–54) to his ‘Vorlage’, to say that it belongs to a numberof passages ‘which aim at narrating Jesus’ miracles in order to demonstrate his divinesonship’ (Johannesevangelium, 83). Yet there is not a word in this passage that so muchas hints at divinity.

80 ¨�E� I �æ, 3 n. 7.

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lies in the readiness with which scholars, not being supermen, followone another down culs-de-sac, Sackgassen, and the blindest of blindalleys.81 Writing about the same time as Smith, Robert Fortna asks,rather confusingly:

Granted that it is difficult to say whether in any absolute sense a particularportrait of Jesus is (or is not) that of a divine man; can we see indications thatthe Signs-Gospel’s Jesus is more nearly a divine man than John’s or viceversa? Does John play down or emphasize the elements that might be sointerpreted in the pre-Johannine christology?82

His answer, which is that the evangelist has suppressed certain‘divine man’ features present in the source, whilst exaggeratingothers, might suggest that the concept is unhelpful, not to saymisleading. And indeed Fortna himself concludes by questioningthe value of the category in the study of the Fourth Gospel: ‘We areled to ask whether John or his predecessor could consciously haveconceived of Jesus as divine man. Hellenistic as their Judaism surelywas, they both—more than most other New Testament writers—retain a sense that Jesus is none other than the Messiah of Jewishexpectation.’83 Since, then, the Ł�E� I �æ is turning out to be littlemore than a disconsolate chimera, we may leave him to his lam-ent.84 But the category Fortna selects to replace him is equallyunhelpful; he goes on to ask (‘perhaps too crudely’): ‘Are the mi-raculous deeds of Jesus consistent with his humanity or do theyrather display his divinity?’85 And in shifting from the superhumanto the divine (now seemingly in the full sense of the word) he issimply laying one inappropriate category aside in order to pick up

81 Another example is the widespread assumption, only recently abandoned, that atthe time of Jesus there existed a fully operational anti-Roman faction called the Zealots.

82 ‘Christology in the Fourth Gospel’, 491.83 Ibid. 493.84 The main credit for the exposure of the fallacy must go to Carl H. Holladay, Theios

Aner in Hellenistic Judaism. In his treatment of Philo he may underrate the extent towhich a Platonic view of the divine qualities of the human F� has affected Philo’sevaluation of Jewish heroes, especially Moses (cf. Vit. Mos. 1. 27). But he certainlysucceeds in his main aim. Having established that the role of the Ł�E� I �æ concept inHellenistic Judaism is a crucial middle link for any theory which emphasizes itsimportance for New Testament christology, he shows that it ‘has been repeatedlybased upon the same few bits of data, conspicuous not only for their paucity but alsofor their ambiguity’ (44). More recently, A. Pilgaard similarly concludes that the use ofthe term as a model for early christology ‘rather confuses than clarifies this question’(‘Hellenistic Theios Aner’, 122).

85 ‘Christology in the Fourth Gospel’, 495.

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another. This emerges only too clearly from his conclusion, which isthat the miracles of the signs source are ‘merely disclosures of thefact of Jesus’ divinity’.86 To say this is to disregard the fact that ‘theMessiah of Jewish expectation’ was a human figure, not a divine one,and that in the context of contemporary Judaism miracles, howeverextraordinary, are not per se indications of divinity.

A rather different error vitiates another important attempt todelineate the christology of the signs source:

In the term Ł�E� I �æ we have hit upon the one and only word capable ofthrowing light upon the religio-historical presuppositions of the Signs-Source: all the essential theological traits of the miracle stories in the sourceare also to be found in the hellenistic concept of the Ł�E� I �æ. In point of factthere is not much to separate the Jesus of the Signs-Source from this miracle-worker of the ancient world: all one could adduce would be the name ofJesus, his Jewish origin, his annunciation by the Old Testament prophets,and the fact that as Christ he is the Son of God. That is little enough.87

What impresses Jurgen Becker most about the source is the way inwhich it pushes the prodigious aspects of the stories ‘right up to thelimits of what is tolerable’.88 But tolerable to whom? Is it not worthinvestigating the possibility that the evangelist was not utterly trans-forming the character of his source when what he emphasized wasnot the prodigious but the symbolic? True, Becker, unlike Fortna,does not actually believe that the source saw Jesus as divine. But bothare equally guilty of neglecting the properly messianic features withwhich the source abounds.

Or does it? For we are here back with the difficulty with which Iprefaced this section, the difficulty that contemporary Jewish sourcesdo not portray the Messiah as a thaumaturge: ‘Of course the Messiahis a wondrous warrior and a marvellously wise ruler. But he is notportrayed as one who heals the paralysed, miraculously providesbread and water, restores sight to the blind, or raises the dead.’89

Martyn himself answers this difficulty by appealing first to theprophet-like and secondly to the Elijah-like traits in the source’sportrayal of Jesus.90 Not the Messiah himself but the other two

86 Ibid. 498. 87 J. Becker, ‘Wunder’, 141 (my italics).88 ‘bis nahezu an die Grenzen des Ertraglichen’, ibid. 137.89 Martyn, History2, 96. Cf. de Jonge, Stranger, 91–2.90 The first of these comparisons is established chiefly in History, chs. 5–6, and the

second in Gospel, ch. 1. For a good discussion of the wonder-working associated withprophets see John Barton, Oracles, 99–102.

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quasi-messianic figures with which Jesus is identified in the Gospel,Elijah and (the new) Moses, are in fact credited with miracle-workingpowers that show certain similarities with those exhibited by theJesus of the signs source. The first two signs, the miracle at Cana, andthe healing of the nobleman’s son (4: 46–54) are reminiscent ofElijah’s two great deeds of kindness to the widow of Zarephath—first of provision (the jar of meal and the cruse of oil) and then ofresurrection (1 Kings 17: 8–24). As for Moses, it is enough to point tothe parallelism between the miracle of manna and the miracle ofbread (ch. 6).

Martyn suggests as a general solution to the problem that traitsassociated with Elijah and the Moses-like prophet may have ‘rubbedoff’ on to the Messiah and thus have accounted for the compositechristology we find in the Gospel. This is surely right, but there aretwo further points to be made.

In the first place, it may be that in drawing such a fine distinctionbetween the miracles of Jesus and those associated with figures likethe Samaritan and Theudas, Martyn is paying too little regard to thegeneral tendency (to which Hellenism must have contributed) toassign wonder-working powers to any important and influentialfigure of the day. (So why not the Messiah also?) As Geza Vermeshas argued,91 the remarkable deeds of Jewish charismatics like Honithe Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa are also relevant to theunderstanding of Jesus, even if these men did not actually have anymessianic pretensions.

In the second place, there is a real possibility that among thetributaries feeding into the signs source was a Synoptic-type traditionlinking Jesus’ wonder-working activities first with his preaching ofthe Kingdom and secondly with his own messianic claims. Martynpoints out that the prophecy of eschatological fulfilment in Isaiah 35

does not even mention the Messiah, and so ‘is clearly inadmissible asevidence for an expectation of the Messiah as a miracle-worker’.92

But according to one tradition, when John the Baptist sent messen-gers to Jesus to ask ‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look foranother?’ (Matt. 11: 3; Luke 7: 20), it was largely in terms of thisprophecy that Jesus replied. At least in Christian circles Jesus’ mir-acles had already come to be regarded as signs of the fullness of

91 Jesus the Jew, ch. 3. 92 History2, 97.

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time:93 ‘False Messiahs and false prophets will arise and show signsand wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect’ (Mark 13: 22). Asthis quotation makes plain Jesus was seen not just as Messiah but asprophet; and the idea that a prophet was authenticated by preternat-ural signs was rooted in the Old Testament and was accepted inrabbinic Judaism. No doubt the signs source shows no more directinterest than does the evangelist in the theme of the kingdom of God.But there survives in his work a firm connection between the miracletradition and the person of Jesus, a connection confirmed by hisexplicit denial (10: 41) that John performed any signs. If Jesus’ replyto his mother in John 2: 4 is correctly read as a statement (‘My hourhas come’), this is how it should be understood.

conclusion

The miracles of Jesus then are above all signs: they belong to atradition that associates Jesus’ actions, and especially his healing,with the fulfilment of prophecy. Perhaps it takesmore than just insightto be able to summarize the healing of the halt and the blind, theraising of the dead, as ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’; but beforeJohn the evangelist has turned the full beam of his religious geniusupon Jesus’ signs, it is surely obvious that to see him primarily as aHellenistic wonder-worker is to fall well wide of the mark.

We have seen that the combination of a Synoptic-type traditionand the ‘rubbing-off ’ of which Martyn speaks helps to explain,among other things, the question of the crowd: ‘When the Messiahappears, will he do more signs than this man has done?’, wherethe link between miracles and messiahship is taken for granted.But the passage in which this question occurs (ch. 7) reflects astage in the history of the community in which growing animosityis evinced by the Jews towards the Christian believers in their midst;moreover, the christological reflection of the group has advancedwell beyond the simple messianic faith of its beginnings. In the next

93 It is true that even later on in Jewish–Christian controversy (e.g. Justin) themiracles of Jesus play no part; cf. Schnackenburg, ii. 475 n. 42. But in the Pseudo-Clementine recognitions, they do constitute evidence of Jesus’ messianic status: ‘Hewho was expected comes, bringing signs and miracles as his credentials by which heshould be made manifest’ (ch. 40. 1).

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chapter some suggestions will be offered about the direction in whichthe thinking of these Jewish followers of Jesus was moving.

‘We have found him of whom Moses wrote in the Law (theProphet); we have found Elijah, who is to restore all things; wehave found the Messiah and the Son of God.’ These are the cardinalaffirmations of the signs source, the earliest traceable literary pro-duction of the Johannine community, whose conclusion was takenover by the evangelist as a fitting end for his own work: ‘these [signs]are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son ofGod’.

In his great commentary, Bultmann allows the Old Testament tobe jostled and frequently elbowed out by huge numbers of otherancient texts. This fits in with his own perspective: by minimizingthe influence of the Old Testament, he can highlight the independ-ence and the novelty of the revelation of Jesus. But it also involves aserious misreading of the Gospel, which remains faithful to its sourcein its insistence that Jesus fulfils in every respect the eschatologicalexpectations of the Jews. For all the mysteriousness and otherness ofhis person, he is set firmly in the context of a living tradition. He is notutterly unintelligible and remote; the area of his intelligibility islimited and defined in the lapidary formula drawn from one of themost ancient of Christian confessions: ‘Jesus is the Messiah.’

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Excursus IV: A Call to Faith

1. general considerations

If one begins by asking what justification there can be for attemptingto reconstruct a source in this chapter (or in any other), the answermust be, as always, the presence of aporias, as the awkward transi-tions have been called since Schwartz, and in this instance thepresence too of clear doublets. Yet the passage we are consideringis so complex we might react as Schwartz (‘Aporien IV’, p. 497) sayshe did to the puzzles of chapter 7, being tempted ‘to lay down [his]critical knife and to leave these sections in the confusion and disorderinto which they have fallen through having been worked over somuch (durch die Uberarbeitung)’. In the opinion of the majority ofthose scholars who have wrestled with the difficulties of the passagethe most feasible explanation of the present text is that an originalsource has been adapted and expanded by a later editor. This doesnot mean that a thoroughly convincing reconstruction of the ori-ginal source is actually possible: the reorganization may have beentoo complex, the omissions too extensive to permit this. But it doesmean that a full understanding of the passage depends upon recog-nizing that it had a prehistory. If the broad outlines of the source arediscernible (enough for its general thrust and purpose to be seen)then this is as much as we can expect. Criticizing the theory ofWolfgang Langbrandtner, Raymond Brown remarks that it depends‘on his ability to reconstruct verse-by-verse the Grundschrift and theadditions of the redactor’. ‘No firm theory’, he continues, ‘can bebuilt on so disputable a base, for every scholar will have a differentassignment of verses to the putative Grundschrift.’1 It is a salutarywarning, but not one that should frighten us off altogether. As JamesM. Robinson insists, ‘the question of the difficulty of reconstructing asource is not identical with the question of whether the sourceexisted’.2 Although certain rungs of our ladder may be more ricketythan others, it may be possible to climb down to the Grundschriftwithout too heavy a fall. The validity of many arguments will

1 Community, 181. 2 Trajectories, 242.

frequently depend upon previous options, but provided these areclearly signalled, then it is possible to proceed—though obviouslythe further we descend the more caution is required.3

We should start by admitting the real difficulties confronted bythose who wish to read John 1: 19–51 as a continuous composition.Since in this matter I largely agree with Robert Fortna, thoughtaking more note than he does of Boismard’s earlier suggestionthat two different versions have been conflated to produce the pre-sent text of John 1: 19–34, some response must be made to thestrictures of Barnabas Lindars upon Fortna’s work in Behind theFourth Gospel (pp. 28–36). Most of Lindars’s most effective argumentsignore the careful and laborious sifting undertaken by Fortna in thecourse of his reconstruction, and aim instead at his general plan.Certainly the weakest parts of Fortna’s thesis are (a) his convictionthat the document was not just a semeia source but a signs Gospel;and (b) his belief that the story of the miraculous draught of fishes inchapter 21 originally belonged to the source. And Lindars shows howdifficult it is (above all in chapter 11) to separate out narrative anddialogue. (Though this argument loses much of its force if, withBammel, one holds that the source ended with the notice concerningJohn the Baptist at the end of ch. 10.4) Moreover, Lindars is surelyright in his contention that there is no possibility of reconstructinganything like the whole of the original source. Fortna does notactually say that there is, but much of his work seems to lean onthat assumption. The evangelist is likely to have been much bolder inhis adaptation of the source than Fortna (sometimes) allows. Still, inexposing the weaknesses of Fortna’s theory, Lindars ignores itsstrengths—in particular the presence of the aporias from which thewhole theory took its rise. Paradoxically, in arguing that the sourcewas a signs Gospel that included both a passion and a resurrectionnarrative, Fortna relinquishes the one argument that the opponentsof the signs-source theory have found most difficult to refute—thereference, right at the end of the Gospel, to ‘many other signs that arenot written in this book’ (20: 30; see Excursus I). In his later work(1988) he abandons this theory, suggesting instead that the original

3 Rereading this paragraph 15 years later, I must admit that my confidence in thepossibility of reconstructing the source even approximately has dwindled withthe years. Yet I still believe that there was some kind of missionary document (possiblythe work of the evangelist himself ) that preceded the Gospel itself and was used in itscomposition. With that caveat the excursus may be allowed to stand.

4 ‘John Did No Miracle’.

186 Genesis

signs source was combined with a primitive passion narrative, repre-senting, he thinks (p. 215), a theological stage earlier than Mark’s,before being incorporated into the work of the fourth evangelist. Thismakes for a somewhat complex theory that cannot be consideredhere. I do not know how the signs source continued, but there aregood reasons for thinking that this is how it began.

2. reconstruction of the signs source of

john 1: 19–2: 115

(1) � ˙ "Ææ�ıæ�Æ

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��ø ��· 7 y�� qºŁ� �N� �Ææ�ıæ�Æ ¥ Æ . . . � ��� �Ø�����ø�Ø �Ø�

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ƒ . . . ƒ�æ�E� ŒÆd ¸�ı���ÆØ ¥ Æ Kæø���ø�Ø ÆP�� · �f ��� �r; . . . 20 ŒÆd

. . . PŒ Mæ ��Æ�; ŒÆd ‰�º�ª��� ‹�Ø Kªg PŒ �N�d › �æØ����: 21 ŒÆd

Mæ����Æ ÆP�� · �� s ; �f �˙º�Æ� �r; ŒÆd º�ª�Ø· PŒ �N��: › �æ����� �r

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º�ªø · . . . ���� �H &���Œ� n ��E� PŒ Y�Æ��; . . . 31 ŒIªg PŒ

fi X��Ø ÆP�� ; Iºº� ¥ Æ �Æ �æøŁfi B �fiH ���æÆcº �Øa �F� qºŁ . . .�Æ����ø : 32 ˚Æd K�Ææ��æ��� ��ø �� º�ªø ‹�Ø ��Ł�Æ�ÆØ �e

� �F�Æ ŒÆ�Æ�ÆE ‰� ��æØ���æa K� PæÆ F ŒÆd ���Ø � K��

ÆP�� : 33 ŒIªg PŒ fi X��Ø ÆP�� ; Iºº� › ���łÆ� �� �Æ�����Ø K o�Æ�Ø

KŒ�E �� �Ø �r�� · K�� n i Y�fi �� �e � �F�Æ ŒÆ�Æ�ÆE ŒÆd �� K��

ÆP�� . . . 34 y��� K��Ø › KŒº�Œ�e� �F Ł�F.28 �ÆF�Æ K ´�ŁÆ �fi Æ Kª� �� ��æÆ �F ��æ� ı; ‹�ı q › ��ø ��

�Æ����ø .

(2) � ˙ �` ƪ �æØ�Ø�

35 'fi B K�Æ�æØ �ºØ �ƒ���Œ�Ø › ��ø �� ŒÆd KŒ �H �ÆŁ��H ÆP�F

��; 36 ŒÆd K��º�łÆ� �fiH ����F ��æØ�Æ�F �Ø º�ª�Ø· Y�� › I� e� �F Ł�F.37 ŒÆd XŒı�Æ ƒ �� �ÆŁ��Æd ÆP�F ºÆºF �� ŒÆd MŒº�Ł��Æ �fiH

����F: . . .

5 Square brackets are placed around words in the text when reading or provenanceappears to me particularly open to question.

Excursus IV: A Call to Faith 187

38 ƒ �b �r�Æ ÆP�fiH· ÞÆ���; �F �� �Ø�; 39 º�ª�Ø ÆP�E�· �æ���Ł� ŒÆd

Zł��Ł�: qºŁÆ s ŒÆd �r�Æ �F �� �Ø ŒÆd �Ææ� ÆP�fiH ���Ø Æ ½�c #��æÆ

KŒ�� � · uæÆ q ‰� ��Œ���: 40 ( ˙ �` �æ�Æ� › I��º�e� )��ø �

—��æı �x� KŒ �H �� �H IŒı� �ø �Ææa ��ø ı ŒÆd

IŒºıŁ�� �ø ÆP�fiH· 41 � æ��Œ�Ø y�� ½�æH��� �e I��º�e �e

Y�Ø )��ø Æ ŒÆd º�ª�Ø ÆP�fiH· � æ�ŒÆ�� �e "����Æ . . .42 XªÆª� ÆP�e �æe� �e ����F : K��º�łÆ� ÆP�fiH › ����F� �r�� · �f �r

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—��æı: 45 � æ��Œ�Ø ��ºØ��� �e ˝ÆŁÆ Æcº ŒÆd º�ª�Ø ÆP�fiH· n

�ªæÆł� "øß�B� K �fiH ��fiø . . . � æ�ŒÆ�� ; � ���F ıƒe �F ��ø�c� �e

I�e ˝Æ�Ææ��: 46 ŒÆd �r�� ÆP�fiH ˝ÆŁÆ Æ�º· KŒ ˝Æ�Ææb� �� Æ�Æ� �Ø

IªÆŁe �r ÆØ; º�ª�Ø ÆP�fiH ��ºØ���· �æ�ı ŒÆd Y��: 47 �r�� › ����F�

�e ˝ÆŁÆ Æcº Kæ���� �æe� ÆP�e ŒÆd º�ª�Ø ��æd ÆP�F· Y�� Iº�ŁH�

���æÆ�º���� K fiz ��º� PŒ ���Ø : 48 º�ª�Ø ÆP�fiH ˝ÆŁÆ Æ�º· ��Ł� ��

ªØ ��Œ�Ø�; I��Œæ�Ł� ����F� ŒÆd �r�� ÆP�fiH· �æe �F �� ��ºØ�� �ø B�ÆØ

Z �Æ �e �c �ıŒB �r�� ��: 49 I��Œæ�Ł� ÆP�fiH ˝ÆŁÆ Æ�º· ÞÆ���; �f �r

› ıƒe� �F Ł�F; �f �Æ�غ�f� �r �F ���æÆ�º.

(3) � ˙ �Æ �æø�Ø�

21

˚Æd �fi B #��æfi Æ �fi B �æ��fi � ª�� Kª� �� K ˚Æ a �B� ˆÆºØºÆ�Æ�; ŒÆd q #����æ �F ����F KŒ�E· 2 KŒº�Ł� �b ŒÆd › ����F� ŒÆd ƒ �ÆŁ��Æd ÆP�F

�N� �e ª� : 3 ŒÆd ���æ��Æ �� Y ı º�ª�Ø # ����æ �F ����F �æe�

ÆP�� · r PŒ ��ı�Ø : 4 ŒÆd º�ª�Ø ÆP�fi B › ����F�· �� K�d ŒÆd ��;ª� ÆØ; h�ø lŒ�Ø # uæÆ �ı: 5 º�ª�Ø # ����æ ÆP�F �E� �ØÆŒ� Ø�· ‹ �Ø

i º�ªfi � �E �Ø��Æ��: 6 q�Æ �b KŒ�E º�ŁØ ÆØ �æ�ÆØ £� ŒÆ�a �e

ŒÆŁÆæØ��e �H ��ı�Æ�ø Œ���� ÆØ; �øæF�ÆØ I a ���æ��a� �� j

�æ�E�: 7 º�ª�Ø ÆP�E� › ����F�· ª����Æ�� �a� �æ�Æ� o�Æ��: ŒÆd

Kª��Ø�Æ ÆP�a� &ø� ¼ ø: 8 ŒÆd º�ª�Ø ÆP�E�· I �º��Æ�� F ŒÆd ��æ���

�fiH Iæ�Ø�æØŒº� fiø· ƒ �b X �ªŒÆ : 9 ‰� �b Kª���Æ� › Iæ�Ø�æ�ŒºØ � �e

o�øæ r ª�ª� ��� ; �ø �E �e ı��� . . . 10 ŒÆd º�ª�Ø ÆP�fiH· �A�

¼ Łæø�� �æH� �e ŒÆºe r ��Ł��Ø ŒÆd ‹�Æ ��Łı�ŁH�Ø �e

Kº��ø· �f ����æ�ŒÆ� �e ŒÆºe r &ø� ¼æ�Ø: 11 'Æ��� K�����

Iæ�c �H �����ø › ����F� K ˚Æ a �B� ˆÆºØºÆ�Æ� ŒÆd K�Æ �æø�� ��Æı�� ; ŒÆd K�����ı�Æ �N� ÆP�e ƒ �ÆŁ��Æd ÆP�F.

188 Genesis

The present text of 1: 19–51 divides naturally into two parts: (1) vv.19–34 (‘Testimony’) and (2) vv. 35–51 (‘Recognition’). The evangelist,who may be responsible for the translations of the Hebrew/Aramaicterms � ,Æ��Ø; "����Æ�, and ˚��A� in (2), certainly intended thepassage to be read as a continuous story. This is obvious from thetemporal indications, which continue in 2: 1. But the questionwhether the two halves of the passage were held together in thesource is more difficult. One must ask (a) where the beginning of thesource is to be located, and (b) how far the Recognition is to beregarded as a vindication and reaffirmation of the Testimony. Bult-mann separates the two episodes and thinks that the signs sourcebegan at 1: 35. But as Ernst Bammel points out, ‘1: 35 ff. is scarcely asuitable beginning’:6 the appearance of John the Baptist is altogethertoo sudden. But how far back should we go? Even v. 19 seems a veryabrupt beginning. As it stands, # �Ææ�ıæ�Æ clearly points back, and ifwe omit the opening clause as secondary, John needs to be intro-duced to the reader. As long ago as 1910, Spitta suggested that theGrundschrift began with 1: 6–7, 9, and pointed to Luke 2: 25 (Simeon)as a parallel. This suggestion has been revived by Boismard (1953)and J. A. T. Robinson (1962), followed by Fortna (1970). Boismard,citing Bultmann, points to Judges 13: 2 (Manoah) and (a decade later)to 1 Sam. 1: 1 (Elkanah) as parallels: the latter text, the openingwords of a book, is particularly convincing. (See too Job 1: 1:¼ Łæø��� �Ø� q . . . fiz Z �Æ �ø�.) Bammel thinks this suggestionimplausible, but if, as I believe, the Prologue hymn was composedafter the signs source by a member of the community, then one caneasily see why he or another (the evangelist?) will have been anxiousto bind it to the source (which we may assume already had canonicalstatus): this was done by an effective dovetail splice; v. 15 (repeated inv. 30) will have been composed at the same time for the sake ofbalance, and the phrase ¥ Æ �Ææ�ıæ��fi � ��æd �F �ø��� inserted in v.7 as a lapidary summary of the Testament that is to follow. Thisresults in a good workmanlike introduction, containing a number ofJohannine themes later to be modified by the evangelist (see John 7).It is also fitting that, having ended his Gospel with the conclusion ofthe signs source, he should take over its commencement too: ¥ Æ . . .� ��� �Ø�����ø�Ø �Ø� ÆP�F.

Having assigned both introduction and Testament to the source,we may go on to ask whether Testament and Recognition were

6 ‘John Did No Miracle’, 198.

Excursus IV: A Call to Faith 189

originally composed together—for it is theoretically possible that theRecognition was a subsequent addition. ‘The one of whom Moseswrote’ (v. 45) is clearly a reference to the Prophet, just as theMessiah (v. 41) is a reference to › �æØ����. J. L. Martyn, following uphints of Bultmann and others, has argued that the present v. 43replaces a short episode in which the missing title, Elijah, was attrib-uted to Jesus by Philip, the third of Jesus’ series of visitors. No doubt itis theoretically possible even so that the account of the disciples’discovery of Jesus was built upon the Testimony in order to reinforceJohn’s denials by positive affirmations on Jesus’ behalf. But if thatwere the case we should have to postulate an extremely complicatedprocess of redaction in which the Elijah title was first reintroducedand later obliterated.

The next important question that arises concerns the time scheme.It is clear, I think, that the �fi B K�Æ�æØ of v. 29 is out of place, and thatof v. 43, like the rest of that verse, suspect. That of v. 35, on the otherhand, makes a natural transition. We have also somehow to accountfor the �fi B #��æfi Æ �fi B �æ��fi � of 2: 1, which makes no sense as a redac-tional addition (unless one is attracted by Dodd’s fantastic suggestionthat it is a deliberate allusion to the resurrection).7 Since behind themultiple adaptation of 1: 19–2: 11 there can easily be discerned atriple development, one is tempted to see just two days in chapter 1,so that the three panels of the triptych will have (a) the Testimony,(b) the Recognition (taking place on a single day), and (c) the firstsign at Cana. The question of how Jesus managed to move fromBethany to Cana overnight seems to have worried the redactor, butneed not have concerned the author of the source. In any case, it ispossible to take the phrase �fi B #��æfi Æ �fi B �æ��fi � to mean ‘on the next daybut one’, which would allow plenty of time for the journey. More-over, the presence of the disciples at Cana is hard to explain if thestory was conceived independently of what precedes. Accordingly, bybracketing all the notations of time except the �fi B K�Æ�æØ of v. 35 andthe �fi B #��æfi Æ �fi B �æ��fi � of 2: 1, we reveal a clear and logical develop-ment. The remaining temporal notions will have been added laternot, as T. Barrosse has suggested,8 to emulate the seven days ofcreation, but to facilitate the transition between various episodes,much in the manner of Mark’s ubiquitous �PŁ��.

7 Wellhausen (13) comments drily: ‘After the next and the next and again the nextday, there now follows the third day.’

8 ‘The Seven Days of the New Creation in St. John’s Gospel’, CBQ 21 (1959), 507–16.

190 Genesis

Turning to the detailed analysis of (1) the Testimony and (2) theRecognition, we can move more rapidly because the ground is sowell-trodden. Fortna, in eliminating ‘the Jews from Jerusalem’ fromv. 19, defends the absolute use of I����ºº�Ø (making ƒ ƒ�æ�E� ŒÆd

¸�ı���ÆØ the subject). I have retained this proposal, though it seemsto me more likely that I�����ØºÆ replaced an original qºŁ . In thatcase the K� � ��æ�º��ø should probably be kept also. The phraseI�����ØºÆ ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ could have been added by the redactor with thepurpose of ensuring a proper reference for John 5: 33: ��E�

I����ºŒÆ�� �æe� ��ø � . I agree with Bultmann, Boismard, andothers in finding v. 25 the natural sequel of v. 21 and v. 31 of v. 26: ‘Eneffet la reponse a la question formulee au v. 25 est donnee au v. 31:‘‘Pourquoi baptises-tu?’’ ‘‘Pour cela je suis venu, moi, baptisant.’’ Or,dans le texte actuel de Jn, cette reponse n’est donnee que le lende-main, et devant un auditoire inexistant!’ As Boismard argued in hisearlier article, the witness of John the Baptist is directed to the priestsand Levites (1: 19). But he does not deliver his testimony until the dayafter they have put their question, by which time ‘ils ont disparu del’horizon’! I see no way of getting round this objection, and I alsoagree with Boismard that the contrast between two types of baptism,water and the Holy Spirit, is likely to be secondary. On the otherhand, the vision of the Holy Spirit descending ‰� ��æØ���æ isscarcely likely to have been added subsequently. In one importantrespect it resembles a fragment of the Gospel of the Nazarenes cited byJerome (In Isa. 11: 12: ‘descendit fons omnis spiritus sancti et requievitsuper eum.’) John also, unlike the Synoptists, alludes to the prophecyon which Jerome is commenting: that the spirit of Yahweh will restI Æ�Æ����ÆØ) on the Messiah. As for the debate concerning the cor-rect reading of v. 34 (› KŒº�Œ��� or › ıƒ��), I have already quotedSchnackenburg’s decisive arguments in favour of the former.9 DeJonge, having pointed out that ‘the title ‘‘Son of God’’ is exactly theone we should expect in 1: 34’, adds ‘and therefore it is likely to beoriginal’,10 an argument which violates one of the most hallowed ofthe canons of textual criticism: lectio difficilior potior. The episode isrounded off by v. 28, which fills this function well (Bultmann com-pares it to 6: 59; 8: 20; 12: 36), making it unnecessary to search further(in 3: 28–9., for instance: see Boismard and Fortna).

9 See supra, p. 161. 10 ‘Jewish Expectations’, 108 n. 13.

Excursus IV: A Call to Faith 191

In the Recognition there are two main problems: v. 43 and theconclusion. Subsidiary questions (e.g. who is responsible for thetemporal notations in v. 39) do not merit a long discussion. And inan excursus intended for specialists there is no need to reproduceMartyn’s admirably detailed defence of his reconstruction of v. 43.I would simply add that this revised version opens the way for areconsideration of the alternative readings of the third word of v. 41.Most editors recognize that �æøØ¡ is an attempt to smooth away theproblems raised by reading either �æH�� or �æH� . Generally�æH� is accepted as correct, but the adverb seems to have littlepoint (‘The first thing Andrew did’), and the trouble with reading theword as an adjective (‘Simon was the first he found’) is that Andrewis not credited with any further finding (unless he reappears as thesubject of � æ��Œ�Ø in v. 43, which is impossible, as this would alsomean attributing to him the decision to move to Galilee, MŁ�º��� ).But if Martyn’s solution is right, then the original reading in v. 41must be �æH��. To Andrew goes the credit of the first discovery in achain: Andrew finds Simon, Simon finds Philip, Philip finds Natha-nael. Once the chain has been broken, then �æH�� is not justredundant but out of place. (If �æH� were the original reading,then �æH�� could be explained as a scribal error, following y��; butthe reverse is just as likely—an original nominative altered to agreewith �e I��º�� .)

Lastly, the conclusion. Most who accept a signs source wouldexclude 1: 51. Even Dodd agrees that this high doctrine ‘may well bean addition by the evangelist’.11 Fortna12 argues against Bultmann13

that v. 50 should be retained, for two reasons: (1) there is a hiatusbetween v. 50 and v. 51 disclosed by the sudden shift from singular Złfi �to plural Zł��Ł�; (2) the approval of a vision leading to faith conflictswith the explicit theology of 20: 29. But (1) is scarcely an insuperabledifficulty: Jesus turns from Nathanael to address a larger audience.As for (2), the ‘vision’ here is figurative, not physical, unlike that ofThomas, and accordingly ����ø need not be taken to refer to greatermiracles. Rather it fits in, as Bultmann saw, with the Johanninetheology of 5: 20 and 14: 12. Fortna contends that v. 50 makes aneffective transition to chapter. 2. That is a matter of opinion: to meit seems a lame ending for an otherwise well-told tale. The fig-tree

11 Tradition, 312. 12 Gospel of Signs, 187. 13 Gospel, 98 n. 5.

192 Genesis

motif (whatever its significance) belongs to the evangelist too, and hasbeen added by him to v. 48 for the sake of continuity.

The interpretative problems of the Cana episode make source-critical analysis even trickier than usual. There are three mainproblems.

1. Does the initial exchange between Jesus and his mother belongto the original story or is it a later addition of the evangelist? Fortnaopts resolutely for the latter solution: ‘All attempts to dismiss theinconsistency in 3b–4 are futile; Jesus clearly rejects (v. 4) what is atleast an implicit request for a miracle (v. 3bc)—and yet proceeds inwhat follows to accomplish one.’14 Besides, he adds, both the themeof Jesus’ hour and to a lesser extent his disagreement with his familyare Johannine, and almost certainly not from the source. But thisreasoning is unsound: there are numerous themes in the source thathave been taken over and adapted by the evangelist; in any case, the‘family-disagreement’ motif may be Johannine, but it is thoroughlytraditional as well (e.g. Matt 12: 46–50). As for the inconsistency, ifsuch there be, this is even harder to explain on the hypothesis of aneditorial insertion. For if the rejection of a demand for a miracle wasabsolute and represented the evangelist’s considered judgement,then he would have had to have abandoned the source at thispoint in order to compose instead a Gospel made up entirely ofdiscourse and dialogue.

2. The contrast (in v. 9) between the ignorance of the Iæ�Ø�æ�ŒºØ �and the knowledge of the �ØŒ Ø concerning the source of thetransmogrified water is an awkward intrusion: it clutters up thesentence unnecessarily and is syntactically very clumsy. But al-though the question of mysterious origins is not exclusively thepreserve of the evangelist himself (in fact it is reminiscent of some-thing John the Baptist says in a phrase generally assigned to thesource: 1: 31), it nevertheless represents one of his central concerns.

3. How much of the conclusion of the story (v. 11) is pre-Johannine? At least ‘the commencement of the signs’ and the dis-ciples’ act of faith, which constitutes an inclusion with 1: 7 androunds off the triptych. To object, as some have done, that there isno place for an act of faith here, because this has already taken placein the previous chapter, is to overlook the importance for the writer

14 Gospel of Signs, 31.

Excursus IV: A Call to Faith 193

of this ‘opening’ of Jesus’ signs. The phrase ‘he manifested his glory’is probably an addition, though it cannot surely have been insertedat the same time as the protest in v. 4—a point Fortna ignores.Alternatively, ‘his glory’, as understood by the source, will havebeen the messianic glory of Jesus, which is only indirectly a manifest-ation of the glory of God.

I am unconvinced by the arguments of H.-P. Heekerens,15 whoholds that the two Cana miracles (2: 1–12 and 4: 46b–54) derive fromthe same source and were added to the Gospel by a later redactor.

15 Zeichen-Quelle.

194 Genesis

4

SON OF GOD

Between the simple messianic faith outlined in the previous chapterand the high christology associated with the figure of the Son of Manlies a middle ground. There can be no question of marking this outclearly, still less of railing it off. Nevertheless, one might reasonablyexpect to be able to detect in the Gospel at least some traces of thepassage from the earlier to the later faith. In searching for these onecould of course begin from the strong evidence of the finished gospel,with its clearly defined notions of pre-existence, exaltation, revela-tion, and so on. But the question I want to attempt to answer in thischapter (the most tentative in the book) means taking a ratherdifferent approach, one that involves the imposition of certain meth-odological restraints. The question is this: How far could the Johan-nine group proceed along what Koester calls ‘the Johanninetrajectory’ on its own steam, without requiring the kind of externalboost provided, in Bultmann’s theory, by the Gnostic myth?1

This is what we are given: (a) the sign source; (b) an indefinitenumber of Synoptic-type traditions; (c) the readiness the groupshared with other contemporary Jewish sects to search in the OldTestament for answers to its religious questions; (d) the need torespond to the increasingly hostile queries and challenges of thehost community. With regard to this last point, we have to assumethat the group was no more anxious to alter or develop its faith thanany other religious sect, and will have done so only out of the instinctof self-preservation or (less likely in this instance) the urge to make

1 Leaving aside the Mandaean sources, the written text with the strongest claim forinclusion under this category is undoubtedly the collection of poems known as the Odesof Solomon. But for all the remarkable resemblances in thought and idiom these bearto the Fourth Gospel, it is more than doubtful if they can be regarded as a source.Many scholars think the Odist was Christian, e.g. H. Chadwick: ‘The consistentlyChristian character of the Odes is unambiguous’ (‘Some Reflections’, 267). Similarly,J. Charlesworth concludes: ‘The numerous and pervasive parallels between the Odesand John cannot be explained by literary dependence of the Odist upon John or viceversa’ (‘Qumran’, 135).

converts abroad. I am deliberately postponing here any consider-ation of such strong Christian traditions, absent from the signssource, as could lead directly to the high christology familiar tous—the resurrection/exaltation motif, pre-existent Wisdom, theSon of Man. Had these been active elements within the group’sthinking from the beginning we might have expected a very rapidfermentation and a consequent ‘bursting of the bottles’ within a veryshort time.

There are, in fact, reasons for thinking that the Jesus group livedfairly peaceably for a time alongside the parent community and thatthe tension between them and the synagogue authorities did notreach snapping-point straight away. Martyn has shown how trau-matic the final irrevocable act of excommunication must have beenfor the new group. Their pain and their anger, so manifest in the textof the Gospel, cannot be explained except on the hypothesis of agradual disenchantment on the part of the establishment, even iftheir decision ‘that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiahshould be expelled from the synagogue’ (9: 22) was reached, asMartyn contends, in response to an authoritative decree from thecentral committee of the Pharisees in Jamnia, the reformulation ofthe so-called Birkath ha-Minim, the Benediction against Heretics.2

Moreover, this decree is generally (though insecurely) dated aroundad 85. If this is right, then some twenty years must have elapsedbetween the formation of the group of those who proclaimed Jesus asMessiah and their eventual excommunication. And however muchthis period is curtailed, there must remain an irreducible minimumphase of cohabitation before the divorce of the two parties.

Even so, it must be confessed that the direct evidence for a slowbuildup of tension between the two groups is very slight. By andlarge, John is faithful to the Synoptic tradition according to whichthe antagonism of the Pharisees towards Jesus was whipped up tomurderous proportions almost at the start of his public career. InMark 3: 6 we are told that after Jesus had cured a man with awithered hand on the sabbath, ‘the Pharisees went out, and imme-diately held counsel with the Herodians how to destroy him’. Formcriticism shows that this is the climax of a series of controversies thatare slung together in the Gospel with only the most perfunctoryregard for questions of time and place. This does not necessarily

2 History 2, 50–62. But see the reservations discussed in the Introduction, pp. 31–3.

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mean that these stories are all inventions of the Christian communityeager to defend their own point of view against their Jewish adver-saries (as Bultmann, for instance, holds).3 But it does make thingsdifficult for the historian, who in any case must conclude that thedecision to seek Jesus’ death was reached much later in his careerthan the Gospel text, read uncritically, might be thought to imply.

In the Fourth Gospel the situation is even more complex. It ishard to believe that the literary activity of the Christian group ceasedaltogether after the composition of the signs source, to be resumedyears later, following the expulsion from the synagogue. The presenttext of the Gospel may include certain episodes written down at amuch earlier period, when the attitude of the authorities may havebeen nervous or suspicious rather than positively belligerent. If so,these have been so thoroughly absorbed into the later text that theyare very much harder to detect than comparable episodes in theSynoptic Gospels, in which the oral tradition has left much moreobvious traces. Eventually the fourth evangelist shows himself pre-pared to transfer the story of the cleansing of the Temple, which inother Gospels was the ultimate and unforgivable outrage, and tomake of it Jesus’ very first act upon entering Jerusalem for the firsttime (John 2: 13–22). What is more, besides accepting the tradition ofthe Pharisees’ immediate and unremitting hostility to Jesus, John isprepared—as can easily be seen—to impose his own characteristicideas and preoccupations upon his material throughout. So there aretwo factors to be taken into consideration by anyone attempting toplot the earliest stages of the Johannine trajectory. On the one hand,there is the very high probability that the development of the newchristology was slow rather than sudden. It is this probability thatjustifies the methodological restraints I have already mentioned. Onthe other hand, there is the presence throughout the Gospel of thecontrolling hand of the evangelist.

1. the samaritan connection

As before, I propose to conduct this fresh enquiry by starting from asingle chapter, in this case chapter 7. But first it is necessary to spendsome time upon a discussion of an alternative theory concerning the

3 The History of the Synoptic Tradition (Oxford, 1968), 39–40.

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theological development of the Johannine group. This theory is theone outlined by Raymond Brown in his book The Community of theBeloved Disciple. Brown is very conscious that a major weakness ofMartyn’s earlier work, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, is itsfailure to account for the shift from the primitive faith of Jesus’earliest disciples to the new theology: ‘He offers no real explanationfor the appearance of a higher christology in the ‘‘Middle Period’’ ofpre-Gospel development.’4 Brown himself attempts to fill this gap byappealing to the fresh impetus given to the Christian Jews by theaccession to their ranks of a largish number of converts from Samar-itanism. The special interests of this group will, he thinks, haveprecipitated a new wave of theological reflection, eventually result-ing in the high Johannine christology we know so well. Moreover,‘the acceptance of the second group by the majority of the first groupis probably what brought upon the whole Johannine community thesuspicion and hostility of the synagogue leaders. After the conversionof the Samaritans in chap. 4, the Gospel concentrates on the rejectionof Jesus by ‘‘the Jews’’.’5

Other scholars attach even more importance than Brown to whatI have termed ‘the Samaritan connection’. G. W. Buchanan actuallyconcludes that the term ‘Jew’ in the Fourth Gospel meant simply‘non-Samaritan Palestinian’ (which is why Jesus himself could becalled a Jew), but that ‘the author came from another Semitic group,namely the anti-Judean, Samaritan Christian Church’.6 Even OscarCullmann, who is himself in favour of a strong Samaritan connec-tion, admits that this is pushing the evidence too far (though he doesnot reject Buchanan’s theory out of hand) and leans rather towardsthe alternative proposal (of J. Bowman7) that ‘the Gospel was writtenfor Samaritans’.8 A very different suggestion comes from J. D. Purvis,who handles the evidence much more cautiously than either Bucha-nan or Cullmann. He is ‘inclined to think that the author of theFourth Gospel was involved in a polemic with Samaritan Mosaism,and not only that, but also in a polemic with a heterodox branch ofthe Samaritan community which was engaged in the promotion of aparticular figure as the Mosaic eschatological prophet.’9 Against thisit must be urged that there is no good reason for supposing John’sdemotion of Moses to be directed exclusively against a Samaritan

4 Community, 36. 5 Ibid. 37. 6 ‘Samaritan Origin’, 163.7 ‘Samaritan Studies I’. 8 Johannine Circle, 51. 9 ‘Fourth Gospel’, 190.

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sect, since many Jewish groups, including the leaders of the estab-lishment who are John’s main target elsewhere, were ardent cham-pions of the cause of Moses.

Even a brief sketch of all the arguments advanced on behalf of thevarious hypotheses put forward regarding the Samaritan connectionwould take us too far away from the subject of this chapter. But thestory of the Samaritan woman in chapter 4 does undoubtedly suggestthat at one point, how early we cannot tell, the young Christiancommunity was joined by a number of Samaritan converts.10 Wehave seen how the early process of proselytization is mirrored inchapter 1: one disciple of John the Baptist calls a second, who calls athird, and so on. But the missionary activity reflected in chapter 4 isof a different order, for here it is not the disciples, who are amazed tofind Jesus talking with a woman, but the woman herself who spreadsthe good news: ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Canthis be the Messiah?’ And as a result, we are told, ‘They (i.e. otherSamaritans) emerged from the city and began to approach Jesus.’The evangelist distinguishes between this group, who believed inJesus because of the woman’s testimony (�Øa �e º�ª �B� ªı ÆØŒe�

�Ææ�ıæ����) and a larger group who believed on account of Jesus’own word (�Øa �e º�ª ÆP�F). These told the woman, ‘It is no longerbecause of what you said (�Øa �c �c ºÆºØa ) that we believe, for wehave heard for ourselves and we know that this is indeed the Saviourof the world’ (4: 39–42).

Brown points out that ‘immediately after chapter 4 we get thepicture of a very high christology and sharp conflict with ‘‘the Jews’’who charge that Jesus is being deified (5: 16–18)’.11 This implicationof post hoc ergo propter hoc is, I believe, an example of disingenuous-ness that one would find hard to parallel in Brown’s exegetical

10 There are two very distinct themes in 4: 1–42. The most prominent is that of the‘living’ or ‘fresh’ water of revelation, contained in a dialogue closely related to thediscussion with Nicodemus in ch. 3. The other theme centres upon Jesus’ ‘prophetic’insight concerning the woman’s marital status, her recognition of Jesus as prophet andMessiah, and the subsequent conversion of many of her fellow-countrymen. Thissecond theme no doubt furnished the core of the original story, round which theevangelist later wove his own characteristic theology of revelation. See above, Excur-sus III, ‘Salvation is from the Jews’, pp. 97–9. Even Birger Olsson, who insists onprinciple that the text must be interpreted integrally, admits that the passage ‘hasa prehistory’ and that ‘the author who gave the narrative its present form had athis disposal different kinds of material, each with its own ‘‘history’’ ’ (Structure andMeaning, 119).

11 Community, 36.

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writings. For it would surely be straining credulity too far to supposethat the sequence of events recorded in the Gospel directly reflectsthe catalytic effect Brown attributes to the accession of a numberof Samaritan converts to the original group. It may well be, as hesuggests, and the suggestion is a valuable and important one, that‘the presence of the new group (anti-Temple Jews and their Samar-itan converts) would make the Johannine community suspect to theJewish synagogue authorities’. But what was there in their beliefsthat could have prompted the charges of ditheism levelled againstJesus in chapter 5? After all, the Samaritans throughout their longhistory showed themselves just as firmly and as aggressively mono-theistic as orthodox Jewry.12

Now the Samaritans had a very different concept of Messiah fromthose whom I identified in Chapter 1 as the � �ı�ÆEØ. It certainlyexcluded both the traditional Davidic Messiah (for the Samaritansdetested both Zion and its king) and ‘Elijah back on earth’ (for in theSamaritan version of the Book of Kings Elijah was regarded as a falseprophet and a sorcerer, who died ignominiously by drowning inthe Jordan).13 Apart from Joseph and of course the patriarchs theone biblical personage who claimed their unquestioning allegiancewas Moses, and Brown argues that the Samaritan Taheb (either ‘hewho returns’ or ‘he who restores’)14 ‘was sometimes seen as a Moses-returned figure’. Now Moses was believed to have conversed withGod and to have come down to reveal to the people what God hadsaid. Consequently, continues Brown,

if Jesus was interpreted against this background, then Johannine preachingwould have drawn from such Moses material but corrected it: it was notMoses but Jesus who had seen God and come down to earth to speak of what

12 In his classic study J. Montgomery speaks of ‘the frigid monotheism of Samaritantheology’, Samaritans, 214. But see the letter addressed to the Sidonians at Shechem in166 bc in which they declare to Antiochus their readiness to have Zeus worshipped attheir sanctuary. Cf. E. Bickerman in RHR 115 (1937), 108–21.

13 These texts are most conveniently cited by their page references in John Macdo-nald’s edn. of the Samaritan Chronicle II. Elijah, for the Samaritans, was a falseprophet: so far from being credited with the resurrection of the son of the widow ofZarephath, he was actually held responsible for his death; for having wheedled out ofthe widow the meal and the oil which was all she had left, ‘he wolfed the whole lot andate them, and he went on his way’, with the result that the boy starved to death:Macdonald, 164 (Hebrew, 76). Later (171: Hebrew, 80), he is called a sorcerer (Þuk).

14ebev or ebav is a participial form from the Aramaic bfv (¼ Hebrew bfu). Which

translation one adopts depends on whether one takes it as a transitive or an intransi-tive form.

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he had heard above. . . . Thus the term catalyst applied to the newcomers inthe Johannine community implies that they brought with them categoriesfor interpreting Jesus that launched the Johannine community towards atheology of descent from above and pre-existence.15

The trouble is that those Samaritan sources which do appear toidentify Moses and the Taheb (notably the fourth-century MemarMarqah) are all late. In the Samaritan Pentateuch extra importanceis given to the Moses-like prophet of Deuteronomy (who is introducedinto the version of Exodus 20 as well), but there are no groundsfor thinking that this personage was identified this early as Mosesredivivus.16 Wayne Meeks, whose study of the Samaritan textswould be hard to fault (and who believes that the advanced Mosaismof the later texts is probably rooted in much older traditions), admitsthat ‘even the earliest sources do not lead directly to a point muchearlier than the fourth century ad, when a major literary revival andreconstitution of Samaritan life and thought took place’.17 Would wenot have considerable hesitation before using similarly dated Chris-tian sources (the Cappadocian Fathers, for instance) as witnesses offirst-century beliefs? Besides, even if we ignore this difficulty andaccept Brown’s suggestion that it was the Samaritan presence thatlaunched the community towards its high christology, it must be saidthat there was still a whole ocean of speculation to travel over beforeit finally arrived.18

Meeks thinks that Samaritan and later Jewish beliefs concerningMoses had a common source. He speaks of ‘a mutual cultivation oftradition by Jew and Samaritan’ and asks in what region it couldhave taken place. His own suggestion is that Galilee is far and awaythe best candidate:

Its geographical contiguity to Samaria, its susceptibility to Hellenistic influ-ence, the ambiguities of its relationship to Jerusalem and Judaea would allhelp to explain the actual incidence of the traditions in question. If Galileeand Samaria were once the center of the growth of these traditions, it would

15 Community, 44–5.16 J. D. Purvis even questions whether these texts prove that 1st-cent. Samaritanism

saw the prophet as an eschatological figure: ‘Fourth Gospel’, 188.17 Prophet-King, 219.18 One title that cannot be pressed into service, as Brown himself acknowledges, is

‘the Saviour of theWorld’ (4: 42), a hapax legomenon in John (and indeed in the whole ofthe New Testament), for it cannot be located among the tenets of the Samaritanreligion either.

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be quite natural that they would persist at the center of Samaritan andcertain Hellenistic Jewish literature, while only occasionally and peripherallyin ‘normative’ Jewish documents.19

This conjecture must be borne in mind as we in our turn move fromSamaria to Galilee.

2. messiah and prophet

Is the Messiah to come from Galilee? (7: 41)The Prophet20 will not emerge out of Galilee (7: 52)

For chapter 7 I postulate a rather complex process of compositionbuilt round two main blocks of material, the first (vv. 14–19a, 25–31)concerned with Jesus’ ascent to the Feast of Tabernacles and anensuing controversy over the twin titles of Prophet and Messiah,the second (vv. 32, 37–52) telling how the chief priests and Phariseessent the temple proctors to arrest Jesus and how their failure to do soprovoked a further controversy, also centred upon the same twotitles.21 But the focus of interest is very different in the two blocks.The first includes a number of far-reaching reflections upon thedeeper implications of the two titles. The second (which we areabout to consider) is relatively straightforward, and seems to hingeupon a local quarrel between Galileans in general and the authoritiesin Jerusalem (not called � �ı�ÆEØ in these stories).

The controversy that arises out of the dispute recorded in v. 41concerning the identity of Jesus turns upon a simple but fundamentalissue: can either (a) the Messiah (v. 41) or (b) the Prophet (v. 52) comefrom Galilee? To understand the story properly we must recognizethat ‘Galilee’ is both a geographical region and a value term. Else-where in the Gospel � �ı�ÆEØ is more often than not a value term also,though not, of course, a positive one. As we saw in Chapter 1 ittoo was partly a geographical designation, signifying primarily ‘the

19 Prophet-King, 257.20 The Bodmer papyrus (p66) is the only authority to include the article before

�æ����� in this verse; but though now widely accepted by scholars and students ithas not yet found its way into published translations and is not even mentioned by thelatest (27th) Nestle-Aland edn. of the Greek text (1993). See W. Meeks, ‘Galilee andJudaea’, 160 n. 4.

21 For an exegetical defence of this proposal, see Excursus V.

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inhabitants of Judaea’, partly an indication of religion. And thoughthe ��ı�ÆEØ are not explicitly mentioned in the story under consider-ation, they are obviously not very far away. For in tacitly acceptingJesus’ Galilean origin, the author of the story is aligning the unlet-tered populace of Jerusalem (the crowd, who are ignorant of the law)with Jesus and his fellow-Galileans against the rulers (ƒ ¼æ� ���)and the Pharisees, who refuse to be impressed. Nicodemus too, whoventures to protest on Jesus’ behalf, is disowned by his own peoplewith the sardonic question, ‘Surely you are not a Galilean as well?’ Soit is in this story, I suggest, that we have the first signs of the riftbetween the Johannine community and the authorities. The hostilityof ‘the high priests and Pharisees’ towards Jesus does not yet haveany particular ideological thrust; their opposition is based on thesimple fact, admitted by all, that Jesus came from Galilee.

Martyn points out that the expression ‘chief priests and Pharisees’is ‘a very strange combination’ because it was possible to be both apriest and a Pharisee.22 He suggests that the reason for this odditylies in the evangelist’s desire to indicate both (a) the historical oppos-ition of the leaders of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin during Jesus’ lifetimeand (b) his own local situation at the time of writing, when the localSanhedrin (Gerousia) will have been largely controlled by Pharisees.But if, as I believe may be the case, this story was composed before ad70, when the chief priests were still the official leaders of the Jewishcommunity in Jerusalem, then the two-level argument, if indeed thishypothesis is correct, will have been not so much temporal in thiscase as geographical. That is to say, the writer may have intended tosuggest that the Pharisees of his own city faithfully reflected theattitudes of the chief priests in Jerusalem, whose active oppositionto Jesus is one of the relatively few secure elements in the wholetradition.

However this may be, the point of the story is to be found in thestark contrast between the simple but conclusive answer of the ��æ��ÆØ, the temple proctors, stoutly supported by Nicodemus (‘Noone has ever spoken like this man’), and the automatic response ofthe Pharisees, whose mindless appeal to authority (‘Has a single oneof the ‘‘rulers’’ or the Pharisees believed in him?’) is accompanied bya curt dismissal of those who do not know the law. The effect of this is

22 History 2, 84.

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to set Jerusalem off against Galilee, the sophisticated south againstthe unlettered north.

Accordingly I think Wayne Meeks is right to detect here ‘a histor-ical bone of controversy between the Johannine community andthe Jewish group’;23 if so, and if too we are entitled to gloss Meeks’s‘Jewish group’ as the ��ı�ÆEØ in the sense I have established, then wemay have in this story a flickering recollection of an emphasis uponthe prophetic and messianic claims of Jesus rooted in a richer soilthan we could possibly know about from ‘orthodox’ Jewish sources.All four of Jesus’ first-named disciples were Galileans, Nathanaelfrom Cana, the other three from Bethsaida (which the evangelistthought of as in Galilee: 12: 21), and the commencement of Jesus’signs took place there. More important than the subsequent Samar-itan connection, then, was a Galilean connection.

Meeks argues that for John Galilee was the place of acceptance,just as Judaea, Jesus’ native land (�Æ�æ��) was the place of rejection:‘A prophet has no honour in his own country’ (4: 44). This proverbnot only has a different application in the Fourth Gospel (in the otherthree Jesus’ �Æ�æ�� is Galilee), but the addition of the adjective Y�Ø� ðK �fi B N��fi Æ �Æ�æ��Ø) points to a link with the bleak affirmation of thePrologue: ‘He came to his own [home] (�a Y�ØÆ) and his own [people](ƒ Y�ØØ) received him not’ (1: 11), unlike the Galileans, who didwelcome him (4: 45). Accordingly, says Meeks,

the journeys to Jerusalem in John symbolize the coming of the redeemer to‘his own’ and his rejection by them, while the emphasized movement fromJudea to Galilee (especially 4: 43–54) symbolizes the redeemer’s acceptance byothers, who thereby become truly ‘children of God’, the real Israel. Thus,while ‘the Jews’ symbolize the natural people of God, who, however, rejectGod’s messenger, ‘the Galileans’ symbolize those who are estranged from thenatural people of God, but became truly God’s people because they receiveGod’s messenger.24

More generally, he says,

the best explanation for the controversy stories in which ‘Galilean’ and‘Samaritan’ are epithets applied by Jewish opponents to Jesus or his followersis the assumption that Christians of the Johannine circle had at some timemet just this kind of polemic. The positive appropriation of these epithets,

23 ‘Galilee and Judaea’, 160.24 Ibid., 165. Contra R. Brown, Community, 39 f. andW. D. Davies, The Gospel and the

Land (London, 1974), 321–31.

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moreover, suggests that there may have been historical reasons why theJohannine community was willing tacitly to accept an identification as‘Samaritans’ and ‘Galileans’.25

The author of the story at the end of chapter 7 either did not know ofor else was uninterested in any claim that Jesus was actually a lineardescendant of David, born in Bethlehem and of Judaean national-ity.26 He is content to leave unanswered the scriptural argumentthat the Messiah was to come from Bethlehem (v. 42) and that theProphet was not to come from Galilee (v. 52). He ironically recordshow the Pharisees shrugged off any possibility that those who madesuch claims could come up with any convincing proof: ‘This bunchof ignoramuses is under a curse’ (v. 49).27 But at this stage there is nocounter-proof drawn from scripture. The rabbinic-type argument inwhich Jesus explicitly engages so frequently elsewhere in the Gospel(including, as we shall see, this very chapter) is missing here. Insteadwe have the kind of quietly devastating punch-line that is one of thehallmarks of this particular Gattung in the Synoptic Gospels: ‘Thisman has spoken like no one before him’ (v. 46).

Now this assertion is of crucial importance for our understandingof how the faith of the community developed. It constitutes a majorstep forward from the simple argument of the signs source (stillobservable in this chapter: v. 31) that Jesus’ miracles were the chiefguarantee of his messiahship, and gives us in this relatively earlypassage what is really the central theme of the whole Gospel, revela-tion. Already proclaimed as Prophet and Messiah, Jesus is beginningto take on the lineaments of the Revealer. Subsequently, in adaptingthe signs source, the evangelist will deliberately include Jesus’ wordsas well as his works in the reference, and thereby the sense, of �æªÆ.28

But even at this stage, I suggest, the movement has begun, and theJesus group has already had sufficient experience of what will later becalled ‘the words of eternal life’ (6: 68) to make it the single conclusive

25 ‘Galilee and Judaea’, 168.26 See Bultmann, p. 305 n. 6; Meeks, Prophet-King, 36–8; ‘Galilee and Judaea’, 156–9;

de Jonge, ‘Jesus as Prophet’, 55.27 Scholars agree that this is an allusion to those the rabbis refer to derogatorily as

ytae zp (‘literally ‘people of the land’, but used to signify people ignorant of the law).Bultmann (p. 310 n. 5) disputes Strack–Billerbeck’s contention that it was a technicalterm.

28 As for instance in 14: 12: ‘He who believes in me will also do the works that I do,and greater works than these will he do.’ These ‘works’ surely include the preachingand spreading of the message of the Gospel.

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answer to the charge of ‘leading the people astray’. One might addthat the new faith could not have survived simply on the strength ofa waning memory of Jesus’ miraculous deeds, whatever their sym-bolic force. This was now reinforced by the much more durableconviction of the abiding significance of his words. The vital differ-ence between words and deeds is that words can be repeated and, inthe right context, freshly understood so as to become the source ofnew life. No Christian writer has ever been more keenly aware of thisthan the fourth evangelist.29

In its present context, the amazement of the ��æ��ÆØ must refer tothe extraordinary pronouncement of Jesus on the last day of thefeast: ‘out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water’ (7: 38). It iseasy to see in this pronouncement, especially if one remembers theparticular quality of the Feast of Tabernacles and its ritual,30 animplicit claim on Jesus’ part to be a new Moses, less easy, perhaps,to read it as a claim to be the Davidic Messiah. Bultmann argues thatit is out of place here on the grounds that the ��æ��ÆØ would have tohave waited overnight before reporting back to the priests and Phar-isees who had sent them (vv. 32 and 45).31 He may be right, but thestory would be incomplete without some great prophetic declarationto account for the admiration of the ��æ��ÆØ. Moreover, the clearconviction that Jesus has spoken with an unparalleled authority,here put into the mouths of the officers sent to arrest him, mustsurely emerge from an experience of prophecy among the followers ofJesus. At this point the experience simply serves to reinforce theprimitive faith in Jesus as Prophet and Messiah. But it did not stopthere, and we may reasonably suppose that prophecy—in the Paul-ine sense of a God-given gift—will have continued to play an import-ant role in confirming the conviction of the young community thattheir insights into the true nature of Jesus’ messianic claims werebased upon an authentic revelation, and that as followers of Jesusthey were not, as the opposing party charged, being ‘led astray’. Ournext task is to attempt, in a modest way, to chart the appearance ofsome of these new insights, which as could be expected were associ-ated at first with already established beliefs.

29 Pascal, however, came close (in a passage he later struck out in obedience to thecensor): ‘Les propheties sont les seuls miracles subsistants qu’on peut faire’ (Pensees,760). But if these more enduring miracles are in fact to endure they must be writtendown—hence the need for a Gospel.

30 Raymond Brown (pp. 326–7) gives a good summary of the relevant material.31 Bultmann, p. 287.

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3. origins

When the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from. (7: 27)

The other two important themes in chapter 7, mission and origins,arise naturally out of questions concerning the Prophet (‘on whoseauthority does he speak?’) and the Messiah (‘no one knows where heis from’). Johannine theology carries both themes into realms ofmystical speculation far removed from the simple and perfectly jus-tifiable request for some guarantee that Jesus was all that he claimedto be. The deuteronomic promise that Moses would have a successorlike himself was accompanied by a warning to anyone eager to donprophetic garb not to ‘speak a word in my name which I have notcommanded him to speak’ (Deut. 18: 20; cf. 13: 1–6)—equivalently awarning against false prophets. And the (historically) earlier promiseof a successor to the throne of David was soon made more specificthan it was in the original prophecy (2 Sam. 7): in particular, theDavidic Messiah came to be associated with Bethlehem (Mic. 5: 1). Soit was only to be expected that Jesus should be required to producehis credentials.

Accordingly, questions concerning Jesus’ prophetic mission andspecial messianic claims need not have been inspired in the first placeby theological curiosity on the one hand or by suspicion and hostilityon the other. There is a tradition that Jesus’ teaching prompted thequestion, ‘On what authority are you doing these things, and whogave you this authority?’ (Matt. 21: 23)—a natural enough query toput to any teacher bold enough to challenge the received ideas of thereligious establishment. As for the question concerning Jesus’ ori-gins, it would be surprising if it had not been put to a messianicpretender, especially one whose Galilean connections were commonknowledge. We have already seen that there is no attempt at the endof chapter 7 to cover up these connections in the face of the challen-ging demand, ‘Surely the Messiah is not to come from Galilee?’ (7: 41).

In fact the implicit invitation to Jesus to engage in a debate over hisown origins has been taken up earlier in the chapter, not this time inresponse to a suggestion that the Messiah is to come from Judaea, butrather in answer to a question arising out of an altogether differenttradition, one that insisted upon the obscurity of the Messiah’sorigins, for when he appears ‘no one will know where he is from’(7: 27).

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The objection that the Messiah’s origins were to be unknown(v. 27) clearly conflicts with the subsequent objection (v. 42), basedon Micah 5: 1 ff., that he is to come from Bethlehem. It is, of course,possible to gloss over this difficulty by saying that the two objectionscome from different voices in a large crowd. But this is to ignore thatthe stories in which they are embedded, skilfully spliced as they are,fulfil different purposes and make different points. Whether they werelinked by the evangelist himself or found by him already joinedtogether in a continuous narrative need not concern us here. Whatseems clear is that of the two objections only the one concerning theobscurity of the Messiah’s origins is elaborated in a fashion fullyconsonant with the evangelist’s developed christology.

The expectation of an ‘unknown’ Messiah is attested in an import-ant passage in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho (second century), wherethe Jew Trypho is made to say: ‘Even if the Messiah is already bornand in existence somewhere, he is nevertheless unknown; even hehimself does not know about himself, nor does he have any kind ofpower until Elijah comes and anoints him and reveals him to all’(Dial. 8. 4; cf. 110. 1). This tradition was probably familiar to theJohannine group from the start: it is reflected in the words of John theBaptist, ‘There stands among you one whom you do not know . . . Imyself did not know him’ (1: 26, 31; cf. 1: 33). In the Johannineversion of the baptism story Elijah is replaced by the descent of theHoly Spirit in the form of a dove (1: 33). But although the passage inchapter 7 clearly depends upon the same tradition it sharply divergesfrom it in one important respect by insisting, against the tradition,that Jesus does know where he comes from, for his origin is precisely‘the one who sent him’: �Ææ� ÆP�F �N�Ø ŒIŒ�E �� �� I�����غ� .

What is more, in the Gospel account ignorance of the Messiah’sorigins is restricted to those outside the circle of Jesus’ disciples. Frombeing universal, even necessary, it has become the mark of theuninitiated. For these Jesus is a ��ı�ÆE� (4: 9; 18: 33–5), a man fromNazareth (18: 5, 7; 19: 19) or Galilee (7: 41, 52), ‘whose father andmother we know’ (6: 42). They are not, of course, totally mistaken inthinking so; when Jesus first appears on the scene (in the signssource) he is identified as ‘the son of Joseph, from Nazareth’ (1: 45);and when he says, in the passage under discussion, ‘you know me,and you know where I am from’ (7: 28), he is being ironical in theJohannine manner, but there is no need to punctuate the sentence asa question, as is done, for instance, in the RSV. As Bultmann says,

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the irony does not lie in any suggestion that their knowledge is basedon faulty information:

Yet in a paradoxical way this is at the same time a proof of their ignorance.Their knowledge is unknowing; for they use their knowledge, which isperfectly correct, to conceal the very thing which is important to know.Their knowledge serves only to prevent them from recognizing Jesus; hecannot be the Messiah because they know where he comes from!32

Evidently the gulf between Jesus’ adherents and his opponents isimmeasurably wider here than in the story that follows at the endof the chapter (which I have already discussed). For there the funda-mental opposition was between Galileans and ��ı�ÆEØ, and it waspossible to pass, as Nicodemus did, from one group to the other. Nodoubt in a sense that is true here too, but the principle of division isnow not external but internal, and the circle of believers has come tobe confined to those who have learnt from Jesus (once more againstthe tradition) where he is from: this knowledge is all that reallyseparates them from Jesus’ adversaries, and it is to be expected thatthose outside the privileged circle will from time to time betray theirignorance and their blindness (cf. 9: 29; 19: 9). Otherwise they wouldbe insiders and not outsiders.

Though the tradition concerning the uncertain provenance of theMessiah may well have given rise to questions regarding Jesus’ trueorigins and therefore helped to account for the growing convictionthat his real home was in heaven and not on earth, still it may bedoubted whether the Christian group would or indeed could havearrived at this answer without some inspiration from an altogetherdifferent source. The evangelist insists very powerfully—it is one ofthe Gospel’s most pervasive themes—that Jesus ‘came into’ the worldas an outsider, and that the question ��Ł� , whence, cannot besatisfactorily answered by naming any particular location on thisearth. For in the last analysis Jesus is not ‘of the world’ (KŒ �F Œ���ı)at all. He is (or was) in it but never of it.

The expressions ‘to be of ’ (�r ÆØ KŒ) and ‘to be born of ’ (ª� �ŁB ÆØKŒ) usually carry a double meaning in the Fourth Gospel, implyingboth origin and nature.33 To be of the earth is to be earthly; to be ofthe world is to be worldly. To be of heaven is to be heavenly, and also

32 Bultmann, pp. 297–8.33 See Ch. 10, p. 296. Bultmann comments on the meaning of �r ÆØ KŒ in a series of

brilliant notes: pp. 135 n. 4; 138 n. 1; 162 n. 3; cf. 655 n. 7.

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to be of heaven, from above (¼ øŁ� ).34 And so this double theme oforigin and nature establishes a contrast basic to the thought of theevangelist, the contrast between heavenly and earthly, between Godand the world, between above and below: ‘You are from below; I amfrom above; you are of this world; I am not of this world’ (8: 23).35

The majority of commentators, when discussing the passages inthe Fourth Gospel in which this opposition is most vividly expressed,are content to draw up a list of parallels, biblical and extra-biblical,36

and perhaps to underline the differences between orthodox andheterodox examples of the opposition. Bultmann filters out the coarsemythical features of what is here a simple, two-storeyed universe byassigning them to the Gnostic source. He then expounds his owninterpretation of the pure theology he has thus succeeded in isolat-ing. This coincides, one is not surprised to see, with the views of theevangelist. But this solution, remarkable as it is, remains extremelyinsecure, with no firmer support than the tenuous hypothesis of arevelation source.

Wayne Meeks, in an article to which allusion has already beenmade more than once,37 partially fills in the gap in our understand-ing of the Gospel’s developed theology with his suggestion that thecommunity’s profound sense of Jesus’ alienation from the world ispartly at any rate the reflection of its own experience vis-a-vis theJews. His followers, like him, are in the world (17: 11) but not of it(17: 16): ‘For if you were of the world, the world would love its own;but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of theworld, therefore the world hates you’ (15: 19).

The fourth evangelist’s insistence that Jesus enters the world as astranger and is never truly at home there runs counter to the whole

34 In ch. 3, where the entire series of oppositions is displayed, there is also, excep-tionally, the contrast between � �F�Æ and �æ� (v. 6).

35 Here, almost for the first time in considering the christology of the Fourth Gospel,one is forced to pay some attention to a possible apocalyptic background, not onlybecause, as we shall see in the next chapter, the opposition between the two realms,heaven above and earth beneath, is firmly associated with the (originally) apocalypticfigure of the Son of Man, but also because it is independently attested in contemporarywritings: ‘Those who dwell upon the earth can understand only what is on the earth,but he who is above the heavens can understand what is above the height of theheavens’ (4 Ezra 4: 21); cf. John 3: 12; Wisd. 9: 16 and other passages cited in Meeks,‘Man from Heaven’, 168–9 nn. 36–7.

36 See Str.–B. ii. 424–5.37 ‘Man from Heaven’. Meeks pays much attention to the ‘Son of Man’ theme in this

article, but consideration of this topic will be deferred until the next chapter.

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Synoptic tradition, where Jesus’ evident distress at being rejected byhis people is accentuated by a persistent awareness that they are hispeople, as they were of the prophets who preceded him: ‘O Jerusalem,Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent toyou!’ (Luke 13: 34). The perfectly natural curiosity concerning Jesus’origins cannot of itself have precipitated the whole of this remarkabletheology of alienation, nor could it have been carried through with-out a conscious reversal of the tradition that the Messiah himselfwould be as much in ignorance of his own origins as those on whosebehalf he came. According to John’s conception one essential elem-ent in Jesus’ message was a steady affirmation that his real originswere divine, that his first and only true home was in heaven. Such aformal contradiction of the traditions concerning Jesus himself aswell as of those concerning the Messiah he claimed to be is hardlyconceivable without some appeal to an equally powerful tradition,one that so far has eluded us.

4. mission

Part of the answer to this puzzle is to be found in the very passage wehave just been considering. After his ironic admission that the crowdis not ignorant of his origins, Jesus continues: ‘and I have not comeon my own initiative, but the one who sent me, whom you do notknow, is a true sender:38 I know him because I am from him, and hecommissioned me’ (7: 28–9). So Jesus associates the question of hisorigins with the seemingly very different question of his mission. It isimportant to realize that these two motifs, however readily yoked,are not in fact natural twins. The mission-motif is primarily associ-ated in the Bible with the title and function of prophet, not that ofMessiah, whose origins may have been mysterious, but whose role asthe harbinger of a new era of divine justice was, within certain limits,reasonably assured. Conversely it might appear that, although theparticular role and function of each individual prophet was unique,there was no mystery about the origins of any of them. True, theircommission was in general the consequence of a divine summons,

38 The word here is Iº�ŁØ ��, which pace Bultmann and others, means not ‘truthful’but ‘genuine’, ‘authentic’—‘true’ in the sense that Jesus is the true vine (15: 1) and thatGod is the true God (17: 3).

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but they were for the most part sent from where they stood, likeMoses, the archetypal prophet, who was both called and sent fromthe holy ground on which he had ventured in order to get a betterview of the burning bush (Exod. 3: 2–3).

No doubt there remain in the Old Testament distinct traces of amythical concept of prophecy, according to which the prophet is sentdirectly from the heavenly council-chamber. God is pictured as pre-siding over his council (dfo), which consists of ‘the holy ones’, ‘thesons of God’, or ‘the gods’, and giving instructions to his legates.A striking instance is the strange story of Micaiah (1 Kings 22: 19–23),who explains how it was that a lying spirit came to be sent out andplaced in the mouths of the four hundred prophets advising the kingof Israel. Jeremiah picks up the same idea in the course of hisinvective against the false prophets of his own day, of whom heasks, ‘Who among them has stood in the council of Yahweh toperceive and hear his word?’ (Jer. 23: 18).

Speaking with the voice of God, he declares: ‘I did not send theprophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied.But if they had stood in my council, then they would have pro-claimed my words to my people’ (23: 21–2). As James F. Ross asserts,this implies that the prophets’ authority is ultimately derived fromthe divine council itself.39 Again, Second Isaiah, in some respects theprophet par excellence (since his whole identity is absorbed into hisprophetic role), also seems to have received his commission as one ofa group sent out directly from the heavenly council.40 There is nodoubt that the eschatological prophet foretold by Moses, whetherthought of as a type or as an individual, was conceived along thesame lines: ‘I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak tothem all that I command him’ (Deut. 18: 18). The sense of missionexemplified in Moses himself is shared by all the prophets. Malachi,the last in the canon, sums up in his name (‘My angel/messenger’)the overwhelming sense of vocation (that is both a calling and asending) held equally by his predecessors.

But even if this ancient myth could be shown to have influencedthe evangelist, it still does not adequately account for the theology ofthe Fourth Gospel, according to which Jesus’ home is in heaven.None of the prophets was thought of as anything other than a

39 Cf. ‘Prophet as Yahweh’s Messenger’.40 Cf. Frank M. Cross, Jr., ‘The Council of Yahweh’, JNES 12 (1953), 174–7.

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human being invested with a special authority from on high. Theambiguity in the name of Malachi, suggesting a possible identifica-tion of the prophet with an angel-messenger, certainly offers furtherscope for investigation;41 but the orthodox tradition at least does notsee the prophet as in any sense divine. Moreover, we should remem-ber that in the Fourth Gospel itself John the Baptist also was commis-sioned (I����ƺ�� �) by God (1: 6; 3: 28), whom he could speak of as‘the one who sent me’ (› ���łÆ� ��), 1: 33. And since there was neverany question that his true home was in heaven we must concludethat there is no necessary connection, even for the fourth evangelist,between the idea of a heavenly mission or commission and the ideaof being ‘from God’ in the strong sense, even though the two ideasare usually connected in practice in the self-revelation of Jesus.

More promising, because directly attested in the Gospel, is thejuridical tie between Jesus and God, that is to say, the authoritywith which he is invested as God’s special messenger. We have seenthat for Jeremiah the final proof of the untrustworthiness of the falseprophets was that God had neither sent them nor addressed them (Jer.23: 21). Conversely, Jesus’ insistence that he has been sent or com-missioned by God is primarily and most importantly a vindication ofhis claim to be a (or the) prophet. For the question spontaneouslyarising in the mind of a Jew confronted with someone making thisclaim is not, as it might have been in the case of a messianic pre-tender: where does he come from? Rather, the first questions wouldbe: what are his credentials? On whose authority does he speak?

Not only are these questions the ones that any self-styled prophetmight expect to be called upon to answer, but in the deuteronomictradition, which shows signs of a very profound reflection upon theprophetic calling, they are positively demanded. For alongside thepromise of the eschatological prophet (‘I will put my words in hismouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him’, Deut. 18:18) is placed the warning against a pseudo-prophet, one ‘who pre-sumes to speak a word in my name which I have not commandedhim to speak’ (Deut. 18: 20).

Following T. F. Glasson,42 Wayne Meeks has argued that thepassage in Deuteronomy, taken in conjunction with another passage

41 Neither Hebrew (xalm) nor Greek (¼ªª�º�) distinguishes verbally between themessenger and the angel, and we shall see in Ch. 6 that behind the verbal confusion liesa conceptual confusion also.

42 Moses in the Fourth Gospel, 30.

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that concerns the seductions of wonder-workers (13: 2–6) is whatexplains the puzzle of John 7: 14–19, where Jesus’ repeated assur-ances that his teaching is from God rather than from himself (I���Æı�F) are directly followed by a reference to the Jews’ intention tohave him put to death. Meeks considers that the abrupt question,‘Why do you seek to kill me’ (7: 19), is to be explained from the threatof execution Deuteronomy holds out against the false prophets.43 Butthe strong reaction of the crowd to this question (‘You have a demon!Who is seeking to kill you?’) certainly conflicts with the other ques-tion that is put a few verses further on: ‘Is not this the man whomthey seek to kill?’ This is the question that follows most naturallyupon Jesus’ claims to speak on God’s behalf: if these are unwarrantedthen he truly deserves to die for his presumption—he is a falseprophet and the attempts to get him sentenced are fully understand-able. Besides, after the introduction to the whole story in 7: 1,according to which Jesus was avoiding Judaea precisely because ofthe mortal hostility of its inhabitants, one would expect the people ofJerusalem to evince some awareness of this hostility. So it is not thefirst question but the second (‘Is not this the man whom they seek tokill?’) that fits best into the context.44

In any case a further link is provided, as Meeks points out, by aninterpretative halakah in the Mishnah: ‘ ‘‘The false prophet’’—hethat prophesies what he has not heard and what has not been toldhim, his death is at the hands of men’ (m. Sanh. 11: 5). In the firstpassage from Deuteronomy the death-penalty is prescribed for anyprophet or dreamer of dreams who utters ‘falsehood about [or apos-tasy against] (lp eto) Yahweh your God, to make you stray(xhjdel; LXX, �ºÆ B�Æ� ��’ (Deut. 13: 6). Lastly there is a famousbaraitha (allusion to and citation of an ancient tradition) from theBabylonian Talmud which recounts the hanging of ‘Yeshu’ (pfuj) onthe eve of the Passover, at the end of a period of 40 days during which‘a herald went forth and cried ‘‘He is going forth to be stoned becausehe has practised sorcery and enticed and led Israel astray’’ ’ (b. Sanh.43a: the last of these three verbs is hdn, as in Deut. 13: 6). I am nottotally convinced by Martyn’s contention that the leading astray inthis passage is necessarily to be construed as the incitement to

43 Prophet-King, 45 ff.44 That is why 7: 19b–24must be regarded as a later insertion. The question in v. 25

follows naturally upon v. 19a and fits equally well into the context of a defence of Jesus’prophetic claims. See Excursus V, where the matter is discussed in more detail.

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worship false gods, nor that there is an earlier allusion to it in theGospel, in chapter. 5;45 but it seems certain at least that the charge ofleading astray was directed primarily against a false prophet.

So if, as I believe, the affirmations of Jesus recorded in 7: 14–19a dobelong in their present context, then they must refer to the charge offalse prophecy, as Meeks and Glasson have argued. They mark animportant stage in the growing hostility between the Jewish-Christians of the Johannine community and the synagogue. Thecritical attention to which the claims of the former are beingsubjected requires a positive response. Thus a platform is providedfor the Johannine prophet, and whilst directly defending Jesus’ claimto be a true prophet, he was no doubt indirectly defending his own.

5. agency

Commenting on the text from Deuteronomy we have just beenconsidering, Philo wrote: ‘The prophet will serve simply as the chan-nel for another’s insistent prompting.’46 According to this concep-tion the prophet is the mouthpiece of God, with no voice of his own.This corresponds closely to the view of Moses’ role we find in theearly tannaitic commentaries (Mekilta, Sifra, and Sifre) on the lastfour books of the Pentateuch. For instance: ‘Anyone who claims thateven the slightest fraction of the Torah comes from Moses’ ownmouth rather than that of God has thereby shown contempt for theworld of God.’47 Or again, Moses asserts that he speaks ‘not on myown authority but out of the mouth of God’.48

45 Martyn’s discussion (History2, 73–81) fails to take account of some importantdifferences between ch. 5 and ch. 7. In ch. 5, after the plain statement that the Jewssought Jesus’ death because he made himself equal with God (v. 18), there is no furtherdebate. The remainder of the chapter is given over to one of the most profound of theGospel’s ‘revelation’ discourses. There is no room for further argument since there isno common ground between Jesus and ‘the Jews’. In ch. 7, on the other hand, thedebate is still ongoing and urgent.

46 ‹�Æ �� K ���E�ÆØ, �Ø�º�����ÆØ ŒÆŁ��æ ��ºº �� ���æı (Spec. Leg. 1. 65). Philo is,of course, thinking here of the phenomenon of ecstatic prophecy. But in insisting thatnothing of the prophet’s message will be truly his own (º�ªø �b NŒ�E P�� ) he is alsofaithfully following the tradition.

47ftma fmrp jqm eum tbdf udse jqm tma etfhe lk (Sif. Num. 112 on 15: 31).

48zkl tmfa ek’’se jqm ala zkl tmfa jna jmrm al (Sif. Deut. 12 on 5: 9). Both of these

texts, it is worth noting, are reproduced in Schlatter’s early (1902) commentary inreference to John 7: 17. See Sprache und Heimat, 106.

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Sayings such as these are clearly religious applications of theJewish law of agency, according to which, in the simple formulationof the Mekilta, ‘an agent is like the one who sent him’.49 Ever sincePeder Borgen, following up suggestions of Theo Preiss and others,stressed the importance of this idea for understanding the theology ofthe Fourth Gospel,50 its centrality has been increasingly recognized,not least because the use Christian thinkers made of the principle canbe shown to go back to Jesus himself, or at least to be firmly estab-lished in the Synoptic tradition: ‘Whoever receives one such child inmy name receives me; and whoever receives me receives not me buthim who commissioned me (�e I�����ºÆ � ��)’ (Mark 9: 37; cf. Luke9: 48). That Jesus should see himself as God’s agent is not particularlyastonishing in view of the widespread, one could say universal,Jewish conviction concerning the prophets’ role as divine emissaries;that he should make ‘little children’ his own representatives gives theprinciple such an unusual but (for him) characteristic twist that it ishard to see this as anything but an authentic saying—one of themany instances of Jesus’ extraordinary imaginative freedom in hisdealings with all social groups whose human dignity for whateverreason was not properly recognized by his contemporaries—not onlythe religious authorities but sometimes, as here, his own disciples.

Besides the saying just quoted there is a more general applicationof the principle found, appropriately, towards the end of the mission-ary discourse in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘He who receives you’, Jesus saysto his twelve disciples, ‘receives me, and he who receives me receiveshim who commissioned me’ (Matt. 10: 40), a saying which is given itsnegative complement in Luke: ‘He who hears you hears me, and hewho rejects (IŁ���E) you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects himwho commissioned me’ (Luke 10: 16).51

The importance of this tradition in the development of the Johan-nine theology of mission can easily be overlooked. Here for the firsttime we appear to have an authentic tradition capable under theright conditions of generating the high christology according towhich the man who has listened to the words of Jesus has heard

49 Borgen, ‘God’s Agent’, 76 n. 5, cites a number of other rabbinical texts as well.This text is from Mek. on Exod. 12: 3 (fvfmk zda lu fhflu) (Lauterbach, Mekilta, i. 25).

50 Ibid.51 The verb IŁ���E is also found (a hapax legomenon) in John 12: 48, which makes it

likely that the passage in which it occurs was built upon an inherited logion, orpossibly more than one. Cf. P. Borgen, ‘Use of Tradition’.

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the voice of God and, more strikingly, in Jesus’ own words to Philip,‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14: 9; cf. 12: 45). Hereis the deepest source of the constantly recurring ‘as . . . so’ (ŒÆŁg�. . .o�ø�)52 which, with its double perspective (back to God, forward tothe disciples) is one of the most salient characteristics of Johanninetheology. What Wayne Meeks nicely calls ‘harmonic reinforcement’is not just a natural consequence of universal social forces operatingwithin a cognitive minority, but comes into play as a result of aprofound reflection upon the theological principle of the law ofagency, a reflection which was evidently initiated by Jesus himself.

The deepest roots of this law are to be found in a diplomaticconvention shared by many pre-industrial societies according towhich an emissary is to be treated with all the respect and courtesydue to the monarch who sent him. It is natural, too, especially insocieties where travel was always subject to delay and often todanger, that the ambassador should often be a plenipotentiary.Otherwise communications between two kingdoms might easilybreak down altogether. King David, it will be remembered, even didhis wooing of Abigail by proxy, after her husband Nabal, who hadinsulted David’s messenger, had been struck down by God (1 Sam. 25:38–42; cf. 2 Sam. 10—the story of Hanun and the Ammonites).

The transition from mission, regularly associated in the Old Testa-ment with prophecy, to agency, which need not have any religiousovertones at all,53 is easily disregarded. It is a theological truism thatGod’s dealing with mankind can only be conceptualized analogically,for human language is the only language we have. So it is notsurprising that, in searching for a conceptual framework thatwould enable them to talk intelligibly of such dealings, Jewish writersturned to their own legal tradition. This happened very early. In theBook of Numbers God is portrayed as angered by the opposition ofMiriam and Aaron to their brother Moses, so much greater than allother prophets because ‘I have entrusted him with all my house: withhim I speak mouth to mouth’ (Num. 12: 7–8). Reflecting on thispassage, a tannaitic writer makes the point clearly: ‘With what isthe matter to be compared? With a king of flesh and blood who has aconsul (agent) in the country. The inhabitants spoke before him.Then said the king to them, you have not spoken concerning my

525: 30; 8: 28; 12: 50; 14: 31.

53 J.-A. Buhner rightly insists on this point (Gesandte, 181 ff.).

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servant but concerning me.’54 The law of agency is simply a naturaldevelopment of, or offshoot from, this diplomatic convention,55 andgiven the religious application of the latter it was to be expected thatthe more precise formulations composed to accommodate the com-plex business dealings of a small but highly structured society shouldalso influence religious thinking, especially in a case where theclaims to represent the voice of God were as strong in fact and intradition as those of Jesus. But always behind the dry and oftendreary niceties of the civil law the grand traditions of Judah’s imper-ial history and Israel’s prophetic heritage continued to make them-selves felt. The convention according to which the agent was fullyrepresentative of his master was more than a legal fiction: it illus-trated and exemplified a way of thinking. Nor does the legal precisionin any way diminish the significance of the religious analogies drawnby Jesus himself (as we are about to see) and after him by the earlyChristians. For John above all but also for the tradition upon whichhe drew, Theo Preiss’s term mystique juridique is singularly apt.56

One such tradition, with strong claims to authenticity, is the sayingin John 13: 16, ‘Amen, amen I say to you, the servant (�Fº�) is notgreater than his master (Œ�æØ�) nor is an agent (I����º�) greaterthan the one who sent him.’ Not just the use of the traditional I�� I�� but also the technical opposition between �Fº� and Œ�æØ� andmost of all the unique occurrence of the word I����º� make itprobable that this belonged to the store of logia inherited by theevangelist.57 He or an intervening writer makes this sayingthe corner-stone of the enacted parable of the washing of the feet:the disciples are not to be prouder than their master. But as always inthis Gospel the comparison points in two directions: backwards toJesus’ own divine commission as well as forwards to that of his owndisciples, as the conclusion of the story—itself another traditionallogion—makes plain: ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, he who receivesone whom I send receives me and he who receives me receives himwho sent me’ (13: 20; cf. Matt. 10: 40).

If now we think of Jesus himself as the servant who is not greaterthan his master, God, we may find that this is contradicted by thegeneral tenor of the teaching of the Gospel, for according to this Jesus

54 Sif. Num. 104 on 12: 9, quoted by Borgen, ‘God’s Agent’, 68.55 In fact the regular word for ‘agent’ (hflu) means literally ‘one who is sent’

(I����º�). Cf. John 9: 7.56 ‘Juridical mysticism’, ‘Justification’, 25.57 Cf. K. Berger, Die Amen-Worte Jesu, 95–9.

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claims equality with God—divine status. This contradiction can onlybe resolved by bearing in mind that Jesus’ relationship with Godcontinues throughout to be conceived on the analogy of the proph-etic mission and the law of agency. The paradox of the parity be-tween the sender and the sent cannot be maintained at its properpoint of equilibrium unless both its terms are kept in sight. In fact theking is greater than his emissary; in law the emissary is the king’sequal. The pendulum swings gently between these two apparentlycontradictory propositions, with the result that one is sometimesstressed at the expense of the other.58 So Jesus can say not only ‘Iand the Father are one’ (10: 30) and ‘I am in the Father and theFather is in me’ (10: 38; 14: 10) and (perhaps most significantly) ‘theFather who dwells in me does his works’ (14: 10), but also, veryfrequently, and most notably in this same context of Jesus’ responseto Philip (14: 10), ‘the words that I say to you I do not speak on myown authority’.59 In rejecting the hypothesis that Jesus’ relationshipto God is cast in the prophetic mould, Bultmann points out that noprophet is ever given divine status. But this is only partly true.Provided that one does not lose sight of the reservations containedin Jesus’ insistence that he neither says nor does anything on his ownauthority, this aspect of John’s christology, whose ontological impli-cations are given none of the heavy emphasis they were to receiveover two centuries later in the debate against Arius, could beexplained as arising from a deeply religious reflection upon theprophetic mission of Jesus within the conceptual framework ofthe Jewish law of agency.60 In a sense the parity with God assertedby and for Jesus is a natural inference from the prophetic schema.

58 The paradoxes of subsequent Trinitarian theory, itself heavily dependent upon arather literalistic interpretation of Johannine theology, have to be reconciled by asimilar capacity for looking at two seemingly opposing propositions at the same time.Kasemann comes quite close to this insight: ‘If the formulae of his commission throughthe Father and his unity with the Father are isolated from each other, the result will besubordinationism or ditheism’ (Testament, 11).

59 I�� K�Æı�F P ºÆºH. Cf. 5: 19, 30; 7: 16 ff., 28; 8: 28–9, 42; 16: 13. In the case of John7: 18a Buhner is even prepared to argue that › I�� �Æı�F ºÆºH should be translated‘whoever attempts to conceal the fact that he has been commissioned’ (wer seinenAuftrag verschweigt), and the sequel, �c ���Æ �c N��Æ ����E, by ‘is seeking his ownadvantage’ (der sucht den eigenen Vorteil) (Gesandte, 249; cf. 237 ff.). This suggestion,which follows a discussion of two special clauses in the Jewish law of agency (whatBuhner calls ‘die Ausweisklausel’ and ‘die Vorteilsklausel’), seems to me to move toofar from the Greek text.

60 Many of the ‘I am’ sayings, as J.-A. Buhner has argued (Gesandte, 166–80), mayhave had their origin in the same broad general context of Near Eastern diplomatic

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Such an inference might seem at first sight to conflict too stronglywith the ingrained Jewish belief in the absolute primacy of God to beeasily or rapidly drawn. Of course the Johannine group saw themessage of Jesus, that is their ownmessage about Jesus, as proceedingdirectly from God, and in rejecting it the religious authorities wererejecting the word of God. But this was classically true of everyprophet. Is there anything more to Christian belief which mayhelp to explain why no other Jewish group before the advent oftrue Gnosticism made such extravagant claims on behalf of itsleader?

6. sonship

Part, at any rate, of the answer to this question must lie in the beliefthat Jesus was, in a quite unique sense, the Son of God. As amessianic title, this expression originally held no connotations ofdivinity. This we have seen in the previous chapter. But there werestronger claims made on Jesus’ behalf which derived in the firstinstance from a quite separate tradition. We must begin by distin-guishing between the plain title ‘Son’ and the originally messianic‘Son of God’.61 It is the former, frequently associated very closely inthe Fourth Gospel with affirmations concerning Jesus’ mission, thatmust occupy us now. Essentially John saw Jesus’ relationship withGod in two clearly distinguishable ways, sonship andmission; and thetwo names Jesus has for God (‘Father’ and ‘the one who sent me’)though often united in practice (‘the Father who sent me’)62 shouldnot be assumed without further proof or argument to have beenlinked together in the traditions upon which John drew. In chapter 7

conventions according to which the emissary might preface his message witha statement of intent (‘I have come to . . . ’) or of self-introduction (‘I am . . . ’). SeeCh. 2, pp. 125–9.

61 Cf. F. Hahn, Titles, 307. Hahn is surely right, against B. M. F. van Iersel, ‘DerSohn’, and I. Howard Marshall, Origins, 111–23, to insist upon observing this distinc-tion.

62 › �Æ�cæ › ���łÆ� ��—5: 37; 6: 44; 8: 16, 18; 12: 49; 14: 24; ÆP�� with the samemeaning 5: 23. What is more, › �Æ��æ is regularly the subject of the verb I����ºº�Ø 5: 36; 6: 57; 10: 36; 20: 21; cf. 5: 38. The idea recurs in Jesus’ prayer to the Father (11: 42)and especially in the so-called Sacerdotal Prayer (ch. 17), where it is found six times(vv. 3, 8, 18, 21, 23, 25).

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the term ‘Father’ is not used: nowhere in this chapter is there theslightest hint that Jesus regarded himself as the Son of God.

C. H. Dodd is so impressed by the influence of the prophetictradition upon John’s christology that he asserts: ‘John has deliber-ately moulded the idea of the Son of God in the first instance upon theprophetic model.’63 But sons, first of all begotten by their fathers,generally loved, frequently educated, and sometimes chastised bythem, are rarely sent, unless they happen to be princes royal, ven-turing abroad to execute some mission at the behest of a kinglyparent. There is no natural association between the idea of sonshipand the idea of mission; and one of the most intriguing challenges setby the Fourth Gospel is to locate the source of the tradition accordingto which the Son was ‘sent into the world’. Or is the frequentconjunction of the two ideas in the Fourth Gospel to be ascribed tothe work of the evangelist, fusing two different traditions into a nowindissoluble whole?

In the opinion of Eduard Schweizer there is evidence in the NewTestament of a tradition according to which God sent his Son into theworld for the specific purpose of bringing salvation. Twice in Paul(Rom. 8: 3–4, Gal. 4: 4–5), twice in the Johannine literature (John3: 16–17; 1 John 4: 9), there occurs what Schweizer takes to be atraditional formula, known presumably to both authors independ-ently of each other.64 Schweizer traces this so-called formula back tothe Jewish wisdom tradition, citing in particular the passage inwhich Solomon is portrayed as beseeching God to grant him thegift of wisdom: ‘dispatch (K�Æ�����غ ) wisdom from the holyheavens and send (���ł ) her forth from thy throne of glory’(Wisd. 9: 10). But is this a true parallel? The unforced metaphoricallanguage employed in this prayer scarcely offers a convincing ana-logue to the mission of the Son in Paul and John. There is nothinghere to suggest the strong kind of hypostasization of wisdom thatwould be necessary to establish the parallel Schweizer requires, eventhough the figure of wisdom is personified in a traditional mannerelsewhere in the book. The phrase �N� �e Œ��� is not found in Paul

63 Interpretation, 255.64 ‘Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund’; cf. ThDNT viii. 374–6, s.v. ıƒ��.

However, as J. Ziesler points out, ‘that God sent Christ (Gal. 4: 4 f.; Rom. 8: 3) as theSon does not in itself mean his pre-existence, for the prophets are also sent (Isa 6: 8; Jer.1: 6; Ezek. 2: 3) and so are Moses, Aaron, and Miriam (Mic. 6: 4)’: Pauline Christianity(Oxford, 1985), 41.

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(which reduces the alleged ‘formula’ to a single word, or pair ofwords); and the Galatians passage continues by saying that ‘Godhas sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts’ (v. 6). The same word,K�Æ����ºº�Ø , is employed, a fact which suggests that the term is inboth instances a perfectly simple and natural metaphor which itwould be a mistake to overinterpret. Certainly there is no need topostulate, as Schweizer does, that the notion of pre-existence isactively present. If there is indeed a primitive formula underlyingboth the Pauline and the Johannine usages then it seems a prioriquite unlikely that this very sophisticated notion had any part toplay in it. Interesting as they are, Schweizer’s researches are surelyinconclusive.

In the course of his article, however, Schweizer drops one hint thatis worth following up. It is an allusion to the parable of the wickedhusbandmen (Mark 12: 1–11), in which, after the savage ill-treatment, even murder, of many of his servants, the owner of thevineyard eventually sends ‘his beloved son, saying ‘‘They will respectmy son’’ ’. The reaction of the farmer tenants is the opposite of whatthe owner expects: ‘they said to one another, ‘‘This is the heir, comelet us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours’’ ’. This parable—ormaybe one should rather speak of allegory here—presents manypuzzles. In the context of the Gospel, it is plain that the servants(�FºØ) are the prophets and Jesus is the son. The majority of moderncommentators have assumed that the Christian meaning of theparable is so strong that it cannot be authentic; but recently certainscholars have marshalled a number of arguments intended to showthat the parable, apart from the conclusion, could actually have beentold by Jesus.65 There is no need to take sides on this question. Whatinterests us above all in this parable is the imaginative space it occu-pies: God as a wealthy landowner (who could easily be a king), theprophets as his servants, Jesus as his son—the heir to his land, sentout after the servants on a mission that would end in his rejectionand death. There can be no question of pre-existence here, since theactual mission of the son is not conceived any differently as a sendingfrom that of the servants who preceded him. Important are (1) thespecial status of the son within the owner’s household; and (2) thegeneral circumstances which would make his mission—as a son,

65 B. M. F. van Iersel, ‘Der Sohn’, 124–45; X. Leon-Dufour, ‘Parabole’; M. Hengel,‘Gleichnis’.

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indeed, an only son66—not just an adventitious conjunction, but anatural consequence of his privileged position.

J. D. Derrett brings this out very clearly in a careful discussion ofthe legal aspects of the kind of case presupposed by the parable:

Formal protest must be made before witnesses, warning the tenants thatlegal action would commence against them. Slaves, however, could notmake this protest, nor could slaves adjure witnesses—a serious handicap inso involved a matter. By that period it had not yet become possible to pleadone’s cause through an agent—one must actually transfer one’s right to the‘representative’. Therefore the son had to be sent. He is represented in theparable as if he really was the only son of the owner.67

Martin Hengel adduces examples that show just how difficult it wasat this period for an absent landowner to obtain redress from recal-citrant lessees, and how reluctant the local authorities were tointervene—understandably, because they had to take their taxesfrom the lessees, not the landowner. He also quotes a parable froma tannaitic source which has some important parallels with theGospel story:

Like a king owning a field which he had entrusted to tenant farmers, whobegan to rob and steal. So he took the field from them and entrusted it to theirchildren, but these began to behave even worse than their parents. Then ason was born to the king, and he told them, ‘Vacate my property; you maynot stay any longer.’68

Hengel also quotes a rather more recent story about a king whowished to journey to a remote province; accordingly he instructed atenant to look after his garden and to enjoy its produce until his own(the King’s) son should come of age.69 Hengel is concerned to showthat the parable could in all essential respects have been told by Jesus.

66 In the LXX the word IªÆ����� (literally ‘beloved’) is regularly used to translatethe Hebrew djhj (literally ‘only child’)—even in Gen. 22: 2, where the Greek conse-quently becomes awkwardly overloaded: �e ıƒ� �ı �e IªÆ���e n Mª���Æ�. Spe-cially noteworthy is the fact that virtually all the passages in which this relatively rareword occurs concern not just an only child but one that is doomed to death—as Isaacwas (Gen. 22) and, particularly strikingly, the daughter of Jephtha (Judges 11: 34); cf.Jer. 6: 26; Amos 8: 10; Zech. 12: 10. Many commentators, e.g. Hengel, think that theIªÆ���� was added by Mark to his source, but in view of the doomladen connotationsof the word it is a perfectly fitting term for the son of the parable, and the obviousrendering if the Hebrew (or Aramaic) djhj was used in the source.

67 ‘Parable’, 302–3.68 Sif. Deut. 312 on 32: 9, quoted by Hengel, ‘Gleichnis’, 28 n. 92.69 Midr. Tanh

˙uma B hlub 29a § 7 (Buber, 56–7).

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There is no need, he argues, to suppose that the son was introducedinto the parable at a later date in order to make a peculiarly Christianpoint, since even in the original parable he is qua son the only fullyaccredited representative of the owner.

This interpretation of the parable of the vinedressers depends oncertain contemporary laws and customs without which it would bevirtually impossible to comprehend why the owner’s son should besent out as a trouble-shooter in a highly delicate and dangeroussituation. The New Testament itself provides examples of the con-vention that the (eldest) son was his father’s natural heir (e.g. Heb.1: 2: n �Ł�Œ� Œº�æ �� � �ø ); and the Fourth Gospel has its shareof these. In particular, the phrase �Ø�� ÆØ K �fi B ��Øæ� (¼ djb wvn) ‘togive into the hand (of)’70 is a formal expression signifying the trans-mission of authority—authority in the first place over the owner’s(in this case the father’s) property. A good example of this conventionis found in an early midrash in which once again a king is selected asthe natural metaphorical analogue of the divinity:

Another interpretation of this month shall be unto you. God was like a kingwho possessed treasure-houses filled with gold and silver, precious stonesand pearls, and who had one son (dha wb ¼ � ª� ��). As long as the sonwas small his father guarded them all, but when the son grew up andreached manhood, his father said to him: ‘As long as you were small, Iguarded them all; but now that you have reached manhood, everything ishanded over to you (xl tom lke ¼ � �Æ �Ø���ÆØ ��). So God guardedeverything, as it says, And let them be for signs and for seasons (Gen.1: 14); but as soon as Israel was grown up, he entrusted the Israelites withall of these, for it says: this month shall be unto you.71

In virtually all the rabbinic parables in which a king (or wealthylandowner) has dealings with his son, the son in question is Israel.72

But the legal background, the way of thinking, is the same as in theparable of the wicked husbandmen, and does much to explain the

70 ‘The Father loves the Son and has given everything into his hand’ (3: 35); ‘Jesus,knowing that the Father had given everything into his hands’ (13: 3). Cf. 10: 18; 17: 2.

71 Exod. R. 15: 30 on 12: 12, quoted by Buhner, Gesandte, 197 n. 17.72 e.g. ‘To what may this be compared? To a king who took on a large number of

workers, among them one who worked with him for several days. The workers came toreceive their wages, this man among them. The king said to him, My son, I will haveregard for you. All these workers put little effort into their work, and I will give thembut little wages. But for you I have reckoned a considerable sum. In the same way theIsraelites in this world asked God for their wages: and the nations of the world alsoasked for their wages before God. And God said to Israel, My sons I will have regard for

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ease with which, once Jesus’ sonship was assured, he came to bethought of as the natural recipient of the authority of God.

One way in which this relationship was expressed in Jewish lawwas the pair of reciprocal expressions, vjb lpb (literally, ‘lord ormaster of the house) and vjb wb (literally ‘son of the house’). AsJ. -A. Buhner has observed, some awareness of the quasi-juridicalrole of the latter helps us to understand one of the most extraordinarypassages in the Fourth Gospel, that in which Jesus claims to havebeen given, as God’s Son, the twin powers traditionally reserved toGod alone, the power of judgement and the power of bestowing life(5: 22, 27):

This formally gives him an authority to be surpassed by none: he is to behonoured in the same way as the Father who sent him. In this connection wemust bear in mind the vjb wb, the ‘son of the house’ in Jewish law andcustom. In Aramaic court language the avjb tb referred to the freemenattached to a royal household and in particular the royal princes with theright of inheritance. The vjb is the household (‘familia’) as the fundamentaljuridical and sociological group, and wb=tb [Aramaic and Hebrew words for‘son’] denotes the way in which the ‘son’ belongs. Jewish tradition frequentlypresupposes this usage, which was by no means confined to the court. ‘Son’(vjb wb) refers to the members of the household, and denotes a position thatguarantees a stable relationship of particular intimacy. Just such a particularintimacy is implied in the passage in the Mishnah (Taanith 3: 8) where Honithe Circle-drawer is said to know how to gain access to God in the mannerthat a son of the house has access to his father.

The term vjb wb then, connotes the fact of belonging to a household:but in connection with the teaching on authority it has also acquireda specific juridical meaning. Of fundamental importance here isMishnah Shebuoth 7: 8, with the interpretation given in the Baby-lonian Talmud, b48b. The Mishnah names those who have beengranted the authority to dispose of the property of the vjbe lpb ifthey come under the suspicion of misappropriation, even in the mostgeneral and unspecified way, they must swear to their innocence:‘An oath may be imposed on these, although no claim is lodgedagainst them: jointholders, tenants, trustees, a wife that managesthe affairs of the house, and the son of the house (vjb wb).’ Who is this

you’ (Sifra 111a on Lev. 26: 9). Cf. Sif. Num. 105 on 12: 10: ‘Here is a parable. A king saidto the tutor of his son: ‘‘Chastise my son, but not until I have departed, for a father isfull of pity for his son.’’ ’

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vjb wb? From the association with the wife one may infer that what ismeant here is the true or natural son, who can be given the sameresponsibilities and authority as the master’s wife. The Baraitha(b48b) sheds some light on the matter: ‘A Tanna taught: The son ofthe house who was mentioned does not mean that he walks in andwalks out, but he brings in labourers and takes out labourers, bringsin produce and takes out produce.’

The expression ‘to walk in and out’ refers to the normal relation-ship between the vjb wb and his family, whereas the Baraitha derivesan important juridical consequence from the position of authoritystressed in the Mishnah. Accordingly the vjb wb in this case is anadministrator with total responsibility. With regard to the questionconcerning the natural sonship of the vjb wb it must be borne in mindthat what counts in the Jewish and oriental understanding of theson/father relationship is the legal position. The natural son too hasto be assigned to his position, as is shown by the law of the first-born.Consequently the term taken as a functional concept may alsoinclude the idea of natural sonship, as is evident from the Mishnah;but the converse is not true—natural sonship does not necessarilyimply the position of a plenipotentiary agent. So the vjb wb is notthe Œº�æ ��� ��Ø�� (Gal. 4: 1), for ��Ø� is used of a minor, but theıƒ�� (who has already been given full authority over the estate ofthe vjbe lpb).73

To consider the christology of the Fourth Gospel in the light ofthese juridical concepts is like being given another eye. Suddenlythe whole relationship between the Father and the Son stands outin startlingly fresh perspective. In particular we can see how themoment of mission (sending) is conceived primarily as a commission(the bestowal of authority of plenipotentiary powers), much as in theparable of the wicked husbandmen. Naturally the prophetic traditionhas played some part here also; but the concept of the household ofGod over which Jesus, as Son, has been given full control is one towhich the prophetic tradition as such made no contribution.74

The way in which the often virtually interchangeable functions offatherhood on the one hand and mission on the other mutually

73 Gesandte, 195–8.74 Cf. Heb. 3: 5–6, where Moses the servant of God (�Ø��e� K ‹ºfiø �fiH YŒfiø

ÆP�F ‰� Ł�æ�ø ) is contrasted with Christ the Son, obviously seen here as vjb wb

(‰� ıƒe� K�d �e rŒ ÆP�F).

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support and reinforce one another75 cannot be explained by recourseto the Old Testament alone, but this very characteristic feature ofJohannine theology becomes fully intelligible when one considers thequite precise juridical conventions to which Buhner has drawnattention. For the Johannine conception of Jesus’ sonship comesout of a conceptual world in which the agent appointed by thelandowner to look after his estates is thought of as a son (thevjb wb) and conversely one in which the first-born son attains hismajority at the very moment he receives his appointment.

The relationship between God and Jesus is nowhere more fullyarticulated than in the dialogue and discourse in John 5: 19–30. Thisis universally acknowledged, but C. H. Dodd76 and P. Gaechter77 inparticular have argued independently that behind the high christ-ology in this passage lies a simple parable of apprenticeship—a sonlearning a trade from his father, the only person fully competent toinvest him with all his own professional expertise: ‘For the [a] Fatherloves the [his] Son; and shows him all that he himself is doing’(5: 20).78 This may be right—it is certainly a brilliant suggestion—but the force of Jesus’ claim here depends upon the tacit assumptionthat besides the skill he also has the authority to perform the quint-essentially divine functions of bestowing life and passing judgement.Behind the parable (if parable there be) must stand the overarchingjuridical conceptions I have already discussed. And here it is impos-sible to mistake the consequences of using this particular conceptualsystem as the vehicle of Jesus’ message of self-revelation. God’s estateor domain is not confined to earth; but on earth his authority ismanifest above all in two ways: for he alone has the power to quicken(in the Old English sense) and to judge. So in taking over these twofunctions Jesus is exercising an authority (K�ı��Æ, v. 27) which Godalone could have given him. And the conclusion (of the first part ofthe discourse) is expressed in the now familiar terminology of the lawof agency: ‘I can do nothing on my own authority (I�� K�Æı�F ¼

75 Not, though, as we have seen, in ch. 7, where the absence of any mention of Godas Father may indicate the use of an independent (and possibly earlier) tradition.

76 ‘A Hidden Parable’. 77 ‘Zur Form’.78 This interpretationpresupposes anAramaicoriginal—thepoint being thatAramaic

uses the definite article in contexts where Greek (and English) would use the indefinitearticle, especiallywhenreferringgenerally toa type. SowhereGreekwouldmorenaturallyspeak of ‘a son’ and ‘a father’, Aramaic would say ‘the son’ and ‘the father’. The bestknownexampleofaGreekmistranslation.ofanAramaic expression is› ıƒe� �F I Łæ��ı(the Son of Man). The Aramaic Wna tb often means ‘a man’, ‘mankind’, ‘one’.

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jmrpm); as I hear I judge; and my judgement is just because I seek notmy will but the will of him who sent me (�e Ł�º��Æ �F ���łÆ ��� ��¼jhlume vpd)’ (5: 30; cf. 6: 38, 40).

Illuminating as Buhner’s suggestions are, it may still be askedwhether the dependence he has argued of Johannine expressionsand thought-patterns upon Jewish legal concepts sufficiently ac-counts for the high christology of John 5 and other such passages.It could do so only if Jewish law were conceived as a source; but thisseems in the highest degree unlikely. Buhner himself repeatedlystresses that neither the law of agency nor the more general conceptof the role of the emissary in the Ancient Near East is confined to thereligious sphere. On the contrary, the fourth evangelist, like manyanother religious writer, has seized upon a conceptual system hefound ready to hand in order to put the ineffable into words. Theexceptional character of Jesus’ relationship with God cannot beexplained by the law of agency, although it may be partly expressedin a terminology originally elaborated to deal with more mundanematters. True, the prophetic mission of Jesus has a real affinity withthat of the human agent on behalf of a human owner, and no doubtthe Jewish law of agency was constructed with the prophetic modelin mind. But the audacious nature of Jesus’ claims cannot be readinto or out of any formulation of Jewish law. One of the advantages ofBultmann’s postulated revelation-discourse source is that its Emis-sary is already a divine or semi-divine figure whose lineaments,modified and softened, can easily be transferred to Jesus. And it isthis transference, more than an analogy, more than an inference,that justifies Bultmann’s claim to have explained the genesis of theGospel’s picture of Christ. The Jewish legal system may furnish aplausible background for this christology; it may, seen as an exegeticaltool, help us to understand what the evangelist is saying. But itcannot in my opinion be seriously proposed as an alternative source;for it leaves unexplained the transition from the idea of a humanagent as envisaged by the law (and one must include here theimplications of the term ‘son of the house’) to that of a divine agentto whom God has entrusted his own powers and his own authority.Such a transition is far from being the smooth and uncomplicatedadjustment Buhner’s argument appears at times to suppose.

I shall be considering a number of other possible influences in thenext chapter. But no discussion of the theme of Jesus’ divine sonshipwould be complete without taking some stock of the Synoptic-type

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traditions that must have helped to form the thought of the fourthevangelist. In spite of the interpenetration of the concepts of missionand sonship (because of the fruitful ambiguity of the term vjb wb) theintimacy with God claimed by Jesus is not to be explained simply asthe product of Christian reflection upon a law or a legal system. Suchreflection can only twine around or rather stem out of an early beliefin some kind of special relationship between Jesus and God alreadyexpressed in terms of sonship. Obviously the close and exclusiveknowledge of God claimed by the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is verydifferent from anything found in the Synoptic tradition, with thepossible exception of the so-called Johannine logion (Matt. 11: 25–7;Luke 10: 21–2). Nevertheless the original seed of this fine floweringmust be sought somewhere, and where more plausibly than in Jesus’own sense of the fatherhood of God?

In fact there is plenty of evidence that this was exceptionally deepand strong. On the personal side there is the tradition of Jesus’continual communication with God in prayer, which was clearlyboth intimate and unassuming. No doubt his use of the familiarAramaic address ‘Abba’ (can this possibly, though, have had over-tones resembling those of ‘Daddy’, ‘Papa’, or ‘Vati’?) is not as telling aproof of an exclusive sense of sonship as Joachim Jeremias wouldhave us believe:79 certainly if the early Christians had thought of it inthis way they would scarcely have adopted it, as they did, in theirown prayer.80 All the same, that Jesus did think of and address Godas his father is beyond question.81

Equally clear, and more significant for our purposes, is the impactof this tradition upon the Fourth Gospel, which had Jesus praying toGod on three separate occasions: before the tomb of Lazarus (11:41–2), at his final entry into Jerusalem (12: 27–8), and in the extendedprayer of chapter 17. On each occasion he uses the simple vocative���æ, which corresponds closely to the more stilted › �Æ��æ (an

79 Theology, 61–8. See J. Barr, ‘Abba isn’t ‘‘Daddy’’ ’.80 Rom. 8: 15; Gal. 4: 6. There is no evidence in pre-Christian Palestinian Judaism

that God was addressed as abba by an individual Jew in prayer. Jeremias adduces twoinstances in the Babylonian Talmud from stories told of sages who lived in the 1st cent.bc (Prayers of Jesus, 59); but G. Schelbert has shown these attributions to be insecure:‘Sprachgeschichtliches zu ‘‘Abba’’ ’.

81 In my William James Memorial Lecture entitled ‘The Religious Experience ofJesus’, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 32 (2003), 17–20, I argued that Jesus’ profound sense ofthe fatherhood of God was probably an insight that came to him as part of a propheticcall on the occasion of his baptism.

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Aramaism) found, for instance, in Mark’s account of the Agony(14: 36). John clearly experienced some difficulty, even embarrassment,in adapting this particular prayer to fit his own conviction of Jesus’absolute control over his own destiny: Jesus openly wonders whetherhe should pray in the way that tradition demanded, and then decidesthat he should not: ‘And what shall I say? ‘‘Father save me from thishour’’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour’ (12: 27). And inconcluding his prayer at the tomb of Lazarus he is made to assurehis listeners: ‘I have said this on account of the people standing by’(11: 42)—because he did not actually need to pray on his own account.

It is not part of my purpose to establish that the historical Jesusknew God as Father in a way that no one else has ever done in fact orcould ever do in principle. Such an extreme claim can neither beverified nor disproved.82 All I wish to insist upon is (a) that there isreason to believe that Jesus really did have an unusually deep aware-ness of God’s transcendent majesty and of his all-embracing regardfor mankind, and (b) that this awareness is at the root of a traditionwhose most colourful bloom is the high christology of the FourthGospel.

Lastly we must consider briefly the passage in the Synoptic Gospelsin which the Father/Son relationship is most strikingly expressed.This is the ‘thunderbolt from the Johannine sky’, Matt. 11: 25–7/Luke10: 21–2. Here is Luke’s version:

I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden thesethings from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea,Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to meby my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or whothe Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to revealhim.

Because of their very singularity these two passages in Matthewand Luke, which obviously have a common root, are hard tohandle and to assess.83 Most commentators are reluctant to admitthat John may have used the logion as a direct source, in any ofits forms, but the fact is that it is as close if not closer to the spiritof his theology than any parallel that has been adduced outside

82 For a more optimistic view of the possibility of knowing Jesus’ inner conscious-ness of God, cf. J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, esp. 11–40. See too Jeremias, Prayers,56–61; M. J. Suggs, Wisdom Christology, 71–97.

83 They are all but ignored in C. F. D. Moule, Origin of Christology.

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the New Testament.84 And even if no direct link can be established,and it is hard to knowwhat could count as proof in this respect, thereis at least evidence of theological reflection being carried on outsidethe Johannine circle but along parallel lines. Schnackenburg arguesthat there are some important differences:

The mutual knowledge is not so much, as in John 10: 15, an expression ofintimacy and unity of the Son with the Father, but forms part of the idea ofthe fullness of power conferred on the Son by the Father (� �Æ �Ø �Ææ���Ł�

Œ�º). The Father’s ‘knowing’ the Son is in the Old Testament and Judaictradition of election, while knowing on the son’s part means acknowledge-ment: the Son accepts the Father’s revelation and his will, which enables himto communicate his revelation to others (fiz Ka ��º��ÆØ Œ�º).85

That there are differences is clear, though they do not seem to me asgreat as Schnackenburg says. The Father’s bestowal of authority onthe Son is just as important a theme in the Fourth Gospel—as wehave seen at length—as that of their mutual knowledge.

conclusion

It must be confessed that this chapter must end somewhat inconclu-sively. The most valuable result has been the discovery of a thought-world that makes sense of the evangelist’s picture of Jesus as the Sonof God entrusted by him with a message for the world. As ‘the son ofthe house’, he would gradually come to be thought of as emergingfrom that house (cf. 14: 2, # NŒ�Æ �F —Æ�æ�� �ı); and even if therewere no other influences nudging the evangelist towards a cosmo-logical dualism one can understand how the contrast betweenheaven and earth, heaven naturally thought of as the home of Godand earth the home of men, fits in with the vision of a two-storeyuniverse, and even makes it possible to think that this Emissary

84 Jeremias (Prayers, 56–61) has actually suggested that the Synoptic saying mayhave originated in a simple comparison to a father–son relationship, in which thenatural intimacy of father and son is used to illustrate how Jesus was empowered byhis Father to reveal him. His argument follows the lines of the articles of Dodd andGaechter cited earlier (nn. 76–7) and may be thought to receive further support if notcomplete confirmation from the findings of Buhner already considered.

85 Schnackenburg, ii. 179. He rules out altogether the possibility of any directinfluence. Aside from this, his Excursus 9, ‘ ‘‘The Son’’ as Jesus’ Self-Designation inthe Gospel of John’ (ibid. 172–86), is interesting and informative.

Son of God 231

occupied a place (� �) in his real home before embarking upon hismission to earth. Various strands then of the complex pattern of theGospel’s finished theology can be seen to invite this particular weave.

Even so, the themes discussed in this chapter, origins, mission,agency, sonship, do not, even in combination, account for the wholeof the Gospel’s high christology or explain how it was actuallygenerated. Perhaps the investigation of other themes, other strandsof the pattern, will enable us to see the full design more clearly. Oneof these, the Son of Man, will occupy much of our attention in thefollowing chapter.

232 Genesis

Excursus V: The Composition of John 7

No chapter in the Gospel poses more problems of analysis than thisone, and the continuing disagreement is not surprising.1 Whatfollows is an attempt to give some exegetical justification to theanswers given to these problems in Chapter 4. The core of the chapteris to be found in two sets of material:2 (a) a controversy over theperson of Jesus centring upon the twin themes of mission, whichalludes to the claim that Jesus is the prophet, and origins, whichis associated with the title of Messiah; (b) the story of Jesus’ attemptedarrest, which itself concludes with a controversy story of adifferent kind involving the same two titles: a strong and reasonablyhomogeneous armature, then, over which further material hasbeen laid. Besides this unity of theme, after the introduction there isalso a unity of time (the Feast of Tabernacles) and place (the Temple).

The controversy material (a) is found in two blocks: vv. 11–31(excluding vv. 19b–24) and vv. 37–44 (excluding v. 39, which iscertainly a later gloss from the hand of the evangelist). The arrestmaterial (b) begins at v. 32 and continues in the last paragraph of thechapter, vv. 45–52.

The two sets of material (a) and (b) overlap in the famous passagethat includes the prophecy about ‘rivers of living water’ (vv. 37–44),the high point of the chapter. In view of its strong emphasis upon thesymbolic significance of the Feast of Tabernacles, this may havebelonged (in a more primitive form?) to the introductory story(cf. v. 2).

It is here (vv. 1–10) that the earliest material is to be found. Thisopening narrative probably started life as the introduction to amiracle-story3 which was subsequently modified and extended (by

1 Apart from the commentators (of whom the most penetrating at this point areBultmann and Lindars) see J. Schneider, ‘Zur Komposition von Joh 7’; C. Dekker,‘Grundschrift’; J. Becker, ‘Wunder’; U. C. von Wahlde, ‘The Terms for ReligiousAuthorities’; H. W. Attridge, ‘Thematic Development’.

2 Lindars, pp. 277 ff., who takes careful account of all the material but gives aslightly different analysis.

3 Cf. Bultmann, pp. 288–9, followed by Becker. Contra Fortna, Gospel of Signs, 186–7.

the addition of vv. 11–13) to serve as the preface to the controversymaterial (a). This is how I suggest the passage originally ran:4

(1)—�æØ����Ø › ����F� K �fi B ˆÆºØºÆ�fi Æ· (2) (˙ �b Kªªf� # �æ�c �H

��ı�Æ�ø # �Œ� ��ª�Æ: (3) �r� s �æe� ÆP�e ƒ I��º�d ÆP�F·

�����ŁØ K ��FŁ� ŒÆd o�ƪ� �N� �c ��ı�Æ�Æ ; ½¥ Æ ŒÆd ƒ �ÆŁ��Æ� �ı�5Ł�øæ��ı�Ø �F �a �æªÆ L �Ø�E�· (4) P��d� ªæ �Ø K Œæı��fiH �Ø�E ŒÆd

����E �Æææ���fi Æ �r ÆØ:½�Æ �æø� ��Æı�e �fiH Œ���fiø:�6. . . (6) º�ª�Ø s

ÆP�E� › ����F�7 . . . (8) ��E� I ���� �N� �c �æ�� · Kªg PŒ I Æ�Æ� ø

�N� �c �æ�c �Æ��� ; ‹�Ø › K�e� ŒÆØæe� h�ø ���º�æø�ÆØ: (9) �ÆF�Æ �b

�N�g ÆP�e� ���Ø � K �fi B ˆÆºØºÆ�fi Æ: (10) � -� �b I ����Æ ƒ I��º�d ÆP�F

�N� �c �æ�� ; ���� ŒÆd ÆP�e� I ��� ½P �Æ �æH� Iººa ‰� K Œæı��ø�.8Like Bultmann, though with certain minor differences, I believe

that this passage could have come from the original signs source.Three points may be noted. In the first place, the story closelyresembles certain features of the Cana episode.9 In both cases thereis a demand for a sign on the part of Jesus’ family (his mother inCana, his brothers here). In both cases Jesus begins by refusing therequest (‘my time is not yet come’), and ends by complying with it.The precise nature of this compliance is not recounted here, butthe conclusion of the story may well have included a reference tothe Feast of Tabernacles; indeed, Jesus’ prophetic words, easily seen

4 Words and phrases which only doubtfully belonged to the source are put inbrackets.

5 Boismard (210) may be right in thinking these words a later addition, prompted bypassages like 2: 23 and 4: 44: ‘Le texte primitif avait probablement un pluriel imper-sonnel.’ Fortna (Gospel of Signs, 196) argues that the mention of disciples implies aprevious sojourn in Judaea. But it seems to memore likely that, if the phrase did belongto the source, the emphasis will have been placed on the contrast between what thedisciples had already seen in Galilee, thought of as K Œæı��fiH, and what they wished tosee �Æææ���fi Æ in Judaea. Perhaps the original read ŒÆd KŒ�E ƒ �ÆŁ��Æ� �ı . . . or some-thing similar. In any case, v. 3 implies that no miracles have yet been performed inJudaea. Note the indicative mood of Ł�øæ��ı�Ø , most unusual after ¥ Æ, and highlyuncharacteristic of the style of the evangelist.

6 This phrase is not necessarily a later addition (especially if it is correct to excise thewords ŒÆd ƒ �ÆŁ��Æ� �ı from the previous verse). It is typical of the evangelist to buildhis own theology upon the simple tradition he has inherited. In the source, as I havesuggested, the ‘manifestation to the world’ might have been simply a counterpoise tothe more private manifestation of Cana.

7 The phrase › ŒÆØæe� › K��� (v. 6) is echoed by › K�e� ŒÆØæ�� (v. 8), an unnecessaryduplication which suggests that the text has been tampered with. The simpler formin v. 8 is likely to be that of the source (q.v. 2: 4, h�ø lŒ�Ø # uæÆ �ı). Bultmann(p. 292 n. 2) reckons that v. 7 certainly, and possibly also the antithesis in v. 6, is fromthe revelation-discourse source.

8 This phrase looks like an attempt to explain away the apparent contradiction.9 Cf. Bultmann, Gospel, 121 n. 4; 289 n. 1.

234 Genesis

as a claim to be a second Moses, the eschatological prophet, wereprobably part of the original conclusion.

A second point of interest is the implication in v. 3 that Jesus hadnot yet performed any miracles in Judaea.10 Evidently the initialmanifestation of glory in Galilee was to be matched by a similarmanifestation in Judaea. Once again the parallel with the Canaepisode is very striking. This must put a question-mark over theoriginal placing (in the signs source) of the story of the healing ofthe cripple at the pool of Bethzatha (ch. 5).

A final point worthy of notice is that the word used in v. 3 to referto Jesus’ works is not ����ØA, but �æªÆ. This is the only place in theGospel where this term is used by anyone other than Jesus himself.When the evangelist takes over the word, he makes it into what isvirtually a technical term, whose reference is identical with that of����EÆ, but whose sense is very different. Boismard thinks that inview of the interest shown by his Document C in seeing Jesus as thenew Moses, there is an allusion to Num. 16: 28, where the LXX reads:K ���fiø ª ����Ł� ‹�Ø Œ�æØ� I�����غ� �� �ØB�ÆØ � �Æ �a �æªÆ �ÆF�Æ ‹�Ø

PŒ I�� K�Æı�F.11 It is hard to be sure about this suggestion. IfBoismard is right about the relevance of the passage, what shouldbe stressed is probably the concluding phrase ‹�Ø PŒ I�� K�Æı�F, andits relevance to the controversy story that follows.

The question concerning the original placing of vv. 14–24 dividesscholars more than any other. Some, e.g. Dodd, retain the passage onprinciple in its present position; others (Glasson, Meeks) argue thatproperly understood, the whole passage can be seen to fit into thecontext perfectly well; others (Spitta, Hirsch)12 cut the section intotwo: 14–18 and 19–24—certainly it is hard to deny a direct allusion tochapter 5 in Jesus’ question in v. 23: K�d �ºA�� ‹�Ø ‹º ¼ Łæø� ªØB

K����Æ K �Æ���fiø; (the £ �æª mentioned in v. 21). This seems to bethe best solution, though I am undecided where precisely to draw theline. The pivotal verse must be v.19, for the mention of Moses isexplicable both as a reference back to the prophetic claims of vv.14–18 and as a reference forward to the law against healing on the

10 Cf. n. 5.11 ‘Jesus est le nouveau Moıse,’ comments Boismard, ‘et les ‘‘œuvres’’ qu’il ‘‘fait’’,

c’est-a-dire les miracles, sont la preuve qu’il fut bien envoye par Dieu; elles le‘‘manifestent’’ au monde’ (213).

12 Cf. Bultmann, p. 238 n. 3.

Excursus V: The Composition of John 7 235

sabbath (vv. 22–3). At least the question ��� �� ����E I�Œ��E ÆØ; (v. 20)must be assigned to the extraneous material because it contradictsthe question that follows in v. 25: P� y��� K��Ø n ���F�Ø I�Œ��E ÆØ;On the whole I am inclined to draw the line in the middle of v. 19,after Jesus’ challenge: ˇP "øß�B� ���øŒ� �E �e �� ; In theoriginal composition, ‘the law’ will have alluded to the passages inDeuteronomy (13: 1–6 and 18: 18–22), which predict the advent of aMoses-like figure and also of false pretenders. This would have fur-nished an excellent point of insertion for the remainder of the ma-terial, where ‘the law’ now comes to refer to the ban against workingon the sabbath. But there can be no certainty on this point, andBultmann may well be right to see in the whole of vv. 19–24 (thoughnot, I think, vv. 15–18) the original conclusion of the source on whichthe evangelist based his account of the healing of the cripple inchapter 5.

Looking then at vv. 14–31 (minus 19b–24) as a whole, we see thatJesus is making two claims: first to be a prophet (vv. 14–19a), for hehas the mark of a prophet, speaking on God’s authority rather thanhis own; secondly, to be the Messiah (vv. 25–31), whose true originsare hidden from his listeners. Hovering over the dialogue in each caseis the suspicion on the part of some of his hearers that he is a falseprophet and a false Messiah.

When the extract from the signs source (roughly as reconstructedabove) was adapted to serve as an introduction to this controversynarrative, it was accordingly expanded in two ways. In the first placethe controversy was to be seen to take place against the backgroundof the relentless hostility of ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ. In the second place the waywas to be prepared for the controversy by an allusion to Jesus’ twoclaims. Hence the addition of (a) v. 1b: P ªaæ XŁ�º� K �fi B ��ı�Æ�fi Æ

��æØ�Æ��E ; ‹�Ø K���ı ÆP�e ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ I�Œ��E ÆØ and (b) vv. 11–13: ƒs ��ı�ÆEØ K���ı ÆP�e K �fi B �æ�fi B ŒÆd �º�ª · �F K��Ø KŒ�E �;12 ŒÆd ªªªı��e� ��æd ÆP�F q �ºf� K �E� Z�ºØ�· ƒ �b �º�ª ‹�Ø

IªÆŁ�� K��Ø ; ¼ººØ �b �º�ª · h; Iººa �ºÆ fi A �e Z�º . 13 P��d� �� �Ø

�Æææ���fi Æ Kºº�Ø ��æd ÆP�F �Øa �e ��� �H ��ı�Æ�ø .Thus the introductory paragraph is now neatly contained by an

opening and closing reference (vv. 1b and 13) to the dangerous threatemanating from the Jews. (ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ are the Jewish leaders here, tobe distinguished from ƒ Z�ºØ.) It is made clear that these disagreeamong themselves. Some think that Jesus is a good man, others thathe is leading the people (Z�ºØ) astray. The colourless word IªÆŁ��,

236 Genesis

intentionally inexplicit, will soon be seen to comprise a doubleclaim—to the titles of (1) prophet and (2) Messiah. Conversely, thecharge of ‘leading the people astray’ will be spelt out in termsassociated with (1) a pseudo-prophet (vv. 14–19a) and (2) a pseudo-Messiah (vv. 25–31).

At this point (v. 32) another and (I believe) earlier controversystory, one with a very different feel and purpose, is added on. Thesuture here is quite visible, since the crowd is described as ªªª��ø ��æd ÆP�F �ÆF�Æ, a phrase which does not refer directly to the preced-ing question, uttered by many voices in the crowd (› �æØ��e� ‹�Æ �ºŁfi ��c �º�� Æ ����EÆ �Ø���Ø z y�� K����� ; [v. 31]), but to theªªªı���� mentioned in the introduction to the story (v. 12). Inother words, the reference of �ÆF�Æ is to the whole of the precedingcontroversy narrative. A new story then begins, with new charac-ters, the chief priests and Pharisees and their ��æ��ÆØ, sent out in thefirst place not to question Jesus but to arrest him.

The dialogue that follows in vv. 33–6 (not, be it noted, with the ��æ��ÆØ, but once more with ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ, as is stated explicitly in13: 33) is out of place. Conceptually, no doubt, it is easy to passfrom the question whence to the question whither—from origins todestiny. The two are linked, for instance, in 8: 14. And it is possible(though odd) that Jesus, confronted with those about to arrest him,should say, ‹�ı �N�d Kªg ��E� P �� Æ�Ł� KºŁ�E . But this passage musthave originated elsewhere—in connection with the material in chap-ter 8 (see vv. 14 and 21). Brown observes that ‘John can referinterchangeably to ‘‘the Jews’’ and to the chief priests and Pharisees’;and he cites 18: 3 and 12; 8: 13 and 22.13 But in this case the chiefpriests and Pharisees are not themselves present at the scene, and theequation of their ��æ��ÆØ with the ��ı�ÆEØ seems intolerably harsh.

If, however, we excise vv. 32–6 from our provisional reconstruc-tion we find that there is a hiatus. The powerful prophecy of vv. 37–8,introduced with such solemnity, is the high point of the wholechapter, and as a response to an attempted arrest seems just asinappropriate as the dialogue on destiny. What is more, as Bultmannnotes, it interrupts the arrest story, ‘since the servants sent out in 7:32 would hardly return only after three or four days!’ Bultmannhimself suggests that 7: 37–44 ‘probably came after v. 30, for v. 31 is

13 These two instances (at any rate the former) may seem to throw some doubt onthe principles employed by von Wahlde (‘The Terms’, cf. n. 1).

Excursus V: The Composition of John 7 237

awkward after v. 30 but fits very well after v. 44’.14 This is not quiteright, because v. 32a is best explained as a deliberate allusion to thewhole of the preceding controversy narrative (vv. 11–31)—as wehave seen. But there is undoubtedly some dislocation here, sincethe ��æ��ÆØ of v. 32b are obviously the same as those of v. 45.Certainly most of the material in vv. 37–44 makes a natural climaxto the controversy material earlier in the chapter; but the originalmeaning of the prophecy was not what the evangelist’s gloss (v. 39)suggests, but rather the strongest possible claim on Jesus’ part to beprophet and Messiah.

When this chapter was composed the arrest material was inte-grated with what I have called the controversy material by thesimple expedient of detaching its introductory sentence (v. 32) andplacing this before two other small episodes, the dialogue on destinyand the great prophecy, now adapted to provide a link with thepreceding controversy material. The effect of this is to move it along way from the story to which it originally belonged: in thepresent form of the text twelve whole verses separate v. 32 from v. 45.

The connections are now quite intricate. There is a further divisionrecorded in vv. 40–1 (KŒ �F Z�ºı s IŒ��Æ ��� �H º�ªø ���ø

�º�ª · y��� K��Ø Iº�ŁH� › �æ�����· ¼ººØ �º�ª · y��� K��Ø ›

�æØ����). This fits equally well what precedes (i.e. the earlier contro-versy, vv. 11–31) and what follows. But the next question (�c ªaæ KŒ

�B� ˆÆºØºÆ�Æ� › �æØ��e� �æ���ÆØ;) clearly belongs with the concludingepisode, where the objection is that Galilee cannot be the true homeeither of the Messiah (vv. 41–2) or of the Prophet (in v. 52 followingp66 in reading the full form, › �æ�����).

In Chapter 4 I have offered an interpretation of the original signifi-cance of this final story. But a word should be added here about therole of Nicodemus, whose role here corresponds so closely to that ofGamaliel in Acts 5: 33–40.15 In the history of the composition of theGospel this was, I suggest, his first appearance, and this story willhave been told before the more acrimonious controversies recordedearlier in chapter 7 (as well as in chapter 5 and chapter 8) had takenplace. This sympathetic Jew, still not committed to following Jesus,

14 Gospel, 287.15 The two are conflated in the Acts of Pilate, Hennecke–Schneemelcher, New

Testament Apocrypha, i (London, 1963), 444–70. Cf. J. L. Martyn, Gospel of John, ch. 2,esp. 74–89.

238 Genesis

was a natural choice, somewhat later, for the interlocutor of Jesus inthe story dialogue of chapter 3. By the time that story was composedit was no longer possible for a prominent Pharisee to engage in opendebate with Jesus—he had to come ‘by night’ (3: 2). Attitudes hadhardened between the situation portrayed in the conclusion of chap-ter 7 and that presupposed at the beginning of chapter 3. In the finalcomposition of the Gospel the necessary link was easily establishedby the addition of the words › KºŁg �æe� ÆP�e �æ���æ , (v. 50).

Like all other attempted reconstructions, this one remains hypo-thetical. But what cannot be denied is the clear evidence that thischapter had a prehistory, and nothing is to be gained by pretendingthat it did not. It is true that any final reading of the Gospel must takeinto account the text as we have it, and especially, in this case, theimportant gloss of v. 39. But if one wishes to understand the growthof the Gospel and of the theological thinking of the Johannine com-munity, some kind of speculation along the lines I have indicated isunavoidable.

Excursus V: The Composition of John 7 239

5

SON OF MAN

introduction

Among the many puzzles presented by the Fourth Gospel one of themost intriguing is the paradoxical contrast between the titles ‘Son ofGod’ and ‘Son of Man’. ‘Son of God’, originally at any rate, indicates ahuman being, the Messiah; whereas ‘Son of Man’ points to a figurewhose true home is in heaven. Divine? Well perhaps not necessarily,or not altogether, but certainly invested by God with an authority noordinary human being would dare to claim. Why this should be so isa question whose answer revolves upon the interpretation of a singletext—the famous vision1 of Daniel 7:

I was seeing visions in the night,and behold, with (zp: ) the clouds of heavenone like a man was coming (ef

˝e eva

˝Wn

˝a tk

¯

k˙´ )

And he approached the Ancient of Days (ei˝m aj:

˝m

¯

Fj sjv: p¯¯dp

¯

f)and was presented before himAnd to him was given dominion and glory and kingship (fklm

¯

f ts

˝jf: wi

˝lW

˝):

With all peoples, nations and tongues serving him;His dominion an everlasting dominion, not to pass awayAnd his kingship not to be destroyed. (Dan. 7: 13–14)

Somehow or other a move was made from this figure like a man (forthe Aramaic term Wn

˝a tb

¯

k˙´ meant no more than this)2 to the Son of

1 It is not altogether clear whether Daniel’s experience was a vision or a dream.Possibly an earlier version that speaks of a vision has been interpreted as a dream: ‘I sawvisions in the night’ (7: 13; cf. v. 2). Cf. P. Weimar, ‘Daniel’. In what follows the terms‘vision’ and ‘dream’ are interchangeable.

2 Or, equally possible, ‘a man-like figure’—alternatives separated by the finest ofnuances, not conveyed by the Aramaic, but with a whole world of interpretativemeaning lying between them. For in the first case the ‘one like a man’ is somethingother than a man, just as the strange animal-like creatures who precede him aresomething other than ordinary animals. In the second case the ‘man-like figure’ isno more than a wraith, floating vapidly through the seer’s dream until the interpret-ation gives it a function and a meaning. Much depends upon whether the figures in thedream, the Wn

˝a tb

¯

k˙´ and the monsters, are thought to be no more than empty

Man, which is how the innocent Aramaic phrase (having first shiftedfrom the indefinite ‘a’ to the definite ‘the’) emerges in the ponderous,literal translation familiar to us from the Gospels.

Whether Jesus, in sober fact, ever thought of himself or referred tohimself as the mysterious personage who appears in Daniel’s dreamis not a question that need concern us here. That the identificationwas made by the Synoptists I take to be beyond dispute. The clouds,the power, and the glory in Mark 13: 26 leave no room for doubt.3

That the term ‘Son of Man’ as used in the Fourth Gospel also impliessome sort of heavenly status also seems obvious to me, but requireselucidation, since many of the passages in which it occurs arecuriously opaque.

Consequently, although the Greek expression › ıƒe� �F I Łæ��ı

(the Son of Man) is certainly a most misleading rendering of theAramaic Wn

˝a tb

¯

k˙´ it would be a mistake to assume that the mysteri-

ous figure in Daniel’s vision can tell us nothing of the early Christianunderstanding of Jesus. On the contrary, even from the relativelysmall number of texts in which the allusion to the apocalyptic Son ofMan is underlined we can see clearly that the identification was ofgreat significance; and we must therefore allow for the possibilitythat he may be lurking in the background in other passages wherethe association is at best implicit. In the Fourth Gospel, I believe, theidentification is even stronger, though for the most part it is notdirectly supported by apocalyptic props. How John fills in the mostlyrather tentative and sketchy suggestions of the Synoptists will beconsidered in the conclusion of this chapter.

(a) The Sayings as a Group

If we were to attempt to isolate the passages featuring the titles ‘Son’or ‘Son of God’ and to treat them apart, we should find ourselves

signifiers, waiting to be interpreted, or whether they are conceived to have somereality, however shadowy and insubstantial, in the world above. In that case the‘one like a man’ is an angel; so is the ‘one in the likeness of men’, jnb: vfmdk

˙´ (10: 16; cf.

10: 18), and a figure introduced similarly as one ‘in the appearance of a man’ (vir),tbc

˝¯eatm

¯

k˙´ (8: 15). Some object that the figure in Daniel’s dream does not merely

represent Israel but, according to the interpretation, is actually identified with ‘thesaints of the Most High’. In my view this is to underrate and possibly altogether toignore the significance of the upper-level action in the apocalyptic vision. But in anycase the relevance of the passage for the New Testament lies not in its originalmeaning, but in the interpretation it was given at the turn of the era.

3 Cf. Matt. 24: 30; 25: 31; 26: 64, etc.

Son of Man 241

handicapped by their sheer number and ubiquity. Do the relativelyinfrequent occurrences of the term ‘Son of Man’ (thirteen all told)4

entitle us to consider them as ‘a cluster’?5

Rudolf Schnackenburg believes that ‘all thirteen texts in Johnwhich speak of the Son of Man form a consistent and well-knitwhole’.6 What is more, he is convinced that ‘apart from the Son ofMan logia themselves, there seems to be no grounds for assumingthat the concept of the Son of Man has greatly influenced the FourthGospel’.7

Against this we may set J. L. Martyn’s view that the evangelistemployed the Son of Man motif as a complement and corrective tothe identification of Jesus as Mosaic prophet-Messiah. The latter title,he observes, is never allowed to occupy the centre of the stage forvery long: it is always replaced soon afterwards by another motif:‘Furthermore, this other motif always has to do with the Son of Man,and it usually consists of a direct presentation of Jesus as the Son ofMan.’8 On the other hand, Martyn holds the view that ‘the titles Sonof Man and Son of God have become interchangeable for John’.9 Butthis is a careless, throw-away opinion, quite untypical of Martyn’swork as a whole, and he would surely have revised it had heundertaken a proper study of the Son of Man sayings individuallyand as a group.

41: 51; 3: 13; 3: 14; 5: 27; 6: 27; 6: 53; 6: 62; 8: 28; 9: 35; 12: 23; 12: 34 (bis); 13: 31.

5 W. R. G. Loader, ‘Central Structure’.6 Schnackenburg, i. 532. Similarly Lindars: ‘The Son of Man in John is the agent of

the revelation which is disclosed in the cross’ (Jesus, 155)—a straightforward butsomewhat over-simplified account. J. Coppens, in one of the most thorough of alldisquisitions on this subject, speaks of a distinct literary stratum, suggesting, withoutpressing the point, that the evangelist may have drawn upon ‘a florilegium of logia,presumably the work of an early Christian group that has remained loyal and respon-sive to a christology centred upon the figure of the Son ofMan’ (‘Le Fils de l’homme’, 65).

7 Schnackenburg, i. 534.8 History2, 134. Martyn adds (n. 194) that ‘the single exception is in the Samaritan

episode in John 4. There, appropriately, the movement is from the Mosaic Taheb to theJewish Messiah as the Savior of the World.’

9 Ibid., n. 193. This he believes to have been demonstrated by S. Schulz inMenschensohn-Christologie. In fact Schulz is concerned with the Son theme (not Sonof God), which he believes to be rooted in the apocalyptic vision of the Son of Man(127, 132–3, 136–7, 141–2). If an alternative derivation is preferred (for which see Ch. 4),then there is no good reason to equate the two titles. E. D. Freed is even more emphaticthan Martyn: ‘Son of Man is only a variation for at least two other titles, namely theSon of God and the Son. . . . There is no separate Son of Man christology in the FourthGospel’ (‘Son of Man’, 403).

242 Genesis

Nevertheless it is hard to specify any features common to allthirteen sayings apart from the title itself. At most one can speak ofa family resemblance, in Wittgenstein’s sense, whereby the reader’sattention is continually being directed to one particular aspect ofJesus’ self-revelation. The title embodies the theme of Jesus’ heavenlyorigin and destiny, and does so often enough to be significant interms of his descent and (more frequently) ascent. It thereforeadds to Messiahship and Sonship, albeit indirectly, the notion ofpre-existence. What it does not convey, paradoxically, is eitherhumanity10 (which mostly rests upon the messianic titles) or anysuggestion of sonship (differing in this respect from the title ‘Son’,which points directly to Jesus’ relationship with God). Nor is the Sonof Man ever said to be sent.

(b) The Origin of the Sayings

The remote origin of all the sayings is the Danielic Son of Man.11 Howfar John drew upon traditions in which this figure had already beenreinterpreted is a matter of conjecture. The important group of say-ings dominated by the concepts of exaltation and glorification (3: 14;8: 28; 12: 23, 34; 13: 31) is connected with the Synoptic passionpredictions, and perhaps also with sayings involving the concept ofJesus’ exaltation at the right hand of God (cf. Mark 12: 36–7; 14: 62;etc.).12 Given his penchant for adopting Synoptic-type traditions andtransforming them to suit his own purposes, there is no need to lookany further for the immediate source of this group of sayings, thoughof course one can still ask howhe comes to use the tradition as he does.

10 Contra F. J. Moloney: ‘There is a concentration on the human figure of Jesus inthe use of ‘‘the Son of Man’’. It is a title which is entirely dependent upon theincarnation. The Son of Man reveals the truth to men because he is man—becauseof the incarnation’ (Johannine Son of Man, 213). Moloney’s error is to take the christ-ology of the incarnate Logos as a kind of axiom from which everything else derives.Equally misguided is C. H. Dodd’s view that ‘for John the Son of Man is the I º�ŁØ e�¼ Łæø��, the real or archetypal Man, or the Platonic Idea of Man’ (Interpretation, 244).M. Pamment, ‘Son of Man’, has a similar view: ‘It is misleading to label ‘‘Son of man’’ a‘‘Christological term’’ since, unlike ‘‘Son of God’’, it does not seek to distinguish Jesus’unique nature or function, but defines the attributes of humanity which all menshould exemplify.’

11 Contra Dodd: ‘if we single out any one passage in the Old Testament which mightbe regarded as the scriptural basis for the Johannine idea of the Son of Man, Ps 79 (80)would take precedence over Dan 7’ (Interpretation, 245 n. 1).

12 Cf. Schnackenburg, i. 535–6.

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With such an obvious source lying close to hand in their owninshore waters, why then have New Testament scholars ventured somuch further out to sea, trawling for speculative answers in anuncharted deep? Because some of the Son of Man sayings imply notjust an appearance among clouds (well attested in the tradition) buta descent from heaven as well. Moreover, in the Fourth Gospel theascent cannot be completely detached from the descent: ‘No one hasascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven,the Son of Man’ (3: 13). And ‘what if you should see the Son of Manascending where he was before?’ (6: 62). For this pattern of the descent/ascent of a heavenly messenger, argues Wayne Meeks, ‘there is nocloser parallel than in the Mandaean writings’; accordingly ‘it hasbeen and remains the strongest support for the hypothesis that theJohannine christology is connected with gnostic mythology’.13 Howfar Meeks is justified in making this inference is a question thatmust await further discussion. But it is clear at any rate that wecannot furnish a satisfactory explanation of the Johannine ‘Son ofMan’ sayings by appealing to the Synoptic tradition alone.

It can be shown that the evangelist was influenced by a number ofcurrents in the formation of his concept of the Son of Man, all of themsomewhere on the outer margins of the broad band of the Jewishtradition. These are most fruitfully considered in the exegesis ofindividual logia. In each case one must ask (a) what it was in thisparticular tradition that inspired the evangelist to take it over; (b)how and why did he use it in the way he did? It is widely agreed thatthe Son of Man sayings as a whole contain some of John’s mostprofound and individual reflections on the role and person of Jesus.So the question what he understands by the term—in context—ismore important than the identification of the sources he used. Cer-tainly there is little value in trying to distinguish the pre-Johanninefrom the Johannine in this area unless one is prepared at the sametime to assess the point and purpose of the adaptations.

1. the way up and the way down (1: 51)

The Son of Man steps into the pages of the Fourth Gospel in what issurely one of the most unusual sayings to be put in the mouth ofJesus by any of the evangelists:

13 Prophet-King, 297.

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Amen, amen I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of Godascending and descending upon the Son of Man. (1: 51)

By no stretch of the imagination could this saying or anythingremotely like it be derived from the Synoptic tradition as we knowit.14 The immediate reference is to Jacob’s dream at Bethel ‘that therewas a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven;and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it’(Gen. 28: 12). For an insight into the meaning of John 1: 51 we mayturn first of all to C. F. Burney, who pointed out that the interpret-ation of Jacob’s dream given in the Gospel depends on the Hebrew,where the word translated ‘on it’ (referring to the ladder) couldequally well be translated ‘on him’ (referring to Jacob).15 After hehad reached this conclusion it occurred to Burney to look up whatthe rabbis had to say on the passage, in the Genesis Rabbah. There hefound to his satisfaction that an argument had taken place on thatvery point. One rabbi translated, ‘ascending and descending uponthe ladder’, the other, ‘ascending and descending upon Jacob’. Ofthese alternative explanations the commentator, according to Bur-ney, prefers the former. But that does not stop him from offering areading of the latter also: ‘Ascending and descending upon Jacobimplies that they were taking up and bringing down upon him.16

They were leaping and skipping over him and rallying him . . . ’.The interpretation now takes a sharp turn in a different direction:

‘as it is said ‘‘You, O Israel [Jacob’s other name] in whom I glory17 (Isa.

14 Contra W. Michaelis, rightly criticized by G. Reim, Studien, 102–3.15 ‘Since zl

˝o ‘‘ladder’’ is masculine, the force of Fb is ambiguous. In LXX, K�� ÆP�B�

can refer only to Œº��Æ�. It may be added that John’s ŒÆ�Æ�Æ� ��� ŒÆd ŒÆ�Æ�Æ� ���literally represents the Hebrew participial construction zjdtjf zjl: p which is obscuredin I ��ÆØ ŒÆd ŒÆ���ÆØ of LXX’ (Aramaic Origins, 115–16).

16 This is a literal rendering of the Hebrew fb zjdtfmf zjlpm, which is simply a Hifil(i.e causative) form of the Qal verbs of the biblical text. Burney comments upon theobscurity of this phrase, made especially difficult by the retention of the fb. His ownsuggestion is that the angels acted as carriers between earth and heaven. Perhaps it isnot too far-fetched to see them clambering up on Jacob’s body in order to transport his�dŒ� up to heaven. Other versions ignore the difficulty. J. Z. Smith (‘Prayer of Joseph’,58) reproduces Freedman’s trans., ‘they praised him and slandered him’, but suggeststhe possibility of a more literal trans.: ‘they raised him up and put him down’ (ibid.,n. 85). In an otherwise useful study of the targumic parallels to John 1: 51C. Rowland failsto mention The Prayer of Joseph and I am left unconvinced by his suggestion ‘that K�d �e ıƒe �F I Łæ��ı should be taken only with ŒÆ�Æ�Æ� ��� and not I Æ�Æ� ���� :‘John 1. 51’.

17 Or rather, ‘in whom I will be glorified’ (taqva fb tua latuj). Cf. John 13: 31.

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49: 3), you are he whose �NŒ� [portrait, image]18 is engraved onhigh.’’ They were ascending on high and looking at his �NŒ� , andthen descending below and finding him sleeping.’ The dreamer isnow seen to be in two places at once, the real man sleeping on earth,while his portrait is fixed in heaven. This is an important element inthe midrash, according to one of which God has to protect thesleeping Jacob from the hostility of the angels.

The following verse (Gen. 28: 13) is the occasion of a similardivergence of interpretation, since the word fjlp can refer (as eventhe RSV recognizes) either to Jacob or to the ladder. Rabbi Lakishtakes the phrase literally: ‘the Lord stood upon Jacob (fjlp brn)Abraham’ (Gen. 17: 22); ‘And God went up from upon him (fjlpm)’(Gen. 35: 13). These words show, he says, that the patriarchs consti-tute the Merkavah, the divine chariot (ebktm we we vfbae). Herethere is a hint of the sort of mediating role that Jesus plays in theGospel—an occasion or vehicle of a heavenly vision.

A further interpretative element comes from the Jerusalem targu-mim (Onkelos is of no help here), where we learn that Jacob’s portraitor image is fixed or engraved (pjbs) upon the throne of glory:

the angels who had accompanied him from the house of his father ascendedto inform the angels from on high, saying, ‘Come and see the just man whoseimage (wjnfsja) is engraved on the throne of glory and whom you werelonging to see.’ And so the angels of the presence of the Lord were ascendingand descending and gazing on him.19

The third piece of evidence, not used in the earlier commentaries,is an extraordinary fragment of the Prayer of Joseph, preserved byOrigen20 and analysed at length and in depth by J. Z. Smith:

Jacob, at any rate, says: ‘I, Jacob, who am speaking to you, am also Israel, anangel of God and a ruling spirit. Abraham and Isaac were created before anywork. But I, whom men call Jacob but whose name is Israel, am he whomGod called Israel, i.e., a man seeing God, because I am the first born of everyliving thing to whom God gives life.’ And he continues: ‘And when I wascoming up from Syrian Mesopotamia, Uriel, the angel of God, came out andsaid that I descended to earth and I had tabernacled among men and that I

18 The loan-word wjnfsja is used.19 Codex Neofiti: similarly Ps. Jon. The crucial word ‘engraved’, though included in

the Paris MS, is omitted by the Codex Vaticanus of the Fragmentary Targum—which isthe version quoted by J. Z. Smith. Cf. F. L. Lentzen-Deis, Die Taufe Jesu nach denSynoptikern (Frankfurt, 1970), 221.

20 Comm. in Joann. 2. 31.

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had been called by the name of Jacob (‹�Ø ŒÆ���� K�d �c ªB ŒÆd

ŒÆ���Œ� ø�Æ K I Łæ��Ø�; ŒÆd ‹�Ø KŒº�Ł� O ��Æ�Ø � �ÆŒø�). He envied meand fought with me and wrestled with me, saying that his name and thename of him that is before every angel was to be above mine. I told him hisname and what rank he held among the sons of God: ‘‘Are you not Uriel,the eighth after me, and I Israel, the archangel of the power of the Lord andthe chief captain among the sons of God? Am I not Israel, the first ministerbefore the face of God?’’ And I called upon my God by the inextinguishablename . . . ’.21

What this fragment adds to the foregoing is summed up by Smith inthe phrase ‘descent myth’. He quotes M. R. James: ‘The leading ideaof the principal fragment is that angels can become incarnate inhuman bodies, live on earth in the likeness of men, and be uncon-scious of their original state. Israel does so apparently that he maybecome the father of the chosen people.’22 Smith goes on to pointout that the language of the descent myth in the quotation ‘clearlyderives from the Jewish-Wisdom-Shekinah theology that has beenthe preoccupation of many students of the Prologue since the pio-neering researches of J. Rendel Harris’—‘That I had descended toearth, etc.’

Although these words have a docetic ring, it is doubtful if thewriter intends to question the full humanity of Jacob. True, bothpassages imply a double role, one in heaven, which has at least apriority in time, and one on earth. But the question of ontologicalpriority is harder to answer. Is the ‘real’ Jacob the heavenly one, whodescends to earth for a particular purpose only to reascend after hiswork there is done? At first sight it would appear so;23 but I suspectthat to put the question in this way may be to presuppose a dichot-omy not envisaged by the writer, who is more concerned to establishthe identity of the two figures than to arbitrate between them.We aredealing here with myth and myth, like gossamer, cannot be weighedin our clumsy scales.

21 ‘Prayer of Joseph’. See too the suggestive remarks of Margaret Barker on this text,The Older Testament, 110–11.

22 The Testament of Abraham (Cambridge, 1892), 30.23 This is the view of Odeberg, pp. 35–6. Cf. Dodd, Interpretation, 245–6. The midrash

goes on to compare the heavenly Jacob with a king in judgement and the earthly Jacobwith a king in sleep. Odeberg concludes from this simile ‘that the celestial appearanceis meant to be conveyed as the real man’. But the opposite view is urged by MortonSmith, as cited by J. Z. Smith, ‘Prayer of Joseph’, p. 59 n. 92. This debate seems to meacademic in both senses of the word.

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How much of this speculation upon the Jacob story is relevant tothe interpretation of John 1: 51? Are we entitled to use the targumand the Prayer of Joseph in our reading, when their mythologicalcontent so far outstrips both the Gospel passage itself and the part ofthe midrash it most closely resembles?

These imaginative extrapolations should teach us first, I suggest,that speculative exegesis of this kind belongs squarely within theJewish tradition. In the light of these late developments the Johan-nine passage, so utterly unlike any of the Son of Man passages in theSynoptic Gospels, seems less surprising. Like other Jewish writersthe fourth evangelist sees in the Jacob story a suggestion of a truthhe himself was anxious to proclaim. So we need to ask what it wasin the story that fired his own imagination and inspired him toconstruct his own myth.

Unlike the author of the Prayer of Joseph, John sees no link,apparently, between the Jewish legend and the wisdom myth. If hehad, this might have been an appropriate place in the Gospel tointroduce the notion of incarnation or ‘tabernacling on earth’, some-thing he signally fails to do.24 Neither incarnation as such nortabernacling is in his thoughts at this juncture.

There are four elements requiring discussion: the open heaven, theladder between heaven and earth, the ascent–descent motif, and the‘greater things’. But what should be emphasized first, perhaps, isthat, unlike all the Jewish midrashim, John substitutes for ‘Jacob’ aname of his own, ‘Son of Man’, assuming that his readers aresufficiently familiar with this term to make the required identifi-cation (with Jesus) for themselves. In making this move he is doingtwo things. First of all he is arrogating for Jesus the special placeassigned to Jacob in the Jewish tradition; secondly he is associatingthe various themes that are peculiar to the passage with a particulartitle which had at best only an indirect link with the messianic claimsprominent in the earlier part of the chapter.25 The move implies,

24 This is all the more surprising in view of the brilliant exploitation of these verytraditions in the Prologue. The difference between the two passages is an additionalproof that the Prologue was not added to the Gospel text until a comparatively latestage of its development.

25 Since the identification between these two traditions is made in the Parablessection of 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra 13 (both writings roughly contemporary with the FourthGospel) some caution is required here. See U. B. Muller, Messias und Menschensohn;W. Horbury, ‘Messianic Associations’.

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then, that these claims do not exhaust the truth about Jesus; what ismore, it already involves a considerable reinterpretation of the roleand function of the figure of the Son of Man. Why the evangelistattached his ascent/descent christology to this title and no other will,I hope, become plain in the course of this chapter.

We may begin by reminding ourselves of the way the evangelisthighlights this title at the end of chapter 1. In its original form thestory of Jesus’ Recognition by the disciples constituted, as we saw inChapter 3, the second panel of a triptych in which the most import-ant of the titles assigned to Jesus matched those that had beenrepudiated by John the Baptist in the first panel, the Testimony.The climax of the series was initially the one bestowed by the wiseand guileless Nathanael: ‘You are the Son of God! You are the King ofIsrael’ (1: 49). The evangelist is dissatisfied with these purely messi-anic titles, which do not, he realizes, adequately impart the realmystery of Jesus. So he replaces the original climax with a mythicalŒº��Æ� (ladder) of his own, one which is no longer earth-bound butreaches up to heaven. The superiority of the new title is establishedvery firmly by the introductory verse, ‘You shall see greater thingsthan these’, because the primary reference of the ‘greater things’is the ‘open heaven’: there is no doubt an allusion here to theTestimony scene—John’s vision of the Spirit descending like a dovefrom heaven (1: 32). But in this version, unlike those of the Synopt-ists, the heavens are not said to have opened (or ‘split’ in the case ofMark 1: 10) to allow the dove to descend. Not until the end of John’sfirst chapter are we permitted an anticipatory glimpse of an openheaven; and this is in connection with the title ‘Son of Man’.(In conformity with Synoptic usage, this title, unlike the precedingones—all of which are ‘discovered’ and proclaimed by the disciples—is reserved for the lips of Jesus.)

One of the difficulties of interpreting the saying satisfactorily is thatthe imagination, for once, is of no avail. Confronted with the bizarrespectacle of the angels clambering up and down on the strange newfigure of the Son of Man, it seizes and stalls. This is a commonexperience of twentieth-century Westerners: as they look at myth,they feel compelled, somehow, to demythologize. But why should ademythologized myth be any more use than dehydrated water? Themedium is the message—it does not contain it or hold it imprisonedlike a genie in a bottle, waiting to be released. Somehow, then, wehave to allow the picture of the ladder, base on earth and top in the

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clouds, to fuse with that of the Son of Man, and at the same time toallow the busily climbing angels, some going up and others goingdown, to convey the message with which the evangelist has chargedthem. But what is this message? It lies in the picture: it is simply thatthere is no other route between heaven and earth than the Son ofMan—an interpretation which leads us back to the intended func-tion of the Babylonian ziggurat, which is no doubt what promptedJacob’s dream in the first place. What is being suggested to the readerin this striking but perplexing image is not very different from theclaim Jesus makes much later in the Gospel: in reply to Thomas’squestion, ‘How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am theway . . . ’ (14: 5–6).

Is that all? Not quite. For in this tiny midrash the evangelist hasintroduced us to a motif which resonates, as Wayne Meeks hasargued,26 through much of the ‘Son of Man’ material in the Gospel,namely the ascent/descent motif. If Jesus appears later simply as theway, here he is the way up and the way down. It would be far toosimple to say that he now appears as ‘the divine man’ whose truehome is in heaven. Oddly, perhaps, the first of the two verbs here, asin the next passage in which the Son of Man appears, is not ‘descend’but ‘ascend’. True, it is not yet being stated of the Son of Man himselfthat he is ascending or descending. But it is he who establishescommunication between earth and a heaven which is now (perman-ently) open. We should remember that nowhere in the Gospel is the‘Son of Man’ theme directly associated with the mission themediscussed in the previous chapter. If the Son of Man were indeedsent then he would have to be thought of as sent from heaven. Butthis point is not made. The Son of Man is first of all not an emissarybut an intermediary.

Schwartz argued27 that coming as it does so early in the Gospel, ina position that clearly indicates its importance to the evangelist, thisprophecy might reasonably be expected to be fulfilled somewherein the course of the remaining chapters. But where? After this brief

26 ‘Man from Heaven’. Although I disagree with some of its conclusions, thisremains, in my view, the most significant single essay on the Fourth Gospel publishedsince Bultmann. In the present chapter in particular my debt to Meeks’s work is verygreat indeed. I am also indebted to an unpublished paper by John McDade, whichshows more insight into the problems raised by this title than most of the other booksand articles I have read.

27 ‘Aporien’ (1908), 517.

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appearance angels vanish from the Gospel and play no further role.But to look for an angelophany, as Hans Windisch did,28 with nosuccess, is to mistake the purpose of the prophecy. Nathanael is beingtacitly equated with Jacob here; but this means that his promisedvision has the character of a dream. And the fulfilment of a dream isnot, whatever else it is, another dream. Jacob’s interpretation of hisdream, on awakening, is sobriety itself: ‘ ‘‘Surely the Lord is inthis place and I did not know it.’’ And he was afraid, and said:‘‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house ofGod, and this is the gate of heaven’’ ’ (Gen. 28: 17). What Jacobconcluded about a place, Bethel, is transferred by the evangelist to aperson who, as Son of Man, is the locus of revelation. These are the‘greater things’ which you (plural) will see (Zł��Ł�); by jumping fromsingular to plural in what looks like a grammatical solecism,the evangelist is deliberately extending the promise made to theindividual Nathanael (Złfi �) to a larger audience—not just the otherdisciples present at the scene, but the readers of the Gospel.

2. ascent and descent (3: 13)

The ascent/descent motif recurs in the next passage (3: 11–13), whichhas caused commentators almost as much trouble as the first. Thethree verses in question, along with the following two (3: 14–15),have been appended to the discussion with Nicodemus concerning anew kind of birth.29 They read as follows:

Amen, amen I say to you (��, singular), that we (plural) speak of what weknow and testify to what we have seen, and you do not accept (ºÆ�� ���,plural) our testimony. If I told you ( �E , plural) of the things of earth(K��ª�ØÆ) and you do not believe, then if I tell you of the things of heaven(K�ıæ ØÆ) how will you believe? The fact is30 that no one has ascended intoheaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.

The abrupt transition from singular to plural in v. 11 suggests thatan originally plural saying has been adapted to fit on to the dialogue

28 ‘Angelophanien’, 226–7.29 The wider context of the whole of ch. 3 is discussed in Excursus IV.30 To translate the initial ŒÆ� in this way is to begin to interpret this passage,

making a very strong connection between vv. 12 and 13. (The initial ŒÆ� of v. 14 hasa very different force.) The RSV ignores the ŒÆ� of v. 13; Brown, p. 129, renders it ‘Now’,a mild adversative. Schnackenburg inserts vv. 31–6 between vv. 12 and 13. Buhner,though he does not discuss the ŒÆ�, understands the passage as I do: Gesandte, 380.

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with Nicodemus, a single individual.31 The evangelist is borrowingfrom a source here, and it is particularly important to bear in mindthat the reference of �a K��ª�ØÆ may have been different in the sourcefrom what it is in the finished Gospel.32 The exceptional difficulty ofgiving any acceptable reference to the phrase in its present context isanother indication that it has been lifted from a very different setting.It is the original reference of �a K��ª�ØÆ that sheds most light on themeaning of the following verse.

The main difficulty of the passage is in v. 13. How are we to explainthe apparent implication that the Son of Man has already ascendedinto heaven, when he has, so to speak, just arrived on earth?

One way of evading this difficulty is to argue that the Greek neednot imply any earlier ascension on the part of the Son of Man: ‘Noone has ever ascended into heaven [and thus equipped himself toreveal the secrets of God]: the Son of Man alone, who has come downfrom heaven [is in a position to do so]’;33 or, more simply, ‘No onehas ever ascended into heaven, but one has descended, the Son ofMan.’34 But this solution places an unbearable strain on the Greek.Frey suggests that the evangelist is once again (as in 3: 11) attribut-ing to Jesus the post-Easter perspective of the community.35 But thisis an evasion rather than a solution. We are therefore left with thetask of explaining what this ascension could be.

31 This is different from the change of number in 1: 51. According to Jorg Frey theplurals in 3: 11 can only be understood as the expression of the Johannine community’switness to an unbelieving world, which is ‘projected into the words of Jesus’ (Eschato-logie, ii. 252). But he does not explain why such a saying should be suddenly injectedinto the dialogue with Nicodemus. He refers back to the Prologue, but the pluralsthere, which clearly indicate the voice of the whole community, are unproblematic.

32 As may be guessed from the perplexity of the commentators, e.g. Bultmann,pp. 147–8. The sense or meaning of the term—things of earth—poses no problem:there are plenty of examples in Jewish and other sources (cf. Bultmann, p. 147 n. 1;Schnackenburg, i. 378, etc.).What is puzzling is the reference or denotation in the presentcontext. Bultmann’s exegetical bravura at this point is quite dazzling, but not altogetherpersuasive. For some further suggestions (none of them convincing) see Blank, Krisis,61 n. 39. I suspect that the root of the problem lies in the fact that in the text as it standsK��ª�ØÆ and K�ıæ ØÆ can only refer to the same truths concerning the person of Jesus,who, as the previous logion implies, unites earth and heaven in his own person.

33 This is the solution of E. Ruckstuhl, ‘Abstieg und Niedergang’.34 Cf. F. M. Sidebottom, The Christ of the Fourth Gospel, 120. The ‘parallel’ in Rev. 21:

27 to which he and, following him, Moloney (Son of Man, 55) appeal actually tellsagainst them. Borgen (‘Some Jewish Exegetical Traditions’, 249) rightly compares John6: 46; 17: 12.

35 Eschatologie, ii. 254. Frey refers (n. 26) to a number of alternative solutions, butdoes not mention Odeberg.

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In his truncated commentary of 1929 Odeberg laid the foundationsof a solution by showing that the passage has a polemical intent:‘The wording P��d� I Æ����Œ� [no one has ascended], etc., immedi-ately suggests that there is a refutation here of some current notionsof ascent into heaven.’36 The insistence that no one apart from theSon of Man ever ascended into heaven is made in the teeth of rivalclaims of prophets or patriarchs (above all Moses, though Odebergdoes not mention him) to have gone up to heaven to receive revela-tion from God.

There are innumerable examples of such heavenly journeys in allbranches of Jewish tradition,37 ranging from pseudepigraphicalapocalyptic texts to the insatiable curiosity of ‘orthodox’ rabbinismabout mystical matters in general and the Merkavah or ‘heavenlychariot’ tradition in particular, according to which a seer is trans-ported to heaven to receive revelations that far transcend anythingvouchsafed to his earthbound contemporaries. The feature all thesestories have in common with the passage in John 3: 11–13 is that theyinvolve not just an ascent or assumption into heaven at the end of anindividual’s earthly life (Enoch and Elijah are the prime exampleshere) but a descent to earth following upon the heavenly vision. Theexistence of such a visionary belief throughout all branches of Jewishtradition furnishes us with an important clue to the understanding ofthis puzzling saying.

For the elucidation of the idea of the ascent of the Johannine Son ofMan we are indebted to two important articles which illustrate theascent/descent motif by highlighting two complementary series oftexts. Published about the same time, the two articles are remarkablyand interestingly dissimilar.

Charles H. Talbert38 is eager to shatter the assumption of indebt-edness to Gnostic sources.39 He has gathered together a large num-ber of bits and pieces flung from the obscure dark of the rich streamsthat feed into what he calls ‘Mediterranean Antiquity’. Many of thetexts he packs into his great big blunderbuss of an article miss their

36 Odeberg, p. 72.37 Out of the huge array of secondary literature see especially G. Scholem, Major

Trends; I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic; C. Rowland, Open Heaven.38 ‘Myth’.39 One of his main targets is Wayne Meeks (Prophet-King, cf. n. 13 above), whom he

cites at the beginning of his article (419 and n. 3).

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target by a wide margin.40 These range from Ovid and Tacitus to theso-called Apostolic Constitutions. His Latin examples alone, he claims,prove ‘that a Greco-Roman mythology of descending-ascending godswho appear on earth for redemptive purposes both existed earlyenough to be available for Christian appropriation and had, by thebeginning of our era, already been used to interpret the lives ofhistorical figures’.41 He stops short, no doubt, of asserting thatOvid and Tacitus, Vergil and Horace, were actually the source ofthe Jewish myth. But it must be said that his treatment of the Jewishwisdom literature is itself curiously wide of the mark: the personifiedwisdom-figure (who is in any case usually closer to metaphor than tomyth) is nowhere portrayed as ascending and descending in humanshape.

When he turns to Jewish angelology he certainly gets closer to theheart of the matter, with the observation that the angel/messenger(xalm) is often virtually identified with the Yahweh of the OldTestament.42 But for clear evidence of traditions directly relevant toJohannine theology we have to move outside the Hebrew canonaltogether.43

The most important section, for our purposes, of Talbert’s articlecomes under the heading ‘archangels’, where he discusses (all toobriefly) six major texts44 and a seventh.45 Central to each of these is

40 As Douglas Templeton remarks, ‘A well-written book is like a rifle, but a scatter-gun may bring down a pheasant’, Re-exploring Paul’s Imagination (Eilsbrunn, 1988),§ 21. 7.

41 ‘Myth’, 420.42 Ibid. 422. Talbert shows how frequently the focus is blurred, sometimes in quite

early texts, e.g. Judg. 6: 11 ff., so that God and his angel are confused. This confusion nodoubt helped to pave the way for the subsequent identification of Yahweh, originallythe Great Angel, with the Most High God. It will receive extensive discussion in thenext chapter.

43 This is not to say that there are not to be found embedded in the Hebrew Biblelarge numbers of allusions whose ‘heterodox’ elements have for the most part beendeliberately concealed.

44 The Book of Tobit, Joseph and Aseneth, the Testament of Job, the Apocalypse ofMoses, the Testament of Abraham, and the Prayer of Joseph (this last already commentedupon in the previous section).

45 The Melchizedek fragment in 2 Enoch (chs. 71–3 in F. E. Andersen’s trans. in OTPs204–13), briefly considered by Talbert, ‘Myth’, 426 n. 1. It is noteworthy that Talbertdoes not discuss ch. 39 of the longer recension (J) of this document, where Enoch, ‘ahuman being created just like yourselves’ (as the text repeatedly insists) is sent fromheaven (cf. 38: 1) with a divine admonition for his children. Nor does he mention thepassage where Enoch is transported to heaven without dying and then, after 60 days,returns to earth to visit his son: ‘And he remained on earth for 30 days, talking with

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the descent of an angelic figure with a particular task to perform onearth. This may be healing (Tobit), mystical initiation (Joseph andAseneth), salvation (Job), guiding into Paradise (Moses), revelationand intercession (Abraham). His mission accomplished, the angelreturns to heaven.46 Not all these texts are pre-Christian but all, inthe relevant passages, appear free from Christian influences (theMelchizedek fragment in 2 Enoch being a possible exception). ‘Theconclusion’, says Talbert, ‘seems irresistable [sic]: in certain circles ofancient Jewish angelology, both B.C.E. and in the first and secondcenturies C.E. there existed a mythology with a descent-ascent pat-tern, in which the redeemer figure descends, takes human form, andthen ascends back to heaven after or in connection with a savingactivity.’47 To call all these angels ‘redeemer figures’ without quali-fication is perhaps to read more into their role than some at least ofthese texts warrant. Nevertheless, the common mythological patternis plain enough, and it is one shared by the Johannine Son of Man.48

These parallels appear at first sight, then, to provide a useful key tothe descent/ascent pattern of the Fourth Gospel. Jesus too is said tohave descended from heaven, to have acted out his role as saviour/revealer, and then to have returned whence he came. But if weactually try this key we find that it fails to make a complete turnin the lock. All Talbert’s instances involve the descent of super-human beings—angels—from their proper home in heaven. Thestarting-point of the fourth evangelist is with the human Jesusof the Synoptic tradition.49 What he is combating—or measuring

them. And then he was taken up to heaven again’ (68: 2). It is significant also thatwhat interests Talbert in the Testament of Abraham is Isaac’s vision, in which he saw ‘aluminous man descending from heaven’, who then ‘went back up (I BºŁ� ) to theheavens from which he had come’ (ch. 7). He does not refer to the later passage inwhich Abraham is transported up to heaven by the archangel Michael, where he sees‘a wondrous man, bright as the sun, like a son of God (‹�Ø� ıƒfiH Ł�F)’. This is thejudge of all mankind—who turns out to be Adam’s son Abel (chs. 12–13).

46 James Dunn (‘Let John be John, 329 n. 75) objects to Talbert’s list of angels thatthey are all ‘only short-term visitors’. But so, as the evangelist sees the matter, is Jesus!

47 ‘Myth’, 426.48 Talbert devotes the concluding pages of his article to the Fourth Gospel, but his

treatment is summary and unsatisfactory, especially of the Son of Man sayings.49 It is wrong to assume that the perspective of the Prologue, which does of course

have its starting-point in heaven, is shared by the rest of the Gospel. This mistakevitiates both Dunn’s article, ‘Let John be John’ and F. J. Moloney’s otherwise usefulstudy, Johannine Son of Man. In asking, ‘Why has John chosen to speak of the incarnateLogos in terms of the Son of Man?’ (214), the latter is begging one question by puttinganother. Problematic as it may be, ‘Son of Man’ is a traditional title; not so ‘Logos’, still

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himself against—in the text under discussion is not the idea ofa heavenly figure descending to earth, but the idea of a humanbeing—other than Jesus—mounting up to heaven. This was clearlyperceived by Odeberg.

So Peder Borgen, in discussing the background of this passage, isright to turn to the strong Jewish exegetical tradition according towhich Moses, after climbing Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of thelaw, actually went on as far as heaven itself.50 This tradition musthave arisen quite early, since along with the even older and betterattested story of the assumption of Elijah it is evidently felt as un-desirable and pernicious by the author of the Mekilta de-Rabbi Ish-mael: ‘Moses and Elijah did not ascend on high; nor did the glorydescend down below.’51 The yawning gap between heaven and earthis to be acknowledged and respected; not even the two most reveredof Israel’s prophets can be allowed to have transcended their earth-bound condition nor the divine glory to have (con)descended to menin a way that otherwise and elsewhere caused no problem to Jewishreaders.

The belligerent assertion that no one has ascended to heavenexcept Jesus finds a satisfactory Sitz-im-Leben, then, in a polemicagainst counter-claims of unique privilege made on behalf of Mosesby more ‘orthodox’ or conservative groups within the synagogue:‘You are his disciples, but we are disciples of Moses’ (9: 28). At thispoint, however, two further questions arise: (1) Why was the claimnecessary? (2) Why was it made of Jesus as Son of Man? Could it nothave been asserted, quite simply: ‘No one else apart from Jesus—he

less ‘incarnate Logos’, a coinage of a later age. The real question to be asked about theJohannine Christ is not how an incarnate divine being came to be thought of as Son ofMan, but how a human being came to be given a title properly belonging to a heavenlybeing.

50 ‘Some Jewish Exegetical Traditions’. Borgen lists Philo, Vita Mos. 1. 158–9;Josephus, AJ 3. 96; Ps.-Philo, Ant. Bib. 12: 1; and Rev. 4: 1, and adds a number ofrabbinical examples. He alludes to the Enoch tradition, but not to the passage whereEnoch ascends is identified as the Son of Man (1 Enoch 71: 14). He might also havementioned the Exodus of the Jewish tragedian Ezekiel, where Moses has a vision inwhich he is invited by a royal figure with a diadem and sceptre to sit on a great throneand be crowned (Exagoge, ed. H. Jacobson, p. 54).

51 Mek. on Exod. 19: 20 (Lauterbach, Mekilta, ii. 224): elml felaf eum elp al

(¼ ¼ ø) and eiml dfbke dtj al (¼ Œ�ø) quoted by Schlatter, p. 93, followed byBorgen, ‘Some Jewish Exegetical Traditions’, 244. Compare Josephus’ careful assertionconcerning Moses that ‘He has written of himself in the sacred books that he died, forfear lest they should venture to say that by reason of his surpassing virtue he had goneback to the divinity’ (AJ 4. 326)—as apparently some people had done (AJ 3. 96).

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who descended from heaven in the first place—has ascended toheaven’?

The answer to the first question is contained or suggested in thetext: only Jesus can tell about ‘heavenly things’, because only he hasbeen up to heaven (to learn the secret mysteries he is now dispens-ing)—and descended to earth to bring the revelation to mankind.

At this point one must resist the temptation to jump back to theGospel narrative. These verses have been slotted into their presentposition quite awkwardly, and this prompts a question concerningtheir original meaning. Bultmann, who discusses vv. 12 and 13

separately, asserts of the latter that it

cannot . . . bear the meaning which is normally attributed to it, that ‘no onehas ever ascended into heaven, in order, that is, to bring back knowledge ofthe K�ıæ ØÆ, except the one who descended from heaven’. For Jesus did notfirst ascend into heaven to bring such knowledge back to earth again. Ratherhe first came down from heaven with the message entrusted to him by theFather and then he ascended again into heaven.52

Bultmann may conceivably be right to impose this reading upon theverse in its present context, and in doing so to avoid the idea (nototherwise attested in the tradition53) that Jesus made a mysticalascent into heaven during his lifetime.54 But it has to be said that ifwe extract the passage from its present setting and consider it apart,then the obvious interpretation is the one Bultmann rejects. Borgenhas furnished convincing evidence of a resilient Jewish tradition tothe effect that Moses had made such a journey in his lifetime. And inview of the strong strain of Moses typology in the Gospel (so wellanalysed by Meeks in his Prophet-King) it seems highly probable thatin these two verses from chapter 3 we have traces of a strugglebetween two rival groups in the synagogue—one sticking to thetradition that the only recipient of the heavenly secrets thatwere later imparted to Israel was Moses himself, the first and greatestof the prophets; the other, the Johannine group, making the sameclaims on behalf of Jesus.

There is, however, one puzzle remaining: the wording of the Gospelmakes it quite clear that in the case of Jesus the descent preceded theascent, a reversal of the natural patternwhereby the human seermust

52 Bultmann, pp. 150–1.53 Though the transfiguration scene comes close.54 As Enoch did. See Gen. 5: 22–4 and I Enoch 14. Cf. J. C. VanderKam, Enoch, 131.

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first mount up to heaven before he can return to inform others of allhe has seen and heard. So what we have in the Gospel is a fusion of twomythological patterns, one angelic, starting in heaven (stressed byTalbert), the other mystical, starting from earth (stressed by Borgen).How great a conceptual leap is involved in this fusion may be gaugedfrom the fact that in at least one document, The Testament of Abraham,the two patterns lie virtually side by side,55 without the least sugges-tion that the archangel Michael, who illustrates the first pattern,could ever be confused with Abraham, who illustrates the second.The blinding realization that in Jesus angel and seer are one and thesamemarks one of the most significant advances in the whole historyof Christian thought: its ramifications are endless. Although bothelements are abundantly attested in the Jewish tradition their fusionhas consequences which Judaism could not contain. Taken separ-ately neither pattern presented any threat: the blending of the twomeant a new religion. The conviction that the heavenly being washuman and the human being heavenly was the conceptual hubround which the huge wheel of Christian theology would revolvefor centuries to come. Meeks’s term, ‘man from heaven’, accuratethough it is, fails to convey the tremendous significance of a break-through signalled almost unobtrusively by a single verse: ‘No one hasascended into heaven except him who descended from heaven, theSon of Man.’

If this is right, then our second question (why was this claim, ofascent–descent, predicated of Jesus as Son of Man?) really answersitself. It looks as if the tradition that provided the catalyst for thefusion we have been considering was none other than the traditionthat Jesus was not just Son, Emissary, and Messiah, but also Son ofMan. What was it then about this title which made it such a suitablevehicle for this particular message? This question, I believe, has twocomplementary answers, one going back to the Old Testament, theother rooted in the Synoptic tradition. These answers will be dis-cussed separately in the next two sections of the present chapter.

As for the timing of the ascent, we must once again be careful notto confuse the purpose of the source with that of the evangelist. Inconsidering the latter it is probably best to follow Bultmann in his

55 Also possibly in 2 Enoch. Nor should one overlook the curious fact that twoarticles by contemporary scholars, written about the same time and onmore or less thesame topic, fail to intersect at any point.

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refusal to regard the ascent mentioned in 3: 13 as different from thefinal ascension referred to in 20: 17: ‘go to my brethren and tell them‘‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and yourGod’’ ’.56 In the source there are no such constraints, and here theonly difficulty is to decide upon the nature of the ascent. Borgenspeaks of a ‘pre-existent ascent’, whatever that might mean; butagainst this it must be urged once again that as it stands the passagequite clearly implies that the descent preceded the ascent.57 None theless Borgen’s suggestion that the ascent represented a kind of ‘instal-lation in office’ is an attractive one and fits in well with Jewish ideasconcerning Moses.

By the time chapter 6 came to be composed for the second edition ofthe Gospel the revolutionary new ideas adumbrated in chapter 3 hadalready been fully assimilated: some notion of pre-existence was bynow an accepted element in the community’s thinking about Jesus.So when Jesus tells the dissident group of disciples. ‘What if you wereto see the Son of Man ascending where he was before?’ (6: 62), he (orthe prophet speaking in his name) is presuming as a shared basis ofargument their continuing belief in the ascent/descent pattern nowparticularly associated with the Son of Man.58 Just what the bone ofcontention was between him and his disciples in this passage (‘This isa hard saying, who can listen to it?’) cannot be resolved here.59

3. the heavenly judge (5: 27)

For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted to the Son also to havelife in himself, and has given him authority (K�ı��Æ) to execute judgement,because he is Son of Man.

56 So too Barrett, Brown, and Schnackenburg.57 It is methodologically improper to argue, as Borgen does, that ‘the parallel

statement in John 6: 46 . . . suggests that the ascent of the Son of Man expressed in3: 13 refers to an event which is prior to the descent and serves as its pre-condition’(‘Some Jewish Exegetical Traditions’, 249). His additional arguments (pp. 250 ff.) areequally tendentious.

58 Lindars’s conclusion (in his earlier article) that ‘descent is not part of theJohannine Son of Man myth, though it is an essential feature of his christology’(‘Son of Man’, 48 n. 16) is the reverse of the truth.

59 Nor do I wish to take issue here on another question over which scholarscontinue to wrangle. When Jesus asks. ‘What if you were to see the Son of Manascending where he was before?’, is the implication positive (‘would you then beencouraged to believe?’) or negative (‘would you be even more scandalized?’)?

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This saying is unique in two respects: (1) it is the only one in which‘Son’ and ‘Son of Man’ are found side by side; (2) it is the onlyoccurrence in the Gospels of the anarthrous form ıƒe� I Łæ��ı

(which here replaces the cumbersome › ıƒe� �F I Łæ��ı. Evenwithout this phrase there is an obvious allusion to Dan. 7: 13. Thepresent chapter began with a rendering of the Aramaic text. Whatfollows is a translation of the two Greek versions, the Septuagint andthat ascribed to Theodotion, which in the case of Daniel is certainlyearlier than the date in the second century ad often assigned to it:60

60 These translations, which are based on the edn. of Joseph Ziegler (Gottingen,1954), 169–70, take no account of the many variants. For a recent discussion of the twotext-forms, see the Anchor Bible edn. of L. F. Hartman and A. A. di Lella (New York,1978), with copious references to earlier studies. J. A. Montgomery had already shownthat the so-called Theodotion Daniel is cited in many passages in the New Testament,especially Hebrews and Revelation. Cf. Daniel (Edinburgh, 1927), 49. Accordingly, the2nd-cent. date proposed for Theodotion by J. Barthelemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila,SuppVT 10 (1963) is too late for this book. It now seems that ‘Theodotion-Daniel isnot in the same textual tradition as Proto-Theodotion (kaige) ‘‘Theodotion’’ existing inthe other books of the Old Testament’ (Hartman and di Lella, 81). Fortunately theexegesis of Daniel 7 in the original need not detain us. The manifold aporias in the textof this chapter suggest that it was not composed as an integrated whole; the analysis ofits prehistory is as complex and uncertain as anything in the Bible. To take but oneexample, U. B. Muller holds that the version of the man-like figure, vv. 13–14, wascomposed after the account of the victory of the Saints. Its function was to append apositive conclusion, one that would conform with the writer’s view of the role of theSaints (Israel), on to the vision. So it was not a case, in Muller’s view, of the visionpreceding its interpretation; rather, what now stands as the interpretation actuallygenerated the vision—or at least that part of it in which the human-seeming figureappears (cf. Messias und Menschensohn, 23–6). For a slightly different view, see P.Weimar, ‘Daniel 7’, with references to earlier literature. Other scholars, e.g. M. Casey(Son of Man), continue to defend the integrity of the chapter.

61 For this strange reading see C. Rowland, Open Heaven, 98 and the attached note.Yet it may be simply due to a scribal error, as J. J. Collins suggests: ‘reading ‰� for &ø�,followed by grammatical hypercorrection’ (Daniel, 311). (His own note, ‘G has ‰�instead of &��’ [275, n. 41] demonstrates that scribal errors have survived the inventionof printing.)

Theodotion LXX

I was watching in a vision of the night, and beholdwith (���) the clouds of heaven on (K��) the clouds of heaven

one like a son of man (‰� ıƒe� I Łæ��ı)coming was comingand he reached the Ancient of Days(ŒÆd &ø� �F �ƺÆØF �H #��æH

�.ŁÆ�� )

and was present as the Ancient ofDays (ŒÆd ‰� �ƺÆØe� #��æH �ÆæB )61

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As early as the Septuagint the literal (and inaccurate) translationof the Aramaic Wn

˝a tb

¯

k˙´ had paved the way for further (fruitful)

misunderstanding; and in this passage the form and content of theJohannine logion establish the link beyond all doubt. In each caseauthority (K�ı��Æ) is conferred by God; in the Daniel passage, how-ever, it is not clear that this authority, though everlasting, is pre-cisely ‘the authority to execute judgement’ mentioned in the FourthGospel. Obviously some extraneous influence has been at work here.This may well have been the Synoptic tradition, in which the Son ofMan figures quite plainly as the eschatological judge. Alternatively,perhaps additionally, we might think of the tendency in contempor-ary Jewish thought to assimilate Son of Man and Messiah and toallow their roles to merge.

The texts in question, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch, are extremelycomplex; and the first especially has been endlessly debated. The Sonof Man features in a section of the work (the Parables or Similitudes,chs. 37–71) of which, unlike the rest of the book, no survivingfragments have been found at Qumran. What is more, Christianinterference has been suspected. Few scholars nowadays accept thistheory; but difficulties abound—and these are scarcely to be resolvedby anyone ignorant of Ethiopic, the only language in which this partof the book has come down to us. It is not even agreed whetherEnoch has progressed beyond Daniel to the extent of using the term‘son of man’ as a title instead of as an idiomatic way, common tomany Semitic languages, of referring to a man.62

and approached him and the bystanders were with himand to him was given (ŒÆd K��Ł� ÆP�fiH)

authority (K�ı��Æ)rule and honour and kingdom (# Iæ�c

ŒÆd # �Ø�c ŒÆd # �Æ�غ��Æ)

and all the peoples, tribes,tongues will serve him;

and all the nations of the earthrace by race (ŒÆ�a ª� �)and all glory, at his service;

his authority (K�ı��Æ) is an eternal authoritywhich will not pass awayand his kingdom will notbe destroyed.

which will never be removedand his kingdom which willnever perish.

62 The Ethiopic version was not translated directly from the Semitic original (Ara-maic or Hebrew), but from a Greek trans. of this. So there are real problems aboutfinding our way into the heart of this Chinese box. What was the Greek lying behind

Son of Man 261

Nevertheless, three points may be made: first, Enoch goes beyondDaniel at least in so far as he speaks of ‘the Man’, as opposed to thevague ‘figure like a man’ of Daniel’s dream; in the second place, heidentifies this man with a messianic redeemer, called initially ‘theRighteous One’ (38: 2–3) and then ‘the Chosen One’ (40: 5 and passim)or ‘my Chosen One’ (45: 3, 4; cf. Isa. 42: 1, etc.). The first clearreference to Daniel’s vision is in chapter 46, where along with the‘Head of Days’ the visionary saw another (being) ‘whose face had theappearance of a man’ (46: 1). On questioning his accompanyingangel about ‘that (son of) man’, he is told, ‘this is the (son of) manwho has righteousness, and with whom righteousness dwells’ (46: 3).Subsequently this Righteous One, Chosen One, (son of) man is openlycalled the Messiah of the Lord of Spirits (48: 10; 52: 4).

Thirdly, Enoch recounts in some detail how ‘that (son of) man’was given a name ‘in the presence of the Lord of Spirits . . . and beforethe Head of Days’ (48: 2). He is invested with some of the appurte-nances of messiahship: he is to ‘cast down the kings from theirthrones and from their kingdoms’ (46: 5), to become a staff for therighteous, a light for the gentiles, a hope for the sick at heart (48: 4).Above all he is the eschatological judge, whose authority extendsover ‘the holy ones in heaven’ (61: 8) and over the mighty on earth(62: 9): ‘And he sat on the throne of his glory, and the sum ofthe judgement was given to the (son of) man, and he will cause

the ‘this’ in the Ethiopic term ‘this man’? If it was simply the definite article (› ıƒe� �FI Łæ��ı or even › ¼ Łæø��) then it looks as though we have to do with a title (‘theMan’) which in a determinate contextual setting will have contained, or come tocontain, a quite precise allusion to a particular role or function. Moreover, since inall human societies except that of the Amazons ‘man’ is an honourable epithet, it iswell suited to carry connotations of authority and power. This is how it is applied to thePresident of the United States at the White House or to the champion poker-player inThe Cincinnati Kid. Margaret Barker argues that the Similitudes are simply following acode already established in the indisputably pre-Christian parts of Enoch, according towhich human beings were represented by animals and angels by human beings, TheLost Prophet, 95–6. If, on the other hand, the Greek term translated by Enoch was ‘thisman’ or ‘that man’ (o�� › ıƒe� �F I Łæ��ı, say, or KŒ�E � › ¼ Łæø�� then this willsimply have been a shorter way of saying ‘the man who has just been mentioned’ or‘the man we have already encountered in the course of this narrative’ (e.g. 46: 2; 48: 2).It is to be noted, however, that even this version presupposes the possibility ofdistinguishing between a man (Wna tb) and the man (aWna tb). The matter is thrashedout in some detail by M. Casey in JSJ 7 (1976) (cf. Son of Man, 100) and M. Black,‘Aramaic Barnasha and the ‘‘Son of Man’’ ’, who come to different conclusions. In anycase the man must be seen as an angel.

262 Genesis

sinners to pass away and be destroyed from the face of the earth’(69: 27).63

In the conclusion of the Parables Enoch ascends to heaven andappears to be identified with the Son of Man: ‘You are the Son ofMan who was born to righteousness’ (71: 14). Collins once arguedthat this passage was a redactional addition, suggesting that it mayhave been ‘a reaction to the Christian appropriation of the phrase‘‘son of man’’ for another who was believed to have made thetransition from earth to heaven’.64 Later he came to think thatEnoch may have been addressed by the angel simply as a man: ‘Youare the man who . . . ’, reminding us that ‘in itself the phrase ‘‘son ofman’’ only means ‘‘human being’’’.65 (But the reaction couldequally well have been from the Christian, and specifically theJohannine side.)

4 Ezra differs from the pseudo-Enoch in presenting what may becalled a Jewish-establishment view of things; but like Enoch heconjures up for his readers a variant of Daniel’s vision, recallinghow in his dream ‘something like a figure of a man’66 rose out ofthe heart of the sea and flew with the clouds of heaven (13: 3). Thisfigure is identified with the Messiah, who has already put in anappearance earlier in the book—where he is called ‘my Son theMessiah’ (7: 29)67 and portrayed symbolically as a lion (12: 31–2).

The Messiah in 4 Ezra seems in some respects less a man thana superman, for like the modern fantasy-hero of that name herenounces human weapons (13: 9) in favour of those associated with

63 One title that Enoch denies him is ‘king’—which might seem odd in view of thefact that both the Danielic Son of Man and the Davidic Messiah are kings, one by gift,the other almost by definition. But Enoch can scarcely be counted a supporter of theDavidic line, and in any case he ranges all human authority-figures among the wicked.Here, as elsewhere in the book, some things Enoch says are strikingly reminiscent ofthe Gospel of Luke: ‘This Son of Man whom you have seen is the One who wouldremove the kings and the mighty ones from their comfortable seats and the strong onesfrom their thrones. He shall loosen the reins of the strong and crush the teeth ofsinners. He shall depose the kings from their thrones and kingdoms’ (46: 4–5. Isaac’strans.: cf. Luke 1: 52; also 1 Enoch 62: 9, etc.).

64 ‘Heavenly Representative’, 176. 65 Scepter, 180.66 Syriac (the Latin is defective at this point).67 ‘Filius meus Christus’; or possibly, following the Ethiopic, ‘my servant the Mes-

siah’, suggesting that the Greek here (and elsewhere) was not › ıƒ�� �ı but › �ÆE� �ı,reflecting a Hebrew jdbp. (Cf. Arab 1 at 13: 32, 52 and Arab 2 at 13: 37, 52.) MichaelStone discusses the whole question very thoroughly in the Excursus on the RedeemerFigure in his commentary on 4 Ezra, 207–13.

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the awesome manifestations of the storm god (13: 10). Nevertheless,he continues to be called a man (13: 3b, 5, 12) and there is no questionhere of the term ‘Son of Man’ being used as a title. And in theinterpretation of the dream given to the seer the Danielic ‘man fromthe sea’ is interpreted allegorically in terms of the tradition of thehidden Messiah (13: 41–56).

Lastly 2 Baruch, much more discreet than the others and evenmore opaque. Though he has a vision of redemption in the form of aflash of lightning (53: 8–11) he avoids all mention of the lightning inhis interpretation of the dream (72: 1–6) and introduces his messianicredeemer without warning immediately afterwards, leaving hisreaders to make what connection they will between the lightningand the one who is destined to usher in an era of joy and rest—butonly ‘after he has brought down everything which is in the world,and has sat down in eternal peace on the throne of the king’ (73: 1; cf.29: 3). Nevertheless there does seem to have been some contamin-ation, as it were, of this messianic figure by theophanic traits likethe lightning—associated elsewhere (cf. Matt. 24: 27) with the Sonof Man.

Perhaps the most important evidence of the identification of thetwo figures is in the Babylonian Talmud, where there is here a directreference to Daniel 7; what is more, Rabbi Aqiba’s idea that David,qua Son of Man, should occupy one of the thrones in heaven wasseen as blasphemous by at least one of his contemporaries:

One passage says: His throne was fiery flames (Dan. 7: 9) and another passagesays: Until thrones were placed; and One that was ancient of days did sit(ibid.)—there is no contradiction: One (throne) for Him, and one for David:this is the view of R. Aqiba. Said R. Yosi the Galilean to him: Aqiba, how longwill you treat the divine presence as profane?68

With some caution, then, it may be said that by the end of the firstcentury ad two originally distinct figures, the one like a man inDaniel and the messianic redeemer, had started to coalesce, hesi-tantly in 2 Baruch, more perceptibly in 4 Ezra, and most clearly of allin 1 Enoch. The identification made by all four evangelists of the one

68 b. Hag. 14a. Tr. Epstein; quoted by Segal, Two Powers, 47, who also refers (n. 21) tob. Sanh. 38a, where other rabbis are said to oppose R. Aqiba. What perplexed the rabbiswas the apparent contradiction, in the same verse (Segal mistakenly implies that morethan one verse was involved), between the singular ‘throne’ and the plural ‘thrones’.Cf. Ch. 1, pp. 88–9.

264 Genesis

they knew as the Messiah with the Son of Man was perhaps lessunprecedented than many have supposed.69 In any case the fourthevangelist surely inherited a tradition to that effect which had someconnection with the various sayings recorded by the other three.

We may now return briefly to the single passage in the FourthGospel in which there is an unambiguous allusion to Daniel’s vision.For our purposes its most interesting feature is not the blending oftwo different kinds of eschatology70 but the merging and mutualenrichment of two different traditional titles. The extra-canonicaltexts we have just been considering combine the motif of the man-like figure in Daniel with that of the Messiah. In John the Messiah hasgiven way to one of the titles this evangelist has made his own, thatof ‘the Son’. This must be seen against the legal traditions surround-ing ‘the son of the house’ and therefore identified as the one investedby the Father with full authority for his mission on earth. This ‘Son’is now identified as ‘the Son of Man’ (there is no doubt here about thetitular use of this term), a heavenly being whose authority is reservedin the first place for a judgement beyond any time or place that canbe classed as belonging to this age or this world.

Once the reference to the Danielic Son of Man is acceptedand understood we are in a better position to appreciate how admir-ably this title serves to sum up the extraordinarily bold and noveltheology succinctly but enigmatically expressed in John 3: 13. Foralthough, according to the Synoptic tradition, the Son of Man does

69 And possibly very much earlier if we accept an argument of Frank Moore Crossbased on a careful study of 4Q246 (which he calls ‘the apocalypse of ‘‘Son of God’’ ’):‘The most striking parallels exist between the apocalypse of the Ancient of Days andthe ‘‘one like a son of man’’ in Daniel 7 [on the one hand], and the apocalypse of the‘‘Son of God’’ [on the other], suggesting strongly that Daniel too must be read asmessianic.’ ‘Structure’, 151–2.

70 The question whether the discourse in ch. 5 originally included vv. 28–9 con-tinues to divide scholars. Bultmann detects here the futuristic eschatology that sooffends him and so assigns the passage to the ecclesiastical redactor; but the veryeffective combination of the two titles ‘Son’ and ‘Son of Man’, with all that eachimplies, does not have to be seen as a regrettable adulteration of an otherwise pureand particularly full expression of the Johannine theme of judgement. Nor can it bereasonably argued that the exercise of judgement conflicts with the assertion of 3: 17that God ‘sent the Son not to judge the world, but that the world might be savedthrough him’. For the Son too, not just the Son of Man, is given power to judge (5: 22);whilst the positive aspect of his mission is displayed in the authority to bestow life (inany case a concept much more characteristic of the fourth evangelist than the‘salvation’ of 3: 17). See below, Ch. 10, pp. 399–403.

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not pronounce judgement except eschatologically, in a future indef-initely distant and remote, nevertheless that judgement is anticipatedby the attitude men adopt to Jesus in his earthly presence.71 Of all thetitles assigned to Jesus in the New Testament, only ‘Son of Man’ isable to convey the simultaneous existence (we are talking haltinglyof myth or mystery here) of a being who, in his solemn reception ofauthority in heaven, symbolizes a scenario that is actually beingplayed out on earth.

Here we find ourselves at the conceptual origins of two of the mostdistinctive and pervasive features of the Fourth Gospel, first the senseit conveys of the remoteness and sheer foreignness of its hero, ana-lysed so persuasively by Wayne Meeks in his ‘Man from Heaven’article,72 and secondly what J. L. Martyn calls ‘the literary form ofthe two-level drama’, in which ‘there are dramas taking place bothon the heavenly stage and on the earthly stage’.73 (These stages willreappear in Ch. 7.)

Further confirmation of the association of the title ‘Son of Man’with the theme of judgement is furnished by the conclusion ofchapter 9,74 where Jesus, on hearing that the man born blind hasbeen expelled by ‘the Jews’, seeks him out and asks him directly, ‘Doyou believe in the Son of Man?’ The use of this term puzzles the man(it is not meant to be immediately perspicuous) and he asks, ‘who ishe, sir, for me to believe in him?’ (9: 35–6). Though Jesus’ replycontains his most explicit claim to the title in any of the Gospels, itretains at the same time a vestige of indirection: ‘You have seen him,and it is he who speaks to you’ (v. 37). The blind man saw him whenhe was in the act of establishing his authority—giving sight to theblind and also, incidentally, refuting the claim to sight made by ‘theJews’. In the Fourth Gospel this is a typical act of judgement, as is madeexplicit in the next verse: ‘For judgement I came into this world, thatthose who do not see may see, and that those who see may becomeblind’ (9: 39).

71 e.g. Luke 12: 8: ‘Everyone who acknowledges me before man, the Son of Man alsowill acknowledge before the angels of God: but he who denies me before men will bedenied also before the angels of God.’ The Matthean parallel (10: 32) reads ‘I’. SurelyLuke is the one who retains the original text here!

72 It is not altogether surprising, then, that by the time it came to be placed in thebibliography of Meeks’s later study, The First Urban Christians (New Haven andLondon, 1983), the Man from Heaven had become ‘The Stranger from Heaven’.

73 History2, 135. 74 Cf. Ch. 2 n. 48.

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4. exaltation and glory

In the passages we have been considering so far, the Son of Man is adirect descendant of the heavenly man in Daniel 7. The emphasis inthese is on the contrast (and on overcoming the contrast) betweenthe heavenly realm and the earthly realm; and the Son of Man,whose ‘dominion and glory and kingship’ were set, on his firstappearance, quite unequivocally in heaven, is seen in the FourthGospel, despite his heavenly origins, to exercise judgement herebelow. But this successful deployment of a double register of meaning(whose reverberations, as we shall see in the second part of this book,resound throughout the Gospel) is only one strand in its richlycounterpointed theology.

When all is said and done, the Son of Man, heavenly being thoughhe may be, is identified with the figure at the heart of the Christianfaith—otherwise there would be no room for him in a Gospel—andthat faith is focused first of all not on ascent and descent but uponcrucifixion and resurrection. One of the most singular features ofJohannine christology is its vision of the crucifixion, that horriblypainful and ignominious death, as itself a kind of elevation. Almostequally remarkable, at first sight, is the fact that this vision is asso-ciated first and foremost with the title of Son of Man. How was thetransition made from the victorious representative of God in aprophet’s dream to the tortured figure hanging on the cross in thelast act of a barbarous execution?

The complete answer to this question belongs to another book(though a short answer will be attempted in the conclusion to thischapter). By the time of the composition of the Fourth Gospel, thetransition had been completed—so effectively that the three greatpassion predictions in the Synoptic Gospels were all associated withthe title ‘Son of Man’. Given the strangeness of this association, whichfor all the explanations that have been offered of it still remains hard tounderstand, it would be idle, when asking why John made the sameconnection, to hunt for reasons outside the Synoptic-type traditionswe knowhim to have inherited. John, and the community towhich hebelonged, will have been aware that on the three separate occasionsonwhich Jesus is said to have foretold his death,75 he employed termsthat linked it inextricably with the figure of the Son of Man.

75 Mark 8: 31; 9: 31; 10: 33–4 and parallels. These are the most important ofBultmann’s second group of ‘Son of Man’ sayings, the passion-and-resurrection sayings.

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Corresponding to the three sayings in the Synoptic Gospels arethree similar predictions in John: 3: 14; 8: 28; 12: 32–4.76 Moreover,John shares with the Synoptists that sense of divinely appointedpredestination, suggested by the word ��E (‘it is necessary’), thataccompanies the first of the three predictions in each of the Gospels.Where John differs from the Synoptists is chiefly in his reluctance tosee the crucifixion as demeaning or degrading and in the word heuses to suggest an alternative view. � �łF , to ‘raise’ or ‘elevate’, doesnot occur in the LXX version of the story of Moses and the bronzesnake that is alluded to in 3: 14;77 instead of łF the simple verbƒ�� ÆØ is used. (See Num. 21: 9.)

The question how John came to see the raising up of Jesus on thecross as an exaltation is actually quite misleading, since it tends toobscure the fact that the primary meaning of łF is not to lift up(ÆYæ�Ø ), still less to crucify (��ÆıæF ) but to exalt. There is not evenany natural ambiguity to exploit, and were it not followed by v. 1678

it might be possible to insist on the primary significance of the wordand to translate it simply by ‘exalt’—which is what it means in theother places in the New Testament where it is used: Acts 2: 33; 5: 31;cf. Phil. 2: 9, ��æıłF . In all these passages the subject of the verb isGod, who concludes the tale of Jesus’ sufferings and humiliation byraising him up to heaven. In 8: 28, by contrast, it is actually ‘the Jews’who, Jesus foretells, will ‘raise him up’.

Accordingly our question is better formulated like this: how doesJohn come to use a term hitherto reserved for elevation into glory forthe ignominy of crucifixion? Or rather, why does he suggest that thecross is not merely a decisive moment in the process of Jesus’ pathto glory, but somehow to be equated with his very entrance intoheaven? C. C. Torrey, referring to 12: 34, suggested that the use ofthe word łF arose from a simple misunderstanding of the Aramaic

76 Cf. Brown, p. 146. As he says, ‘There is no reason to think that the fourthevangelist is dependent upon the Synoptics for his form of the sayings.’ Brown evensuggests that the Johannine sayings, being less detailed, ‘could be more ancient’. If bythis he means ‘more authentic’, this is surely most improbable.

77 Since the lesson the evangelist derives from this story is plain enough, there is nopressing need to trace the line of his exegesis, which is also found in Barn. 12. 5–7;Justin, Apol. 1. 60; Dial. 91. 94, 112. Odeberg (pp. 100–13) has a fascinating excursus atthis point. Some of the Gnostics made the snake itself ascend. Cf. Hippolytus Ref. 5. 12.6–13; 16. 4–16 (references in Moloney, Son of Man, 62 n. 104).

78 Cf. the evangelist’s comment in 12: 33: ‘He said this to show by what death hewas to die.’

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word sl

¯

v¯

oa, which can mean both ‘be lifted up into the heights’ and‘depart’.79 Bultmann waves this suggestion aside with the causticcomment that ‘12: 34 comes after 8: 29 and was composed by theevangelist, who wrote Greek’.80 He is equally dismissive of the ideathat this sublime theological concept is rooted in the ambiguity, inboth Syrian and Palestinian Aramaic, of ÞCd ga: , which can meanboth ‘to be lifted up’ and ‘to be crucified’.81 Were it not for the factthat contemporary Jewish writings are full of grand ideas apparentlyrooted in soil just as shallow, one would be forced to be just asdismissive as Bultmann. But whatever truth there may be in sugges-tions based on Semitic semantics,82 the real question must concernthe theological insight behind this remarkable shift in perspective.

A first approach to an answer might be to return to the beginningof the whole process leading up to the Johannine vision. For whatworried Luke was evidently how to explain and justify the cross inthe first place. His answer, which was to see it as a necessary stage inJesus’ journey to heaven, cannot be said to exhibit any real under-standing of the need for the cross, though it may be a step beyond thegrudging acquiescence that is the highest response to undeservedsuffering of all but a very few religious believers.

Next, the cross is seen as a voluntary self-emptying, not justacquiescence but ready acceptance of God’s will—‘obedience untodeath, even the death of the cross’ (Phil. 2: 8). This is a traditionalview, which Paul may well have inherited but which is surelyderived ultimately from the story of the Agony in the Garden. Fromhere it would be but a step, though a big one, to seeing the cross asthe start of the process of elevation—the first glimpse of glory.83 Andthis, we might infer, is the step taken by John in his account of thecrucifixion, when he substitutes for Mark’s cry of desolation a tri-umphant ����º���ÆØ or consummatum est.84 But the final step, impos-sible to suggest in any account of the physical crucifixion, is the one

79 ‘ ‘‘When I am lifted up from the earth’’ ’. Torrey’s suggestion is repeated byM. McNamara, Targum and Testament (Shannon, 1968), 143.

80 Bultmann, p. 354 n. 6.81 Ibid. 350 n. 1.82 Brown (p. 146) also refers to Hebrew aU

˝n

˝‘which can cover both meanings of

death and glorification, as in Gen. 40: 13 and 19’. Other suggestions include theAramaic zjta.

83 For an imaginative but perhaps not totally convincing reconstruction of thewhole process see J. Blank, Krisis, 80–90.

84 How far such an inference is correct will be discussed in Ch. 12, §2 (‘Death’).

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taken in the three passion predictions and implied by the prayer inchapter 17.

Before continuing this enquiry by pressing even harder the ques-tion concerning the source of the evangelist’s novel view of Jesus’death, we must take into consideration two further passages inwhich the title ‘Son of Man’ occurs: 8: 28 and 12: 32–4.

The second of these (12: 32–4) contains a puzzle. What Jesus says isthis: ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men tomyself’ (v. 32). To which the response of the crowd is: ‘We have heardfrom the law that the Messiah remains [orwill abide]85 for ever. Howcan you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son ofMan?’ The nearest mention of ‘Son of Man’ is in 12: 23, where Jesusstates that ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’Bultmann solves the difficulty by making 12: 34 follow immediatelyupon 8: 28.86 Others make it follow upon 3: 14. That the presentpassage does rely upon the reader’s memory of one or both of the twoearlier predictions is, I think, clear. (It is one of the factors that justifytheir being considered together.) But reorganization of the text raisesas many puzzles as it solves.87

Once alerted to the evangelist’s wish to expand the messianicfaith of the community’s beginnings into the fuller, richer, faithimplied in the title ‘Son of Man’, we can see without difficulty thatthis is part of his intention here. Not surprisingly, the reference tothe ‘law’ has sent the commentators scurrying to their Bibles insearch of the passage to which the ‘crowd’ is alluding in v. 34. But toconcentrate on this rather than upon the words of Jesus himself is toperpetuate this error. Indeed, on the lips of the crowd the Law isdeprived of its usual authority: in so far as it detracts attentionaway from the true revelation, such study is not to be applaudedbut deplored.

The other saying (8: 28) is possibly the most succinct as well as themost enigmatic christological affirmation in the whole Gospel:

When you have lifted up (‹�Æ łø����) the Son of Man, then you will knowthat I am [he] (‹�Ø Kªg �N��). (8: 28)

85 The unaccented Greek of the earliest MSS does not distinguish between thepresent (�� �Ø) and the future tense (�� �E) of this verb.

86 Bultmann, pp. 349, 354.87 G. H. C. MacGregor, ‘A Suggested Rearrangement’; J. G. Gourbillon, ‘La Para-

bole’. The best solution, in my view, is to see 12: 24–6 as a later gloss.

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As Bultmann remarks, ‘the Jews’

do not suspect that by ‘lifting him up’ they themselves make him their judge.The double-meaning of ‘lifting up’ is obvious. They lift up Jesus by crucifyinghim; but it is precisely through his crucifixion that he is lifted up to hisheavenly glory as the Son of Man. At the very moment when they think theyare passing judgement on him, he becomes their judge.88

This is surely right. Bultmann also remarks, however, concerningthe ambiguity of the saying ‘then you will know ‹�Ø Kªg �N�� � that ‘itclearly refers back to the unqualified Kªg �N�� in v. 24, while at thesame time one must add to the main clause the subordinate clause,‘‘that I am the son of Man’’. Thus everything that he is can bereferred to by the mysterious title ‘‘Son of Man’’ ’.89 But is thisenough? Recognized and acknowledged as Son of Man at the mo-ment of exaltation, Jesus also lays claim to an even more prestigioustitle, the one associated exclusively with Yahweh, the national God ofIsrael. The irony is profound, for neither at the story level nor at thedeeper, spiritual level will Jesus’ hearers, ‘the Jews’, ever understandwho he really is. Later in the same acrimonious debate (8: 56–9) theydo come to grasp the full import of the �N��. But then, as we have seen(Chapter 2), their response is one of violent rejection.

Of the other instances of ‘Son of Man’ those in chapter 6 should beunderstood in the light of what was said about the ascending anddescending Son of Man in 3: 13. The two remaining passages (12: 23;13: 31) do not affect our present discussion and can safely be heldover until Chapter 12.

conclusion

Having given some consideration to most of the passages inthe Gospel where the term ‘Son of Man’ occurs, we may turn tothe question how far the Johannine conception of the Son of Man canreasonably be thought to have been derived from the SynopticGospels. That it goes beyond them in many respects needs nolabouring.

Bultmann broaches his solution of the problem of the ‘Son of Man’sayings by dividing them into three groups, ‘which speak of the Son

88 Bultmann, p. 350. 89 Ibid. 349.

Son of Man 271

of Man (1) as coming, (2) as suffering death and rising again, and (3)as now at work. This third group’, he says, ‘owes its origin to a meremisunderstanding of the translation into Greek. In Aramaic, the sonof man in these sayings was not a messianic title at all, but meant‘‘man’’ or ‘‘I’’. So this group drops out of the present discussion.’90

This leaves us with the other two groups. Bultmann himself rejectedthe second group, i.e. those concerning the passion and resurrection,as vaticinia ex eventu, and other scholars, in increasing numbers,have denied the authenticity of the first group as well.

What concerns us here is not the very thorny question of theauthenticity of the sayings, but the question how the term ‘Son ofMan’ came to be associated with Jesus’ passion and resurrection,especially the passion. Here there are two complementary explan-ations, both of which have a certain appeal. The first is that of MornaHooker, in her book The Son of Man in Mark. Although, she says, theSon of Man in Daniel 7 is predominantly a triumphant figure, a closerexegesis of this text reveals that

the Son of man can—and will—suffer when his rightful position and God’sauthority are denied: this is the situation in Dan. 7, where the ‘beasts’ haverevolted against God and crushed Israel who, as Son of man, should be rulingthe earth with the authority granted by God. Given the situation of thenations’ revolt and their rejection of the claims of the one who is intendedto exercise authority, it is true to say that the Son of man not only can butmust suffer.91

The second important contribution comes from John Bowker, inhis remarkable book, The Religious Imagination and the Sense of God.92

Bowker agrees that ‘the suffering and the vindication are alreadylinked in Daniel’, and adds that ‘It is not in the least improbablethat Jesus himself could have made the association as a means ofexpressing his understanding of his own situation and his trust in theFather.’93 Then he goes on to point out that, starting from theassociation of the term with the death-penalty imposed by God on

90 Theology, i. 30. With the substitution of the indefinite ‘one’ for Bultmann’s ‘I’ thismay be allowed to stand.

91 The Son of Man in Mark (London, 1967).92 Religious Imagination, 139–69. This chapter is built upon Bowker’s article, ‘ ‘‘The

Son of Man’’ ’.93 Religious Imagination, p. 146. Hooker reaches the same conclusion, but more

hesitatingly.

272 Genesis

the human race in Gen. 3: 19, many Jewish interpreters of the Bible,up to and including the medieval targumists,

use the phrase ‘son of man’ so consistently with the association of ‘mansubject to death’, ‘man born to die’, that they make it clear that to recognizethe sense of the phrase, established in the original biblical contexts, is notidiosyncratic. It is clear that the Targum translators recognized that thenuance associated with the phrase ‘son of man’ in the majority of biblicalcontexts is ‘man born to die’, and they therefore used that phrase to translate‘man’ in other contexts where man’s subjection to death is referred to.94

There is a nice paradox here, because the ‘one like a son of man’ inDaniel 7 was anything but a mortal: however hard his struggle todominate the beasts, it would not result in his death. But in theSynoptic picture, it is fair to say, both elements are included; andthey are included, if this interpretation is right, within the passionpredictions themselves, where the hope of resurrection must be seenas vindication and ultimate triumph.

In my view it is not easy to establish that Daniel’s vision didactually influence not only the ‘future’ sayings of the SynopticGospels but the passion sayings as well. It may be that Bultmann’striple division prejudges the issue by failing to recognize that two atleast of the passion sayings occur in contexts in which future sayingsare close at hand. So Mark 8: 31 is followed shortly by 8: 38; and hardon the heels of Mark 10: 34 comes the request of the sons of Zebedee‘to sit, one at your right hand, and one at your left, in your glory’(10: 37). However that may be, it is of the essence of an apocalypticvision to transcribe into celestial symbols a series of events that reallybelong to human history. Consequently, once Jesus has been identi-fied with the heavenly figure of the Son of Man (as he was withoutquestion by the early Church), the way is open to see the events ofhis life as the fulfilment of those recorded in Daniel’s vision: thestruggle against the forces of evil that takes place in heaven can beread as Jesus’ struggle with those same forces in the course of hispassion.

94 Ibid. 150. It is interesting in this connection that the first known occurrence of theterm una tb Aramaic, in an 8th-cent. inscription from Sefire, concerns human mor-tality: una tb vfm jg em¼ ‘when [or in whatever way] someone dies’. The general termhere resumes a whole series of people who could conceivably suffer death at the handsof the signatory of the treaty, namely the author himself or members of his family orhousehold. See Gibson, Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, ii, no. 9. line. 16.

Son of Man 273

J. L. Martyn, as we have seen, regards apocalyptic as a two-leveldrama taking place on the heavenly stage and on the earthly stage.God, directing the action of both from behind the scenes, ensures thatthe same story is enacted on both stages at the same time. Or rather,not quite at the same time, for

events on the heavenly stage not only correspond to events on the earthlystage but also slightly precede them in time, leading them into existence, soto speak. What transpires on the heavenly stage is often called ‘things tocome’. For that reason events seen on the earthly stage are entirely enig-matic to one who sees only the earthly stage. Stereoptic vision is necessary,and it is precisely stereoptic vision which causes a man to write an apoca-lypse:

After this I looked, and lo in heaven an open door! And the first voice which Ihad heard . . . said, Come hither, and I will show you what must take placeafter this (Rev. 4: 1).95

But the destiny of Jesus is the reverse of an apocalypse: the unfoldingof a divine plan, necessarily originating in heaven, is transcribed inthe Gospels in terms of a human life. What Jesus is about to do and tosuffer is the revelation of a history that belongs in the first place toGod’s plan for mankind, fixed mysteriously from all eternity by divinedecree and revealed to men for the first time in a totally unexpectedway. The nature of this decree, which is exhibited—set forth—inJesus’ life, can be seen by combining the double series of ‘Son of Man’sayings—those concerning his heavenly destiny, on the one hand,where there is a manifest reluctance on Jesus’ part to identify himselftoo soon or too directly with the celestial judge, and those concerninghis earthly destiny, on the other. Whether the Synoptists themselvesmade this inference does not matter here. What is important is that itis open to their readers and to any who inherited the same traditionto see the concluding events of Jesus’ life as the fulfilment on earthof a heavenly battle whose outcome had been foretold long before.Moreover such a fulfilment was necessary, even inevitable, if Jesuswas eventually to take on the other role assigned to him of victor andjudge.

The tension between the two groups of ‘Son of Man’ sayings isnever fully resolved in the Synoptic Gospels. But in the FourthGospel, although the paradox is heightened the tension has gone.

95 History, 136. See too 1QS11: 20–2.

274 Genesis

The mysterious personage who is to be the universal judge at the endof time is now actually on earth; his triumph is no longer reserved fora distant future, it takes place in the here and now, or at least isawaited as the immediate and inevitable sequel of an imminentdeath. Moreover, the sufferings and death are no longer seen as apassage to glory (as they are by Luke and in a more profound way byPaul). The identification between Jesus and the eschatological victorof Daniel 7 is complete. This (and more) is explicitly affirmed inchapter 5: ‘And he [God] has given him authority to execute judge-ment because he is the Son of Man’ (5: 27). Which is why J. L. Martyncan say that ‘in some respects John 5: 27 appears to be the most‘‘traditional’’ Son of man saying in the whole of the New Testa-ment’.96 This identification has various consequences and is ex-pressed in various ways.

In the first place, the Son of Man, according to John, actually walkson earth. His true home is in heaven (still), where Daniel placed him;and so John sees him as having come down, descended, from onhigh. In other words, the process whereby the role of the Son of Manis drawn back from the futuristic apocalyptic is now carried a stagefurther. In the Synoptic Gospels there was at most a proleptic iden-tification between Jesus and the heavenly Son of Man, an anticipa-tion of a title which would one day belong to Jesus by right, anidentity-in-difference. But in the Fourth Gospel the identification istotal and immediate. As long as the Son of Man remained shadowyand insubstantial, his home in the clouds where his triumph wouldone day be revealed, there was no need to ask questions concerninghis origin. For he had as yet no real existence: he was simply a vividsymbol in an apocalyptic dream. At some point, of course, eitherwhen the literal Greek translation was misread, or when the suffer-ing-Son of Man sayings were introduced into the Gospel narrative, orwhen the current tendency to equate the Son of Man with theMessiah had made itself felt in Christian circles—at some point thetitle was bestowed on the person of Jesus. Just conceivably he mayhave claimed the title himself. But as long as he was remembered as areal human being the theological implications remained hidden; andthere was evidently no temptation to put questions concerning apossible pre-existence: after all, ‘Is not this the son of Joseph?’, as thepeople of Nazareth asked when he turned up in the synagogue (Luke

96 History and Theology2, 139.

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4: 22). Even in the Fourth Gospel the crowd could still ask, ‘Is not thisJesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?’ (John6: 42). But by the time these words were written the memory of Jesusas a man, an individual human being, had begun to fade and hisdistinctive profile to be lost sight of behind the mask of the Son ofMan. As long as this was only a persona in the classical sense, a maskdonned by an actor playing his part, a role, then the protagonist ofthe Gospels could retain his human face: the first act of the dramahad been played, the second was still to come. But at some point theactor was identified with the mask he wore, the persona came to bethought of as a person, the role became a name. And then there is ariddle: ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and motherwe know? How does he now say, ‘‘I have come down from heaven?’’ ’(John 6: 42). Nor are we surprised to see the question formulated evenmore sharply: ‘Who is this Son of Man?’ (John 12: 34).

In this ‘who’ is concealed a ‘whence’, and the ‘whence’ is effect-ively a question concerning pre-existence. For in the Synoptictradition Jesus was seen as a man whose death was followed byresurrection and exaltation at God’s right hand, where he wouldappear on the clouds at the end of time as the divinely appointedjudge. But now he is seen as one who had come down to earth fromheaven; he would carry out his role as judge while on earth and thenreturn to heaven. John gives no answer to the question how Jesuscame or how he finally departed. The language of ascent and descentmay not be intended to be taken literally: one function of the littlemidrash in which the Son of Man is introduced, in 1: 51, is todiscourage the reader from an overliteral interpretation. But byspeaking of descent as well as the traditional ascent (or ascension),John is consciously making an opening for questions concerningJesus’ previous abode, and therefore his previous existence.

276 Genesis

Excursus VI: The Structure of John 3

The sequence of thought in John 3 is notoriously hard to follow, andvarious ways of rearranging the text have been advocated by differ-ent scholars. Any understanding of the text must depend upon howone envisages its construction. Before trying to eliminate the aporiasit is best to explain how they arose.

The episode really begins with the last three verses of chapter 2 (vv.23–5), which prepare the way for the entry of Nicodemus in chapter3. The remainder of the material may be divided up into three blocks:1–21; 22–30; 31–6.

(a) 1–21. Most of the difficulties belong to this section, and there is noagreement about where the natural break or breaks, if there areany, should be located. The first eight verses follow on withoutinterruption, and the concluding verses, 16–21, seem to fit to-gether. But how about what lies between? Breaks have beensuggested after vv. 8, 9, 10, 12, and 13!

(b) 22–30. This section, in which John the Baptist, for once, is givensome prominence (if only in a self-deprecating way), is clearlymarked out.

(c) 31–6. The conclusion is also clearly delineated, and although somescholars ascribe this paragraph to John the Baptist (on thegrounds that there is no explicit indication of a change ofspeaker),1 most would nowadays assign it either to Jesus or (thevast majority) to the evangelist.

It is easy to see the resemblances between (c) and what we mayprovisionally term the central section of (a), vv. 11–15: › J KŒ �B� ªB�

KŒ �B� ªB� K��Ø ŒÆd KŒ �B� ªB� ºÆº�E (31b). This clearly refers back to �a

K��ª�ØÆ of v. 12; similarly the next phrase › KŒ �F PæÆ F Kæ���� � n

��æÆŒ� ŒÆd XŒı�� �F� �Ææ�ıæ�E (31c, 32a), points back to �a

K�ıæ ØÆ in the same verse, whilst the whole section echoes theassertion of v. 11: n Y�Æ�� ºÆºF�� ŒÆd n �øæŒÆ�� �Ææ�ıæF�� .There are also echoes of vv. 6 and 13b.

1 e.g. David Rensberger, Overcoming, 52–7. This is one of the least convincingelements in his stimulating exegesis of this chapter.

The negative conclusion of v. 32, ŒÆd �c �Ææ�ıæ�Æ ÆP�F P��d�

ºÆ�� �Ø, harks back to the ending of v. 11: ŒÆd �c �Ææ�ıæ�Æ #�H PºÆ�� ���. Certain elements of vv. 16–21 also find an echo in theconcluding paragraph of the chapter: the notion of the Father’s lovefor the Son (vv. 16 and 35), of mission (vv. 17 and 34), belief (vv. 15–16and 36), and finally of disbelief (vv. 18 and 36). Thus the end ofchapter 3(c) looks like a commentary, part explanation, part justifi-cation, of the doctrine contained in the earlier sections.

This does not mean that (c) is to be regarded either as preceding v.13 (so Schnackenburg) or as following on from v. 21 (so Bultmann);for in that case why should an evidently extraneous paragraph (vv.22–30) have been inserted to interrupt such a natural sequence?Rejecting such solutions, Meeks remarks that ‘such rearrangementsresult from the failure to perceive one of the most striking charac-teristics of the evangelist’s literary procedure: the elucidation ofthemes by progressive repetition’. But this does not constitute acomplete explanation, as Meeks is aware, for he continues:

in part this procedure was probably forced upon the author by the nature ofthe traditional material he was using, which had evidently produced, withinthe Johannine community, a number of stylized didactic units, in the form ofthe ‘revelation discourse’ on overlapping themes. Alternative formulationsproduced by the community did not always perfectly coincide. The variantformulations could be simply juxtaposed . . . but characteristically the vari-ants are interspersed with narrative episodes or other kinds of material, withcorrectives and restatements by the evangelist.2

These passages, along with other variants on the same theme, will bediscussed in Chapter 13.

Meeks has seen more clearly than the commentators how thisprocedure works, but even he does not allow for the probabilitythat the composition of the present text was a gradual process. Theend of chapter 3(c) will have been added after an early form of theNicodemus episode (a), originally regarded as complete, had alreadybeen continued by the Baptist episode (b). Having this text (vv. 1–30)in front of him, the evangelist will have seen how appropriately theBaptist’s self-deprecatory remarks could be followed by a paragraphbeginning with an assertion that Jesus, being from above, ¼ øŁ� , isalso above all, K� ø � �ø .

2 ‘Man from Heaven’, 150.

278 Genesis

More important, however, than the link between v. 30 and v. 31, isthe way in which the phrase ¼ øŁ� Kæ���� � (v. 31) is used tointerpret the earlier saying of Jesus, Ka �� �Ø� ª� �Łfi B ¼ øŁ� (v. 3).The evangelist now understands Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus tohave been primarily concerned with his own heavenly origins. (Ihave further observations to make on the relation between these twopassages in Chapter 13.)

This brings us to (a), vv. 1–15, the most complex part of ouranalysis. Here we may begin by distinguishing the two ‘Son ofMan’ sayings: v. 13 and vv. 14–15. I have already argued that v. 13was skimmed from the surface of a polemical debate (directed againstcounter-claims being made on behalf of Moses) before beingappended, as it is now, to the dialogue with Nicodemus. The follow-ing saying is an entirely different matter; although it now serves tolink the dialogue with the short but dense revelatory discourse in vv.16–21, it probably originated as an adaptation of a Synoptic-typepassion prediction. I have already commented extensively on boththese sayings.

The dialogue with Nicodemus continues at least as far as v. 10. Inv. 11, however, it takes another turn. After speaking to Nicodemus asbefore, in the singular, ��, Jesus himself adopts the plural form,Y�Æ�� ºÆºF�� etc., and continues with the general charge that�c �Ææ�ıæ�Æ #�H P ºÆ�� ���.

What up to this point was a private conversation with Nicodemushas now become a public address. We saw that in the concludingverses of chapter 1 there is a similar shift from singular to plural; butin that scene there was already an audience of interested onlookersto whom Jesus could turn. Meeks has provided extensive documen-tation of the provenance of the wisdom-type saying in v. 12.3 Verse11, then, marked out as a new and important assertion by theintroductory I�c I�� , is yet another linking verse. The plural(‘we speak of what we know’) is easy to understand if this sayingwas drawn from the same polemical context as that in v. 12, wherethe speaker, as Bultmann suggests, ‘was speaking as one of the groupof messengers from God’.4 (The earlier Y�Æ�� of Nicodemus, in v. 2,is more easily explained as a simple gnomic plural.5)

3 Ibid. 148 and nn. 36 and 37. 4 Cf. Bultmann, p. 134 n. 3.5 See the discussion of riddle in Ch. 2; also Leroy, Ratsel, 136. Rensberger, Overcom-

ing, ch. 3, offers a generally persuasive interpretation of the social implications of theNicodemus episode.

Excursus VI: The Structure of John 3 279

The commencement of the dialogue, vv. 1–10, need not detain ushere. Its Sitz-im-Leben is not controversy but catechetics, and itspurpose will have been to further the consciousness of the Johanninegroup’s sense of superiority to the Jewish establishment within thesynagogue. Bultmann suggests that in the phrase ‘to see the king-dom of God’ (v. 3) the N��E reproduces an idiomatic use of eat

(‘experience’, ‘come to know’) referring to participation in salva-tion.6 In my view the best explanation of the controversial v. 5,attributed by Bultmann to the ecclesiastical redactor, is that ofBecker, who suggests that it comes from the same source as v. 3,where the two verses were variants of the same tradition.7 Theevangelist has no problem with the sacramental flavour of v. 5, butit is not what prompts him to pick up the saying, and he exploits it forhis own ends.

6 Bultmann, p. 135 n. 2. 7 Becker, p. 134.

280 Genesis

6

MESSENGER OF GOD

introduction

Lying behind the probing questions of the preceding three chapters,each concerned with one of the three titles assigned to Jesus in theGospel, is an even more fundamental and urgent problem that hasanimated and activated these. Raymond Brown noted the need toaccount for the appearance of what he called ‘the higher christology’of the Johannine community,1 that is to say, those sayings ofJesus that were interpreted by his adversaries to mean that he wasclaiming equality with God. That he made such a claim, or ratherthat such claims were made on his behalf, is clear from the Gospel.But if we discount Brown’s own suggestion that the arrival ofSamaritan converts was what precipitated a new wave of theologicalreflection that eventually resulted in the high christology familiarto us from the pages of the Gospel (see pp. 198–200), then where arewe to look?

We noted earlier, in Chapter 1, that an impartial observer droppingby during one of the exchanges between Jesus and ‘the Jews’, orwitnessing the outbreak of murderous hostility recorded at the end ofJohn 8, might well be reminded of those fierce family rows whosesurprising virulence is intelligible only if they are heard against thebackground of a long history of mutual incomprehension and mis-trust. And in fact the debate marks the end of a long vendetta. Theissue is a religious one, exacerbated by the conviction on each sidethat the other is distorting or defacing the legacy of the past. Hencethe need to find something in their shared tradition to account for theaccusation of ditheism and for the ambiguity of Jesus’ response. ‘Asknowledgeable Jews themselves,’ asks Wayne Meeks, ‘how could theshapers of the Johannine tradition have come to speak of Jesus in away that the Jews took to be self-evidently blasphemous?’2

1 Community, 36 2 Equal to God, 310

In answering this question Meeks makes a number of standardobservations before going on to remark that ‘the key clue to ourmystery’ may lie in Nils Dahl’s suggestion that the divine doxa of Jesusseen by Isaiah (John 12: 41) and his ‘day’ seen by Abraham (8: 56)point to a Christian appropriation—and christological interpret-ation—of the visions (interpreted as theophanies) of certainpatriarchs and prophets.3 This is a suggestion well worth pursuing.In what follows I shall be examining certain of these theophaniesquite closely. If, however, we are looking for the immediate cause ofthe anger of ‘the Jews’ in the contexts recorded in the Gospel we mustrule out Isaiah’s vision, for its only mention occurs in an appendix tothe Book of Signs, after Jesus had ‘departed and hid himself’ for thelast time (12: 36). It is curiously marginalized. As for Jesus’ observa-tion that Abraham had seen his ‘day’, this, though clearly calculatedto rile his adversaries, was not in itself blasphemous.4

Before proceeding to look for a solution of our own it may behelpful here to remind ourselves of the answer put forward by RudolfBultmann: the well-known hypothesis of a lost Gnostic documentupon which the evangelist drew freely. The question is, though, ifwe reject this hypothetical source, what are we going to put in itsplace? And if we believe that the roots of the Gospel are Jewish, howare we going to account for these bold new ideas? If we cannot find asource what are we to look for instead: a tradition, an influence, abackground, a catalyst, a miraculous divine intervention, or simplythe ineluctable processes of history?

Many important features of John’s christology are rooted fairlyobviously in specific Jewish traditions. That the Prologue is indebtedto speculations about the role of wisdom in God’s plan for the worldwas pointed out long ago by Rendel Harris5 and is now widely admit-ted.6 The figure ‘like a man’ of Daniel 7 is equally clearly the not-so-remote ancestor of the Johannine Son of Man. That the importantmission motif has to be explained against the background of Jewishideas of prophecy and agency is well established. All the various titlesbestowed on Jesus in John 1, including the enigmatic ‘Lamb of God’,are recognizably and for the most part indisputably Jewish.

3 ‘Johannine Church’, 128–9.4 Nevertheless, because of their intrinsic interest, I have made some comments on

these (mostly summarizing Dahl) in Excursus VII, following this chapter.5 ‘Origin’.6 See especially P. Borgen, ‘God’s Agent’.

282 Genesis

Yet none of these religious allusions and debts, remarkable asmany of them are, appears to have provoked in ‘the Jews’ the samekind of blazing anger as what they saw to be a direct claim to equalitywith God—which, as Meeks recognizes, is virtually a charge ofditheism. In particular, neither the term Logos nor the title Son ofMan finds any place, either then or later, in credal confessions.Nowhere do we come across the affirmation, ‘Jesus is the Logos’ or‘Jesus is the Son of Man’.

In searching for what lies behind the fierce debates of the FourthGospel we should be on the look-out for some analogue, on the otherside of the Jewish–Christian divide, of the claims that aroused the ireof Jesus’ antagonists, for otherwise we shall not even begin to com-prehend how this seemingly impassable divide came to be bridged.Hitherto scholarship has failed to come up with a satisfactory ex-planation of the strangely elusive claim, hovering between ditheismon the one side and subordinationism on the other, that character-ized Johannine christology at the point at which it offended thedeepest religious sensibilities of ‘the Jews’ and provoked in them aresponse that was, quite literally, murderous.

Central to my argument is the observation that neither the termLogos nor the title Son of Man can provide what we are looking for,since neither, if we follow the gospel account, was the object ofJewish ire and indignation. The Logos is not found outside thePrologue, and although the title Son of Man is important to Johnand is mentioned in the debate in chapter. 8, it is some way from theheart of the controversy; and this, the true focus of the blazing row, iswhat we are after.

At this point I must acknowledge two debts, first to the important,though largely neglected thesis of Jan-Adolf Buhner’s, Der Gesandteund sein Weg (1977), and secondly to Christopher Rowland’s study ofJewish apocalyptic, The Open Heaven (1982), especially the section on‘the Development of an Exalted Angel’ (94–113). Buhner’s centralinterest is in tracing the link between the angel-motif and theprophet-motif in the tradition, and he goes as far as to say that ‘thefusion or blending (Verbindung) of prophet and angel will prove to bethe real key to answering the history-of-religion question concerningJohannine christology’.7

7 Gesandte, 341–73.

Messenger of God 283

There is clearly much to be said for Buhner’s suggestion. Likeangels, prophets were regarded as speaking with the voice of God(e.g. Deut. 18: 18–20; Jer. 1: 9): no wonder that the later tradition, asBuhner has shown,8 insisted on the fusion or blending (Verbindung)of prophet and angel. What I wish to propose instead is that the keyto any understanding of what lies behind the charge of ditheism inthe Gospel is what amounts to an angel-christology tout court. Thisproposal follows up a remark of Rowland on the failure of moderndiscussions of early christology to include any discussion of theextent of the influence of angel-christology on primitive Christiandoctrine.9 It is also connected with Meeks’s suggestion concerningthe reinterpretation of Old Testament theophanies.

1. the angel of the lord

I begin by noticing the impossibility, in several of the narratives inwhich the angel/messenger of Yahweh plays a prominent part, ofproperly distinguishing between God and the messenger. In thestories of Hagar (Genesis 16 and 21), Jacob (Gen. 31: 11–13), Gideon(Judges 6), and the parents of Samson (Judges 13), the oscillation israpid and the effect disconcerting, even disturbing. ThroughoutGenesis 18 there is a similar subtle and rapid shift between the Lordintroduced by the narrator in Gen. 18:1 and the ‘three men’ whomAbraham (unaware of what the reader has already been told) sees bythe oaks of Mamre (Gen. 18: 2), and also between the Lord and thetwo men in chapter 19, sometimes reflecting the narrative and readeraxis, at other times the perspective of the characters in the story. Weknow that when he wishes God can intervene directly in humanaffairs, but he does not always choose to do so, and when, instead, heselects a messenger to act on his behalf, the reader is afflicted by thesame perplexity as the human protagonist. Even in the delightfulstory of Balaam’s ass, where the angel figure occupies the centrestage throughout, Balaam understandably reads the word that the

8 Ibid. 271; cf. 427.9 Open Heaven, 112. Perhaps Martin Werner’s Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas

(Berne, 1941) should be exempted from this generalization. But this study is patchy atbest: not only does Werner ignore completely the evidence of Daniel 7, but he places fartoo much emphasis on the Parables section of 1 Enoch, material that has to be usedwith great circumspection.

284 Genesis

angel bids him speak (Num. 22: 35) as the word put into his mouth byGod (22: 38).

The divine messenger (indefinite) who appears to Hagar in Genesis21 tells her in one verse (17) that ‘God has heard the voice of the boywhere he is’, and in the next, speaking as God, ‘I will make a greatnation of him.’ Jacob, ten chapters further on, has precisely the sameexperience (31: 11–13). In Exodus 3, though it is the angel of Yahwehwho appears to Moses (v. 2), it is God (v. 4) or Yahweh (v. 7) whospeaks, and accordingly the ensuing discussion is either with God(ch. 3) or Yahweh (ch. 4). In Judges 6 the angel of the Lord whoappears to Gideon begins: ‘The Lord is with you’ (v. 12), but whenGideon speaks the Lord himself answers him, and is then addresseddirectly in his turn. In Judges 13 the angel of Yahweh who appears tothe wife of Manoah is described by her to her husband as a ‘man ofGod’ zje: l

:ae

˝Wja (divine man?), ‘whose appearance was like that of

an angel/messenger of God, most awe-inspiring’. When Manoaheventually asks his name he receives the reply, ‘Why do you askmy name, it is too wonderful’ (13: 2–21), and the angel figurepromptly ascends to heaven in the flame of the altar of sacrifice.When it is all over, Manoah exclaims in alarm, ‘We shall surelydie, for we have seen God’ (Judg. 13: 22).10

That no firm distinction can or should be drawn between God andhis angel/messenger is graphically demonstrated by the use Hoseamakes of the story of Jacob’s wrestling match in Genesis 32. In theoriginal account Jacob’s antagonist is referred to simply as ‘a man’(v. 24), but Jacob himself has no doubt that he has ‘seen God face toface’ (v. 30), so it is not surprising that Hosea, recalling this episode,places God and the angel/messenger in synonymous parallelism (12:4–5; ET 12: 3–4).

All interpretation runs the risk of misunderstanding, but in thesepassages the risk is particularly acute, since it is evident that they areall crucially and deliberately inexplicit. Did Hagar, Jacob, and Man-oah actually see God, as they claim to have done? The answer to thisquestion is deliberately withheld: to say either yes or no would be tomiss the whole point. Is the eponymous hero of Brecht’s Der guteMensch von Sezuan a man or a woman? The answer implied in oneEnglish version, The Good Woman of Sezuan betrays both Brecht’s

10 Cf. Gen. 16: 13; 32: 30. Could there possibly be an allusion to this tradition in Jesus’words to Philip: ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14: 9)?

Messenger of God 285

secret and the translator’s inadequate grasp of it. Is the Jungianpersona (the closest analogy I can find) to be identified with the self?Yes and no. Here the relationship is so close that from one angle itcan only be construed as an identity.11

An especially important and remarkable instance of this equivo-cation has been noticed by Christopher Rowland. The prophetEzekiel’s vision of the divine chariot, which culminates in theappearance of ‘a likeness as it were of a human form’ seated above‘the likeness of a throne’ (1: 26), is well known. The vision of God(Yahweh) in human form is noteworthy in itself. Less commonlyobserved, however, is the reappearance of the same divine figure inEzek. 8: 2, for having now stepped down from the throne, he acts as hisown angel-messenger. ‘This separability’, comments Rowland, ‘en-abled the figure to act as an agent of the divine purpose, in so faras he was the means whereby the prophet was removed to Jerusalem(Ezek. 8: 3).’12 Like the efej xalm of many earlier stories, he addressesthe human seer with the authoritative voice of God, and is the first ofwhat would prove to be a whole series of angelic figures who, likehim, would have a human shape but be readily recognizable asheavenly messengers with the task of communicating divine mys-teries to the few chosen souls privileged to receive them and to passthem on to the wise. Rowland also points to the extraordinaryresemblances between the description of the angel in Dan. 10: 4–9and the vision of God in Ezekiel 1: ‘the fact that he acts as a divineemissary’, he adds, ‘cannot disguise the exalted language used todescribe the angel’.13

2. the liberating angel

The chief messenger figure is the one who guided Israel out of Egypt.The key passage is this:

Behold I send an angel/messenger before you, to guard you on the wayand to bring you to the place which I have prepared. Give heed to him and

11 A serious weakness of Margaret Barker’s fascinating book, The Great Angel, is thatit pushes the case for identity between Yahweh and his angel far too hard, forgettingthat an angel is also, always, a messenger. However equivocally, some subordination isalways implied.

12 Open Heaven, 96–7. 13 Ibid. 100

286 Genesis

hearken to his voice, do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon yourtransgression, for my name is in him. (Exod. 23: 20–1)

Here is an agent acting unquestionably with plenipotentiary powers,so powerful and authoritative that, as will rapidly become clear, hewas often felt to threaten the authority of God himself.

What looks like an early reaction to the whole idea of a liberatingangel and an attempt to belittle his role is found in a verse from ThirdIsaiah. The text of Isa. 63: 9 (zp

˝jW: Fe fjn

˝q:

˝La¯

lmf tr

˝Fl ze

˝t

˝r

˝lb

˝k˙: ‘in

all their afflictions he too was afflicted, and the angel of his presencesaved them’) is generally emended in modern editions to conform tothe LXX: P �æ���ı� P�b ¼ªª�º� Iºº� ÆP�e� Œ�æØ� ��ø�� ÆP���: ‘itwas no messenger and no angel but the Lord himself who savedthem’. Thus the less well-attested a l is preferred to Fl, tr

˝becomes

tjr: (‘envoy’) and fjn

˝q:

˝La¯

lm

¯

f¯

becomes fjn

˝q:

˝La˝lm

¯

f, breaking the con-struct link. The liberating angel (‘the angel of his presence’) vanishesand redemption is attributed to the Lord himself.

In this case it is possible that the Septuagint translators wereselecting a Hebrew text that had already been modified in the inter-ests of a safer interpretation. Elsewhere, as we shall see in a numberof examples, they showed that they themselves were anxious toavoid any suggestion that the liberating angel could exhibit anyinitiative that might lead either to his being thought to enjoy somedegree of independence from the God whom he served or that hisbusy presence was equivalent to the presence of God. This is veryevident from the Greek version of the key text of Exod. 23: 20–1. AsJ. W. Wevers has observed, this steers clear of ‘any interpretationthat might identify the angel with Yahweh, his name is not withinhim; he is not himself the Lord—his name is rather upon him—norcan he forgive sins; rather he can and must carry out God’s orders ashis messenger’.14 In the Masoretic Text of the following verse themessenger is in fact virtually identified with the Lord himself: ‘But ifyou hearken attentively to his voice and do all that I say then I will bean enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.’ ForFlSb: LXX reads �B� �ø B� �ı: the voice is now the voice of Yahwehand the fruitful ambiguity gives place to an edifying exhortation thatcould cause no offence to the most pious of pious ears.

The liberating angel reappears in Num. 20: 16: ‘and when we criedto the Lord, he heard our voice, and sent an angel and he brought us

14 Notes, 369–71.

Messenger of God 287

forth out of Egypt’. The Hebrew is ambiguous in that the subject ofthe second verb, ‘brought us forth’, could equally well be either Godhimself or his angel/messenger. Not so in the Greek:I�����ºÆ� ¼ªª�º K��ªÆª� #�A�: ‘sending an angel, he broughtus forth’. Similarly Judges 2: 1. In MT the angel asserts: ‘I broughtyou up from Egypt’ and complains that ‘you have not obeyed mycommand’. The Greek, on the other hand, makes it clear that theangel is speaking on behalf of the Lord: ‘Thus says the Lord: ‘‘Ibrought you etc.’’ ’.

Not surprisingly the Targums also find a way of evading thedifficulty, though they take a different tack. Onqelos translatesExod. 23: 21 as follows: ‘Beware of him [the angel] and listen to hisMemra, do not refuse to listen to him, for he will not forgive your sins,because his Memra is in my name.’ The translator, Bernard Grossfeldt,comments that

the Hebrew has ‘for My Name is in him.’ The Targum reverses the sense ofthe Hebrew—instead of God’s name being in the angel, the latter’s Memra isin God’s name. This reversal avoids any misconception as to God’s superior-ity over the angels, which the Hebrew could conceivably convey. Tg. Ps-Jonlikewise contains this rendering, while Tg. Neof. has ‘My sacred name will beinvoked upon him’ and Neof.m ‘the name of My Memra is upon him.’15

The Mekilta of R. Ishmael handles the problematic text with somesubtlety. It concludes the Tractate Kaspa with a discussion of Exod.23: 19 (‘You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk’). The nextTractate, Shabbata, which is also the last, takes up the midrash atExod. 31: 12 (‘And the Lord spoke to Moses’): ‘Directly and notthrough an angel (xalm) nor through the emissary (hjlue). Thusthe midrash breaks off just before the offending verse that describesthe liberating role of the angel of Yahweh, and when the commen-tary is resumed, some eight chapters further on, it indirectly repudi-ates this role with a remark ostensibly addressed to the nature ofGod’s communication with Moses. Since there is nothing in 31: 12 tomake one suspect the presence of an intermediary we can onlysuppose that it is the threateningly intractable Exod. 23: 20–1 thathas provoked the vehement denial with which the new tractate,Shabbata, commences. (Another awkward verse that caused the

15 The Targum Onqelos to Exodus: Translation with Apparatus and Notes by BernardGrossfeldt (Edinburgh, 1988), 68 and n. 22.

288 Genesis

rabbinical commentators a lot of trouble was Exod. 24: 1, whereYahweh is spoken of as if someone other than he was the author ofthe Covenant Code that precedes.16)

What the Mekilta hints at is tackled head on by the PassoverHaggadah, which first illustrates Deut. 26: 8 by quoting Exod. 12: 12and then expatiates upon each clause in succession:

‘For I will go through the land of Egypt in that night’: I, and not an angel. ‘Iwill smite the first-born in the land of Egypt’: I and not a seraph. ‘And againstall the gods of Egypt I will execute judgements’: I, and not the emissary(hjlue).

As in the Mekilta, the angel can scarcely be other than the liberatingangel of Exod. 23: 20. The two texts are clearly related.17

Leviticus Rabbah opens by taking God’s address to Moses as astarting-point in an attempt to do away with the role of the liberatingangel. But there is a significant difference. Whilst the more recentmidrash acknowledges that the problem text is picked up both inNum. 20: 16 and in Judg. 2: 1, it preserves God’s transcendence byidentifying the angel in the first passage with Moses and in thesecond with Phinehas. So these are earthly zjkalm who are firmlyidentified as prophets and there is no danger of confusing them withany heavenly zjkalm who might threaten to usurp God’s authority.

We may conclude then that the ambiguity and oscillation betweenYahweh and his angel that is found elsewhere in Exodus, as inGenesis, Numbers, and Judges, appears in Exod 23: 20–1 in an espe-cially direct and dangerous form. When adapting or commentingupon this passage, however, later Jewish authors, starting with LXX,do their best to conceal the indiscretion, not wishing to leave roomfor an angel figure who, credited with an independent existence,might be thought to be related to Yahweh not as an ally or amanu-ensis but as a rival.

These misgivings become readily intelligible when one considershow the tradition of the liberating angel is taken up elsewhere, first

16 Cf. p. 88.17 As is recognized by Judah Goldin, ‘Not by Means of an Angel’. Goldin refers to the

Mekilta on Exod. 12: 12, which cites Exod. 12: 29 (‘Now it was the Lord who smote thefirst-born’) and makes the same addition: ‘not by means of an angel and not by meansof an emissary’. Apart from the last instance the determinate form (hjlue) is used.Goldin fails to notice this fact, but as Buhner has observed (Gesandte, 327) it must havesome significance. Buhner thinks that Israel’s guardian angel is probably the intendedreference.

Messenger of God 289

in the Apocalypse of Abraham,18 secondly (much later) in 3 Enoch, andfinally in the Gospel of John.19

The angel Yaoel who plays a leading role in the Apocalypse ofAbraham and whose name (however differently transcribed in thevarious manuscripts) is clearly a conflation of Yahweh and El, al-ludes to Exod. 23: 20 in his address to Abraham: ‘For your sake I haveindicated the way of the land’ (10: 14). Literally fulfilling the divinepromise, ‘my name is in him’ (Exod. 23: 21) and taking over the roleof the liberating angel, he professes to be the emissary of God: ‘I amsent to you’ (10: 6, 13) and claims the authority of his name (10: 8). Heis also described (11: 2) in terms that recall the angel figure in Ezekieland Daniel (‘his body was like sapphire and his face like chrysolite’)and even the Ancient of Days himself (‘the hair of his head was likesnow’). Subsequently the same name, Yaoel, is given to God (17: 11).

Very much later, possibly as late as the tenth century ad,20 theliberating angel resurfaces in a totally new guise, in the person ofMetatron, the most important of the horde of angels that crowd thepages of 3 Enoch, a completely untypical pseudepigraphon in so far asit comes to us through Jewish, not Christian, sources. Metatron, whois credited with having 70, or 72, other names (of which the first isYaho’el!),21 told the Rabbi Ishmael that the Holy One had set akingly crown upon his head in the presence of all the other angelsand called him ‘the lesser Yahweh’—‘as it is written ‘‘my name is inhim’’ ’ (3 Enoch 12: 5), thus arrogating to himself, hundreds of yearsafter the events of the exodus, the key role of the liberating angel. Nowonder he was perceived as a threat to Jewish orthodoxy.

Finally, in the Fourth Gospel, there is Jesus himself, whose veryname implies liberation. He too declares that he has been sent by Godand shares in the authority of his name (5: 43; 10: 25). God has madehim a gift of his name (17: 11) and he has manifested it (17: 6) andmade it known to his disciples (17: 26).

It seems then reasonable to suppose that the angel of Yahwehtradition provides the most plausible and obvious explanation ofJohn’s presentation of Jesus as the messenger of God. The pages of

18 See above, Ch. 1, p. 89.19 John Day has drawn my attention to a bowl inscription, again some centuries

later than the New Testament, which invokes an angel called Yehoel. See J. Naveh andS. Shaked, Amulets, 163.

20 See P. Alexander, ‘3 Enoch’, 228.21 3 Enoch 48D, 1 (Alexander, 3 Enoch, 313).

290 Genesis

the Bible are crowded with a host of intermediary figures—word,spirit, name, wisdom, priests, prophets, not to mention dreams andvisions—that represent God in his dealings with humanity; butnowhere else is there such an obvious analogue to the tantalizingequivocation that makes it impossible, when assessing the christ-ology of the Fourth Gospel, to settle definitively either for ditheism orfor subordinationism. Searching in the Jewish tradition for remnantsof a possible bridge that could lead across to John’s provocativelyambiguous portrayal of Jesus’ relationship with the God who senthim (the Father–Son relationship is another episode in the samestory), where else should we look?

In the next section of this chapter the case will be strengthened bya consideration of yet more evidence.

3. more angels

To do justice to the colourful diversity of the Jewish heavens at theturn of the era, teeming as they are with angelic life, a painter wouldhave to operate with the bravura of a Bosch. The resulting picturewould not be without internal contradictions, so perhaps it is betterto think of a tapestry woven over a long period by several hands.Despite some disagreement in form and content, one persistent motif,reaching back to the original tradition, may be traced throughout.Four versions of this are particularly relevant to this study.

JubileesThe strength of the angel of Yahweh tradition may be seen in the roleplayed by ‘the angel of the presence’ in Jubilees (of uncertain date, butprobably around 100 bc). From chapter 2 onwards it is he who fulfilsthe task of dictating to Moses the history of creation and much elsebesides; so the voice of the angel is equivalent to the voice of God.When recounting the story of Hagar, this ‘angel of the presence’attributes the angel’s role to another, ‘one of the holy ones’ (17: 11),whereas when he comes to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac hehimself assumes the responsibility of preventing Abraham fromcarrying out the slaughter: ‘And I called out to him from heavenand said to him, ‘‘Abraham, Abraham’’ ’ (18: 10). He evidently feelsmore directly involved in the fate of Isaac than in that of Ishmael.

Messenger of God 291

A little further on ‘the Lord called Abraham by his name again fromheaven’ (18: 14), and the reader sees very clearly that the old equivo-cation has lost none of its power to mystify and bemuse.

4 EzraIn 4 Ezra the angelus interpres has a name, Uriel. In other respects thedifficulty of distinguishing him from the God who sent him is exactlythe same as before. Although the author is a contemporary of thefourth evangelist, it is unlikely that they were acquainted, and themarked resemblances in their handling of the angel/emissary thememust be put down to the striking persistence within the Jewishreligious community of this particular tradition.

In 5: 31 the angel appears for the second time. As his conversationwith the seer proceeds there is a point at which we suddenly becomeaware that it is no longer the angel who is speaking, but God: ‘youcannot discover my judgement or the goal of the love that I havepromised my people’ (5: 40). This is only one of numerous passages inwhich the angel is either addressed by a title that seems moreappropriate to the deity (so 4: 22; 5: 41; 7: 45, 58, 75) or talks as ifGod is speaking through his mouth (5: 40, 42; 6: 6; 8: 47; 9: 18–22). Inchapter 7 there is another abrupt and unannounced change ofsubject: the angel opens the dialogue, but Ezra addresses his replyto God (7: 17).

Elsewhere (12: 7–9) Ezra turns to God to pray for enlightenment andit is the angel who replies. In chapter 13 our first impression afteranother prayer addressed to ‘the Most High’ is that God himself isresponding; but then we realize that ‘the Most High’ is being spoken ofin the third person, and this continues until the end of the chapter,except for one reference to ‘my son’, or possibly ‘my servant’ (13: 37).All this leaves us thoroughly confused—not for the first time. Atthe close of chapter 13 the angel promises Ezra further revelationsand the explanation of wondrous matters (13: 56), but then promptlyvanishes: in the concluding chapter God deals with the seer directly.

How the first readers responded to these bewilderingly rapid andfrequent transitions we can only guess. We should bear in mind,however, that they must have been used to precisely the samecomings and goings, toings and froings, in the Bible itself. Theymay well have simply assumed that Uriel, the angel of Ezra’s vision,had taken the place of the biblical angel of Yahweh.

292 Genesis

The MaghariansWhether or not the tenth-century Qaraite writer, Ya � qub alQirqisanı, to whom we owe our knowledge of the Magharians(cave-dwellers?) was right to place them before Jesus and Christian-ity, what is recorded about the convictions of this sect forms aninteresting comparison with our other examples. With some of itsmembers reported as regarding laughter as unlawful, it can scarcelyhave been the most attractive of religious groups. What is significantabout the Magharians is their literal interpretation of the ‘angel ofthe Lord’ passages in the Bible, ‘for they assert that these are descrip-tions of an angel, who created the world’.22 A similar view, Qirqisanıtells us, was held by Benjamin al-Nahawandı, another Qaraitewriter, who lived in the preceding century: ‘He maintained that thegreat Creator created one angel and it was this angel who created[the] whole world, and who sent the prophets and despatched [sic]the messengers, and performed the miracles and made command-ments and prohibitions and it is he who brings about whatevercomes to pass in the world, and not the prime Creator.’23 It seems,then, that the Magharians, believing the angel of the Lord to be a realbeing, created by God,24 concluded that he acted as a kind ofdemiurge. Jewish monotheism is evidently much more severelythreatened by such a doctrine than by any of the other developmentsof the tradition that we have considered so far. Indeed, with only theslightest of deviations we would be dealing with an embryonicGnosticism, with the angel of the Lord transformed into an evil,oppositional god instead of what the Magharians appear to havethought him to be, a compliant master-of-works.

After outlining Qirqisanı’s views, H. A. Wolfson goes on to suggestthat they should be conflated with reports of the eleventh-centuryMuhammed al-Sharastanı concerning a sect that appears in hiswork, probably by a scribal error, under the name of Maqariba.25

22 B. Chiesa and W. Lockwood (eds.) Ya� qub al Qirqisanı, 134–5.23 Ibid. 147–8.24 Cf. Epiphanius on the Ebionites: ‘they say that he [Christ] was not begotten of

God the Father but created as one of the archangels, greater than the rest’ (Adv. Haer.30: 16, PG 41: 433C).

25 H. A. Wolfson, ‘The Pre-Existent Angel’. Norman Golb disagrees: ‘It is evidentthat the only source which can be relied upon with confidence for the description of theMagarıya is Qirqisanı’ (‘Who were the Magarıya’, 350). But see the very full discussionof Jarl Fossum, ‘Magharians’.

Messenger of God 293

Here the created angel, like that of Qirqisanı’s Magharians, is used asan explanation of anthropomorphism and, like that of his Naha-wandi, is said to have mediated the revelation of the Law. It contains,however, Wolfson points out, three additional elements:

(1) that the angel through whom the Law was revealed and to whom all theanthropological narratives of the Hebrew Bible refer, could be sent down byGod among men to act as His representative; (2) that the angel was actuallysent down by God to act as His representative among men; (3) that it is thisbelief of theirs that was later followed by Arius.26

Apart from the association with Arius, evidently a conclusion ofSharastanı himself, it is hard to see how much closer we could getto one of the fundamental tenets of the fourth evangelist. Even if,which seems unlikely, we should be thinking of two sects rather thanone, the work of these two medieval authors, drawing on evidencethat is now lost to us, shows more clearly than anything else outsidethe New Testament how easy it was, once the first fatal step ofhypostasization had been taken, to pass from a characteristicallyJewish belief to one which is actually much closer to Christianity. Itis not surprising that no record of the existence of this sect has comedown to us through official rabbinical channels.

Justin MartyrFor our final piece of evidence we turn to Justin Martyr, who as earlyas the second half of the second century ad was robustly defendingthe twin Christian doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, especiallythe latter (though not of course in the formal language of the creeds).The term Logos, which he often uses when speaking of Jesus, heprobably borrowed from Philo. Quotations from the Fourth Gospelare rare in his work, possibly because he often had Jewish interlocu-tors in mind and John’s abrasive tone was ill-suited to his own moreconciliatory approach.

In pleading the Christian cause Justin often needed to base hisarguments on the one source whose authority was accepted by thosehe was trying to convince, namely the Bible. Perhaps we should notbe surprised that many of the texts he turned to for support wereprecisely those whose ambiguity allows the reader to see anotherdivine figure, someone other than God himself, enjoying the same

26 ‘The Pre-Existent Angel’, 92.

294 Genesis

powers and demanding the same obedience and respect. This ofcourse is the angel/messenger of God, whom Justin believed to beChrist. Unlike John, who never actually uses the term ¼ªª�º� ofJesus, Justin had no such hesitations: for him the angel of the Lordwas, where it mattered, Jesus or Christ, whom he was equallyprepared to call Ł���: God.

So it is not surprising that in seeking to persuade his Jewishinterlocutor, Trypho, to accept, like himself, the divinity of Christ,Justin turns to passages in the Bible that trouble the rabbinicalcommentators, passages that concern the appearance to Abrahamand the commission of the liberating angel.

Dialogue with Trypho 56

The author summarizes the argument of this long chapter in theopening paragraph:

Moses, the blessed and faithful servant of God, reminds us that it was Godwho appeared to Abraham by the oak of Mambre, along with two angels sentfor a judgement upon Sodom by Another, who dwells above the heavens andhas never either been seen by or conversed with anyone and whomwe knowto be the Creator and Father of the universe.

One of the three angels, Justin is convinced, was Christ, whom hecalls God, but insists that he is not to be confused with ‘the Creatorand Father of the Universe’. Like the Jewish interpreters who pre-ceded him, Justin explains the text in a way that leaves no room for adifferent understanding, but instead of divesting the angels (or ratherone of the three) of any particular significance, he finds evidence inthis story of the true divinity of Christ.

Dialogue with Trypho 75. 1

Similarly it was mysteriously proclaimed, as we have understood, throughMoses in the Book of Exodus that the name of God was Jesus, something hesays was not revealed either to Abraham or to Jacob. This is what was said:‘The Lord said to Moses: Tell this people, ‘‘Behold I am sending my angelbefore my face to guard you on the way and to bring you to the land that Ihave prepared. Give heed to him and hearken to him; do not disobey him. Hewill not abandon you, for my name is on him (K�� ÆP�fiH).’’ ’

Since, according to Deut. 31: 3, Joshua was commissioned to lead hispeople into the Promised Land in terms similar to the Liberating

Messenger of God 295

Angel, Justin feels entitled to apply this commission to Jesus, whichin Greek (and of course Hebrew) is the same as Joshua.27 He is notbothered by the fact that the name of God in the Greek translation ison the angel rather than in him, nor by the modification that avoidsany suggestion that the angel is to be identified with the God whosent him. The name of the messenger is Joshua (Jesus) and the bearerof this name is divine: that is enough for him.

1 Apol. 63. 5In this passage Justin is arrogating for Jesus the two key titles (‘angel/messenger’, [¼ªª�º�], and ‘emissary’, [I����º�]) that the Jewishcommentators, as we have just seen, found so threatening. Forwhoever claims them, or whomsoever they are assigned to, is takingon tasks which in their view belong to God himself.

Turning to the Bible for proof of what he has just said, he concen-trates on the first of the two titles, ‘Angel’, and finds it in theappearance of ‘the angel of Yahweh’ to Moses in the burning bush(Exod. 3: 2). Although the Jews, he argues, have writings that ex-pressly affirm that it was the angel who spoke to Moses, saying, ‘I amwho am, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God ofJacob’, they nevertheless continue to maintain that the one whospoke was the Father and Creator of the universe. In fact both inthe Hebrew Bible and in the Greek it is God (MT zje: l

:a, LXX Œ�æØ�)

who is said to have called Moses out of the bush (Exod. 3: 4), so unlessJustin was relying upon a different textual tradition his reading ofthis passage was false as well as (to our eyes) perverse.28 Yet althoughhe is prepared to say that the Son of God, who is the Word and thefirst-born of God, is also God (v. 15 in this very chapter) he neverconfuses him with ‘the Father of the Universe’, whom he introduceshere (v. 1) as actually unnamable.29 Though coarser and cruder thanthat of John, his christology is recognizably in the same tradition.

27 He often exploits this peculiarity of the Greek. Cf. Heb 4: 8.28 Oskar Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy, holds that Justin made use of a

testimony source here, arguing from the fact that his three quotations from Exodus 3‘show remarkable accordance with each other against the LXX’ (47). But one wouldscarcely expect them to diverge. Elsewhere, in Dial. 59–60, Justin takes a different tack,allowing Trypho to observe: ‘He who was seen in a flame of fire was an angel, and hewho conversed withMoses was God, so that both an angel and God, two together, werein that vision’ (Dial. 60.1; cf. Philo, De Vit. Mos. 1. 71).

29 See Andre Wartelle’s edition of the Apologies (Paris, 1987), 56–61.

296 Genesis

4. conclusion

In response to the question how the hypothesis in this chapter differsfrom or improves upon earlier suggestions, my answer is that theperplexingly rapid shift of perspective demanded by the biblical andpseudepigraphical texts is matched very clearly, at precisely the pointwhere the theory requires it, by a similar oscillation between the claimsattributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, where we experience thesame difficulty in saying whether Jesus is claiming divinity with theFather or acknowledging his complete dependence. The pendulumswings back and forth between the two poles in such a way that wecannot arrest it at either pole, or indeed at any point in between,without radically misrepresenting the evidence. One vital element inthe theory has long been recognized: the Jewish law of agency thatposits a theoretical identity between sender and sent alongside asuspended awareness of the difference between the two. The otherelement, just as vital, is required to explain the particularity of themission of Jesus, where God is the sender and Jesus his angel emis-sary. Clement of Alexandria was to say later of Christ that he hasbeen called ‘the face’ (�e �æ��ø� ) of the Father (Stromata 5. 6. 34,1)—the word that is regularly used in the LXX to translate theHebrew zjn:q:

˝. Put into Latin this would be persona, and the Jungian

term conveys with some precision the essential relationship betweenGod and the face he presents to the world, first through an unnamedangel/messenger and then definitively, as Christians believe, throughChrist.

Why has this explanation, so close to the assumptions of many ofthe leading Church Fathers, never been advanced by critical schol-arship? The most likely reason is that the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel,human and divine, does not look like an angel. But he does behavelike one, and in many places assumes the role not just of a prophet(for the prophets were never confused with the God in whose namethey spoke) but also of the clearly ‘angelic’ Son of Man. What isnotable about the so-called Son of Man in Daniel is that unlike mostof the other individual angels in the book, he has no name, simply anappearance and a role. Like the other angelic figures,30 in Daniel andelsewhere, he resembles a (son of) man; consequently, resemblance

30 e.g. Gen. 18: 2; 19: 10; 32: 24; Judg. 13: 11; Ezek. 9: 2; Dan. 8: 15; 9: 21; 10: 16, 18;12: 6–7; 1 Enoch 87: 2; 90: 14.

Messenger of God 297

being a reciprocal relationship, when the Johannine Jesus takes overthe role of the Son of Man, he has no need to alter his own appear-ance: he looks like an angel after all.

What, though, has been explained in this chapter? Ab esse ad possevalet illatio. Since Johannine Christianity emerged from Judaism, itmust have been possible for it to do so in the form, moreover, inwhich the Gospel shows it to have existed. There must have been abridge (particularly important but having left few obvious traces)probably connected with the more prominent bridge that leads backto the Danielic Son of Man. The discovery of a bridge does notamount to an explanation of how it came to be crossed; nor does itentail the conclusion that the passage was somehow an inexorablenecessity. Just because a new religion did de facto come into existencedoes not mean that it had to do so. But, as we know, it did.

298 Genesis

Excursus VII: Isaiah and Abraham

The glory seen by Isaiah is spoken of by Jesus in the first of the twoappendices that follow the Book of Signs (12: 37–42): ‘Isaiah said thisbecause he saw his glory and spoke of him.’ This verse is immediatelypreceded by a slightly skewed1 quotation from Isaiah: ‘He [God] hasblinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see withtheir eyes and perceive with their heart, and turn to me [ Jesus] toheal them’ (Isa. 6: 9–10; John 12: 40). For Dahl the meaning is clear:‘Isaiah could report on Christ’s saying concerning the predestinedunbelief because he had in his vision seen the glory of the crucifiedChrist.’ Why the crucified Christ and not just the logos asarkos—thepre-existent Word? Partly because of the context, John 12, in whichthere are frequent allusions to Jesus’ approaching passion (vv. 7–8,24, 27–36), partly because Isaiah’s vision, however summarilyreported, anticipates according to Dahl the much more detailedaccount given in a late second-century Christianized apocryphon,The Ascension of Isaiah, wherein the prophet’s culminating vision, inthe course of a merkavah ascent, is that of ‘the Beloved’ in humanform. Recalling this vision, Isaiah states specifically that ‘the god ofthat world’ will reach out (against the Son) and ‘they will lay theirhands upon him and hang him upon a tree’, but that he will riseagain on the third day (Asc. Isa. 9: 12–18).

Dahl continues by linking Isaiah’s vision with the claim in thePrologue that ‘we have beheld his glory’, the glory, that is, of theonly Son of God (1: 14). ‘That this correspondence is intentional’, heargues, ‘is confirmed by the observation that the latter part of thePrologue alludes to another OT theophany, the vision of Moses(Exod. 33: 17–34: 9). Moses was not allowed to see the face of God,whom no one has ever seen (Exod. 33: 20; John 1: 18).’ Yet Godrevealed himself indirectly to him as ‘abounding in steadfast love(dzh) and faithfulness (vma)’ (Exod. 34: 6). And since the Prologuegoes on to assert that Jesus Christ, named here for the first time in theGospel, is the true source of grace (�æØ�) and truth (Iº�Ł�ØÆ) (1: 17),

1 Skewed in that it reads the imperative tenses (wmue¯

and pu

¯

e

˝) as perfects

(wjm: ue¯

and pu

¯

e).

this must be, argues Dahl, because it assumes that ‘Moses too, likeIsaiah, saw his glory’.2 In any case, he notes, Moses is conceived ashaving witnessed to and written about Christ (5: 46).

Lastly Dahl quotes John 5: 37, where Jesus asserts that ‘the Fatherwho sent me has himself borne witness to me. His voice you havenever heard, his form you have never seen’—in spite of a traditionevidenced in the Mekilta’s exegesis of Exod. 19: 11: ‘this teaches thatthe Israelites saw what Israel and Ezekiel never saw’ (which can onlybe the ‘form’ or image of God).3

Relevant here, though not mentioned by Dahl, is the assertion thatno one apart from the Son of Man has ascended into heaven (andtherefore been privileged to witness divine mysteries) (3: 13).4 Giventhe strong opposition to all such claims (the Mekilta specificallymentions Moses and Elijah), ‘it is rather surprising’, commentsAlan Segal, ‘that so many ascensions and ecstatic journeys arereported in inter-testamental literature’. Besides Moses, Elijah, andEnoch, Segal mentions Levi, Baruch, Phineas, Ezra, Adam, Zepha-niah, and Isaiah.5

Abraham too, according to Jewish lore, had a vision, compared byDahl to that of Isaiah. This legend is based mainly upon Gen. 15: 7–21, where Abraham after concluding what came to be called ‘thecovenant between the pieces’ falls into a deep and troubled sleep inwhich he hears from God of his own future and that of his descend-ants. Later tradition inserts into this sleep a vision of heaven and hell,of the time to come and the end of the world (e.g. 4 Ezra 3: 14, ‘to himonly didst thou reveal the end of the times, secretly by night’).6 TheFourth Gospel, Dahl believes, takes this to have been a vision of what

2 A few commentators, notably Bultmann, dispute the allusion, on the grounds thatdoh is translated in the LXX not by �æØ� but by �º��. Others (e.g. Brown, Lindars)simply assume it. In view of the explicit contrast between the law on the one hand andgrace and truth on the other, some allusion seems likely.

3 Quotations of Dahl concerning Moses are from ‘Johannine Church’, 129–30.4 See above, pp. 251–9. Borgen (‘Some Jewish Exegetical Traditions’) gives a full

discussion. One scholar who does bring John 3: 13 into play is Warren Carter, in astimulating article that usefully supplements Meeks’s ‘Man from Heaven’. Carterpoints out that the social exclusiveness of the Johannine community has a positiveside too: ‘Only this community has become ‘‘children of God’’ (1. 12), only ‘‘we’’—incontrast to those who did not know Him—beheld his ‘‘glory’’ (1. 14). Rejected andsocially alienated, yes; but a negative identity, no. Only in this community is God’srevelation, presence and wisdom to be discovered’ (‘The Prologue’, 49–50).

5 ‘Heavenly Ascent’, 1354.6 See Stone, Fourth Ezra, 71, with a full commentary on the whole legend.

300 Genesis

Jesus calls ‘my day’: ‘your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to seemy day; he saw it and was glad’ (8: 56). ‘The Jews,’ he concludes,‘who were not glad, but tried to kill Jesus, thereby proved that theywere not Abraham’s children but the devil was their father (8: 41–7).Claiming that the Father is their God, they do not know him (8: 55).’7

7 ‘Johannine Church’, 131.

Excursus VII: Isaiah and Abraham 301

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PART II

REVELATION

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Introduction

In Part I (‘Genesis’) we have been searching for an answer to Bult-mann’s first great puzzle or riddle: what is the place of the FourthGospel in the history or development of Christian thought? We haveseen that to answer this question it is necessary to devote someattention to contemporary Jewish thought, for it is here that theorigins of the Gospel are to be found. This first puzzle, althoughincapable of solution without careful consideration of the Gospel’smajor themes, is primarily historical: it requires us to survey thebackground of the Johannine group and to take some cognizance ofsectarian movements within the larger Jewish community.

In the remaining chapters (‘Revelation’) we shall be concentratingprimarily upon the answer to Bultmann’s second great puzzle. This isnot historical but exegetical: what is the Gospel’s dominating motif orGrundkonzeption? The solution to this puzzle, unequivocally andquite straightforwardly, is revelation. The modalities of this answerare no doubt both intricate and profound, and to appreciate themfully we must bear in mind the source of the evangelist’s main ideas.The object of our enquiry has shifted, formally speaking, from historyto exegesis, in so far as we are now asking what is the meaning of theGospel rather than how it is to be explained. The two questions,though distinguishable, are not entirely separable: it will be neces-sary to return from time to time to the problem of origins.

One must also retain some awareness of the fact, as I believe it tobe, that the Gospel did not emerge fully formed into the world likeAthene from the head of Zeus: it grew, it had a history. In whatfollows I shall be primarily concerned with the Gospel in the formthat it has come down to us. Although, for example, the Prologuewas composed before being taken over and adapted to form theopening of the Gospel, I shall not hesitate to use it in here to illustratethe evangelist’s theology of revelation. Similarly, although inclinedto accept Lindars’s suggestion that chapter 11 belongs to the secondedition of the Gospel and not to the first, I hold it to be the work of

John and fully representative of his thinking. Chapters 15–17 too aresurely the work of the evangelist. The only major exception is chap-ter 21: like most commentators I think of this as an appendix, notwritten by the evangelist and not added by him to the body of theGospel. Broadly speaking, then, an exegete is entitled to take the textin its entirety. Certain caveats, however, are in order. There is novirtue in the kind of pure and unsullied approach sponsored long agoby the so-called New Critics and subsequently by the Postmodernists,too high-minded to look outside and behind the text for alternativesources of illumination. In the first place, we cannot exclude a priorithe possibility that some passages may not be entirely intelligiblewithout a knowledge of their history: from time to time it may benecessary to supplement the broad synchronic approach favoured bymany exegetes with rigorous diachronic analysis.

Secondly, the message of the Gospel is conditioned by the environ-ment in which it was composed. It reflects, that is to say, the circum-stances of the people for whom it was written and of the Johannineprophet who wrote it. As we shall see in Chapter 10, the particularfocus upon an uncompromising dualism which makes the FourthGospel so different from the other three is best accounted for by thebitterness and fear with which the members of the Johannine groupregarded their Jewish neighbours. This means that the directiontaken by the evangelist’s thought was determined by his experienceand that of his community.

306 Revelation

7

INTIMATIONS OF APOCALYPTIC

introduction

The word ‘apocalyptic’ is derived directly from the title of the lastbook of the Christian Bible:1 the Greek word for revelation isI�ŒºıłØ�, and the Book of Revelation is still referred to in someChristian circles as The Apocalypse. Now since the overriding themeof the Fourth Gospel is, put very succinctly, the revelation of God inJesus and the way in which it was and should be received, we mightconclude directly that a study of Jewish apocalyptic is likely tofurnish a useful starting-point. That such a study is helpful andindeed illuminating will be the main contention of this chapter. Butit is not straightforwardly so. According to tradition the Book ofRevelation shares a common author with the Fourth Gospel: theapostle John. But in language, form, style, and content the twoworks are utterly different. Furthermore, whereas each of the otherthree Gospels contains a so-called apocalyptic discourse spokenby Jesus towards the end of his ministry (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke21: 5–36), there is nothing remotely resembling such a discourse inJohn. The Fourth Gospel has only a few traces of the expectation ofan early parousia that is regarded by many as the characteristicallyChristian form of eschatological hope.

It comes as no surprise, then, to find that in his well-known essay‘The Beginnings of Christian Theology’, in which he put forward thecontroversial thesis that apocalyptic was the mother of all Christiantheology, Ernst Kasemann alludes only in passing to the FourthGospel. Nevertheless the links are many, various, and important. Ifthey have been neglected in the past, this is because New Testament

1 See Morton Smith, <—ˇ˚`¸�—- and `—ˇ˚`¸�/�)’. Smith warns that‘pseudepigraphical apocalypses of the last centuries b.c. and the first a.d. which arecommonly listed as evidence of the ‘‘apocalyptic movement’’ owe their apocalyptictitles either to patristic references, or to late mss, or to modern scholars—and none ofthese sources is reliable’ (19).

scholars have been interested in apocalyptic mainly on account ofthe futuristic eschatology it often contains. Kasemann himself, chal-lenged by Gerhard Ebeling to define what he meant by ‘apocalyptic’,stated quite bluntly: ‘It emerges from the context that almostthroughout I speak of primitive Christian apocalyptic to denote theexpectation of an imminent Parousia.’2 The source of the confusionis not hard to spot. In ordinary speech ‘apocalyptic’ generally refersto bizarre or paranormal phenomena, heralding some dreadful cata-clysm or associated with the kind of nightmarish imagery frequentlyfound in apocalyptic literature. Modern scholarship has objected tothe confusion mostly because genuine apocalyptic writing containsmuch more than eschatology.3

The business of defining the genre of apocalyptic is enormouslycomplex.4 Here I want to expand upon a brief comment I made in theIntroduction concerning the definition of apocalyptic given by JohnJ. Collins in his book on The Apocalyptic Imagination. ‘An apocalypse’,he writes,

is defined as a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, inwhich a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a humanrecipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofaras it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involvesanother supernatural world.5

Although there is no better definition than this available, it is open toseveral objections.

2 ‘On the Subject’, 109 n. 1.3 On this see especially Christopher Rowland, Open Heaven, 23 ff.4 Klaus Koch entitled a preliminary survey of the question Ratlos vor dem Apoka-

lyptik (Gutersloh, 1970), a title that evokes the image of someone staring at the wholescene with an expression of baffled bemusement. A few years later James Barr usedKoch’s work as a starting-point in another, briefer survey: ‘Jewish Apocalyptic’. Barr,who favours a kind of Wittgensteinian, family-resemblance approach to the problem,commented that ‘the situation is not substantially more difficult than with otherdefinitions of genres and literary forms’ (19). His optimism appears to have beenmisplaced, for a few years later (1979) a group of scholars meeting in Uppsala to discussthe general question of ‘apocalypticism’ were clearly preoccupied, and understandablyso, with stalking this ungainly but elusive beast and tethering it down for closerinspection. The big book that ensued in 1983 (Apocalypticism, ed. D. Hellholm) certainlyadvances the discussion but also evinces a fair measure of disagreement among thedozen or so contributors who were concerned with specifically Jewish apocalyptic. Thebeast is still at large, and variously described. Michael Knibb’s survey article, ‘Prophecyand the Emergence of the Jewish Apocalypses’, is especially helpful.

5 Apocalyptic Imagination, 4.

308 Revelation

First, eschatology, though it figures frequently enough, is not aconstant or a necessary feature of apocalyptic writing.6

Second, prophets too were regarded in early times as messengersfrom heaven, and their revelations frequently concerned what Col-lins calls ‘eschatological salvation’. Anyone anxious to protect therather wavy line separating prophecy and apocalyptic7 must estab-lish some kind of ‘exclusion zone’.

Third, nothing is said about the milieu of apocalyptic writing. Thisis certainly a difficulty, because we know so little of the social andpolitical circumstances in which Jewish apocalyptic arose. What wedo know almost always has to be inferred from the writings them-selves. The problem is complicated by the fact that some apocalypses,e.g. I Enoch and Jubilees, are clearly sectarian works, whereas others,such as 2 Baruch and of course Daniel, seem to be quite in accordwith the religious establishment of the day. We cannot thereforesimply label them ‘sectarian’ or ‘conventicle’ writings and leave thematter there. The Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 92–105) and 2 Enoch pointto social rather than religious unrest. Yet some specific reference isrequired if our definition is not to remain uncomfortably loose.Otherwise it would be as if we had to make do with a generaldescription of tragedy that included no reference to the wide differ-ences between Greek, Shakespearian, and French classical tragedy.

As it stands, then, the definition is too broad: it would includeworks such as book 6 of the Aeneid (as Collins himself admits),Dante’s Commedia, and even, provided ‘eschatological’ is taken ina broad Bultmannian sense, the Fourth Gospel! Why is it that,although the Fourth Gospel fits Collins’s definition so snugly, it isobviously not an apocalypse? One answer might be in terms of theshift from the futuristic eschatological hope that is such a notablefeature of much apocalyptic writing to the characteristically Johan-nine understanding of eternal life. By insisting on this difference wewould be able to maintain that the Fourth Gospel did not fit Collins’sdefinition after all. But this is not a totally satisfactory answer. Wemight also wish to say something about the nature of the imageryemployed, with its crazy, inconsequential, dream-like logic (a feature

6 On this point see the concluding remarks of M. E. Stone’s important study of ‘Listsof Revealed Things’, 439–44.

7 Some may prefer to follow John Barton in blurring the lines. See Oracles of God,9–10, 199–201.

Intimations of Apocalyptic 309

of apocalyptic which Collins, despite the title of his book, virtuallyignores). By this means we should be able to exclude Vergil andDante, as well as John, from the definition. (Though by the sametoken it might be necessary to retain William Blake, most of whoseProphetic Books have a genuinely apocalyptic ring and must havebeen influenced by Jewish apocalyptic.)

Fourth, any complete definition must include some reference tothe mode of apocalyptic revelations: they are invariably bestowedeither in a vision or a dream (which then has to be interpreted) orelse in a state of ecstasy or rapture—using both these words in thesense in which they are employed in Christian mystical writing. InJohn 3: 13, as we saw in the chapter on the Son of Man, there is avestige of an old belief that heavenly secrets were imparted to Jesusafter he had ascended into heaven in the manner of an apocalypticvisionary. But the prevailing view of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel isthat he himself was the other-worldly visitant, sent to reveal thetruth to mankind.

In place of Collins’s definition, therefore, I propose the following:

An apocalypse is a narrative, composed in circumstances of political, reli-gious, or social unrest, in the course of which an angelic being disclosesheavenly mysteries, otherwise hidden, to a human seer, either indirectly, byinterpreting a dream or vision, or directly, in which case the seer may believethat he has been transported to heaven in order to receive a special revela-tion.

Although according to this revised definition the Fourth Gospel isdecidedly not an apocalypse, it too is a narrative within whichheavenly mysteries are revealed by a messenger sent from heaven.My purpose in this chapter is to map out as best I can the resem-blances as well as the differences. I shall be arguing that the FourthGospel is profoundly indebted to apocalyptic in all sorts of ways; andI wish to single out four features for closer study. Put schematically,two of these are temporal: two ages (mystery) and two stages (dreamor vision); the other two are spatial: insiders/outsiders (riddle) andabove/below (correspondence). This grouping is neither hard norfast; on the contrary, the four features overlap in a way that occa-sionally confounds analysis. The two stages sometimes merge intotwo ages and the dream or the vision may function as a riddle. Myintention in drawing up these categories is to facilitate understand-ing: they are not to be regarded either as a model or blueprint or as

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an armature around which an ideal apocalypse may be constructed.I begin by taking a closer look at a motif which the Fourth Gospelshares with all apocalyptic. We shall see later that the concept ofmystery is at the heart of the Gospel genre.

1. mystery: the two ages

Some of the documents belonging to the Qumran Library (andtherefore read, presumably, by at least some members of the com-munity) are full-fledged apocalypses. Four of these have been knownsince the beginning of the nineteenth century, gathered together,along with one other that was not found at Qumran, and knowncollectively as 1 Enoch.8 An important theme common to these andalso to the writings of the sect itself is that of mystery: the word gt,also used extensively in the Book of Daniel, occurs dozens of times inthe Scrolls, nor is its use confined to any one particular kind ofwriting: it is found in the Community Rule, the War Scroll, theThanksgiving Hymns, the Habakkuk pesher, 4QInstruction, andother smaller fragments as well. The idea of a mystery, a secretonce hidden and now revealed, is the essence of apocalyptic. It ishere rather than in eschatology that the true affinity of Christianitywith apocalyptic is to be sought, for the Christian revelation resem-bles the revelations communicated to apocalyptic visionaries in hav-ing been previously concealed and being divulged now for the firsttime. This is what I mean by two ages: the age of concealment andthe age of disclosure.

This important idea is nowhere more clearly expressed than in theconcluding doxology to Romans:

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and thepreaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery whichwas kept secret for long ages (ŒÆ�a I�ŒºıłØ �ı���æ�ı �æ� Ø� ÆNø �Ø�

���ت��� ı) but has been disclosed and through the prophetic writingsmade known to all nations, according to the command of the eternalGod, to bring about the obedience of faith (�Æ �æøŁ� �� �b F �Ø ��

ªæÆ�H �æ���ØŒH ŒÆ�� K�Ø�ƪc �F ÆNø �ı Ł�F . . . �N� � �Æ �a �Ł �

ª øæØ�Ł� ��). (Rom. 16: 25–6; cf 1 Cor. 2: 6–9; Col. 1: 26; Eph. 3: 4–5, 9)

8 Or Ethiopic Enoch, to distinguish it from 2 (Slavonic) and 3 (Hebrew) Enoch. Theextensive fragments of these four ‘books’, all in Aramaic, have been assembled andedited by J. T. Milik: The Books of Enoch.

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Since knowledge of the mystery is transmitted through the writingsof the prophets—the scriptures—it must have been somehow con-tained in these beforehand.

Precisely the same idea is found at Qumran, in a passage from theHabakkuk pesher elucidating an instruction to the prophet to tran-scribe one of his visions (Hab. 2: 2):

and God told Habakkuk to write down that which would happen to the finalgeneration, but he did not make known to him when time would come to anend. And as for what he said, That he who reads may read it speedily, inter-preted, this concerns the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God madeknown all the mysteries (zjgt) of the words of his servants the prophets.(1QpHab 7:1–5; cf. CD 1: 11–13; 1QH 9: 24)

The author of the thanksgiving hymns (presumably the Teacher ofRighteousness) in saying of himself explicitly that he has been made‘a discerning interpreter of marvelous mysteries’ (alq jgtb epd ylz)on behalf of ‘the elect of righteousness’ (1QH10: 3), makes it plainthat his insight into the old prophecy is one which even its author,acting as little more than a scribe, did not share.9 And it is not justHabakkuk, but the whole prophetic corpus whose mysteries arerevealed, or so the passage appears to imply, for the first time.

This concept originated in apocalyptic. It stands in stark contrastto what may be called the ‘establishment’ view of the prophets.According to this they fully understood their own message. BenSira, for instance, says of Isaiah that he ‘revealed what was tooccur to the end of time and the hidden things (�a I��Œæı�Æ) beforethey came to pass’ (Sir. 48: 25). One way in which apocalyptic makesa case for a very different view is by use of the ingenious device ofpseudonymity. It has this device in common with many other writ-ings of the Second Temple period (e.g. the Wisdom of Solomon, theBook of Baruch, the Prayer of Manasseh). In every case it serves togive the writing in question authority and credibility, but a numberof the most important apocalypses also use it to emphasize the timethat has elapsed between the composition of the work and therecognition of its significance. The prophet or seer was the recipientof certain revelations, but these, it is stressed, were primarily in-tended for people living in another age, still a long way off at thetime that the revelations were first given.

9 See too 1QS 8: 11–12, where it is said of the Interpreter (utfde) that he is not toconceal any of the things hidden from Israel that have been discovered by him.

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What is probably the oldest of these, 1 Enoch, opens awkwardly,shifting from the third person to the first in the same sentence:

Enoch, a righteous man whose eyes were opened by God, who had the visionof the Holy Ones and of heaven, which he showed me. From the words of thewatchers and holy ones I heard everything; and as I heard everything fromthem, I also understood what I saw. Not for this generation do I expound, butconcerning one that is distant I speak. (1 Enoch 1: 2)

This passage could well have inspired the Teacher of Righteousnessto make his own bold claims about the true meaning of Habakkukand Nahum.

Similar is the explanation of the vision of the ram and the goatgiven to Daniel by the angel Gabriel: ‘The vision of the evenings andthe mornings which has been told is true; but seal up the vision, forit pertains to many days hence’ (Dan. 8: 26; cf. 8: 17; 12: 4; 4 Ezra12: 37–8; 14: 5–6, 45 ff.; 2 Enoch 33: 9–10; 35: 3). Towards the end of thebook Daniel is given his valedictory: ‘Go your way, Daniel, forthe words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end . . . Noneof the wicked shall understand; but those who are wise shallunderstand.’ (This introduces a further distinction, which we shallcome to in due course.) The understanding of the wise, however, isnot in Daniel’s own present: it must bide its time, that is now, ‘thetime of the end’, when the seal of the book has been broken (12: 4)and the wise are perusing its contents.

4 Ezra, drawing upon the same tradition some two centuries later,towards the end of the first century ad, takes it a step further. Thisseer is informed that Moses had been instructed to divulge only apart of what had been revealed to him: ‘These words you shallpublish openly and these you shall keep secret’; Ezra is told to gathera number of trained scribes and spend forty days dictating hisrevelations. This done, God orders him: ‘Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthyread them; but keep the seventy that were written last in order togive them to the wise among your people. For in them is the spring ofunderstanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge’(4 Ezra 14: 45–7). The twenty-four books are what we now know asthe Hebrew canon: the rest are apocryphal writings, reserved forthe wise.10

10 See J. Barton, Oracles, 64–5.

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For a final example we may turn to 2 (i.e. Slavonic) Enoch, whichexhibits essentially the same pattern. In the short recension (B)Enoch is told that the last generation of all will be from his ownstock: ‘Then in the course of that generation the books you and yourfathers have written will be revealed, for the guardians of the earthwill show them to men of faith, and they will be explained to thatgeneration and come to be more highly thought of afterwards thanthey were before’ (11: 34).11

The resemblance between the apocalyptic passages on the onehand and Romans and 1QpHab on the other conceals an importantdifference: in the latter two passages ‘the prophets’ are what we nowthink of as the canonical prophets. There is no new revelation, andthe task of the Teacher of Righteousness, like that of the Christianpreacher, is simply to interpret a mystery whose meaning has hith-erto been kept secret. Enoch, on the other hand, was the recipient of aseries of visions quite different in content from most of what is foundin the canonical prophets. He offers, in other words, an alternativerevelation.12 Notwithstanding this difference, it is evident that theidea of the two ages and of the distinction between the hiddenmystery and its subsequent disclosure to a later generation wasderived from what was basically an apocalyptic convention.

Applied to ancient, revered, and authoritative texts—scriptures—this constitutes an immensely powerful hermeneutical tool, capableof extracting strange new meanings whilst pretending that thesewere lying there dormant in the first place, only waiting for theright touch before emerging, like Sleeping Beauty, to take theirproper place in God’s great design. The apocalyptic trick of pseudo-nymity, another strong hermeneutical tool, is in this respect lessimpressive. No doubt the pesher technique, as we may call it (theword simply means interpretation) resembles midrash—the con-sciously tendentious rereading of biblical texts that had been widelypractised in Israel from very early times (certainly no later than theBook of Deuteronomy, which is largely a rehash of selected passagesfrom Exodus and Numbers). But it distinguishes itself from midrash

11 Thus A. Pennington in Sparks’s collection; the translation in Charles (35: 2–3)differs in important respects. According to the longer recension (A), the founder of therace has the task of revealing the books to his descendants; but see 47: 1–3 (only in A),where Enoch instructs his own children to ‘take these books of your father’s hand-writing and read them’.

12 See I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic, 23–8.

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by insisting that the whole meaning of the ancient text has beenunavailable until now. Deuteronomy lies comfortably alongside Exo-dus and Numbers: although it commands, somewhat brazenly (forthe author flouts his own prescription throughout) that ‘You shallnot add to the word which I command you, nor take from it’ (4: 2);denouncing in advance the numerous midrashim for which it woulditself serve as scripture, it contains no mysteries that are hidden fromits present readers. On the contrary: ‘The secret things (LXX: �a

Œæı��) belong to the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed(�a �Æ �æ) belong to us and to our children for ever’ (29: 29).13

It is important to grasp the virtually limitless potential ofthe pesher method of interpretation; formally speaking it was thisinnocent-looking device that allowed the Old Testament to besupplanted by the New. Before they could take their place in thecanon these modern writings had to present themselves, not asdeliberate usurpers, but simply as authoritative readings of whatwere still regarded as ƃ ªæÆ�Æ�—the scriptures. Of course this wasnot the only condition: Christianity is not just a new set of sacredtexts. Moreover there seems little likelihood that the Qumrancommunity, employing the same exegetical techniques, would havetransformed itself, like Christianity, from a new sect to a newreligion. Nevertheless the New Testament may legitimately beregarded, provided that we do not see it only in this way, as onegigantic pesher. Certainly this is how the Romans doxology cited atthe start of this section appears to function: the Christian gospel is notregarded here as the fulfilment of a prophecy but as the revelation ofa mystery.

Far from being the only New Testament writer to appropriate theessentially apocalyptic concept of the two ages of revelation, John iscompletely typical. Where he differs from all the others except Markis in how he applies it. This is something that we shall have toexamine more closely in the next chapter.

2. visions and dreams: the two stages

And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that issealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, ‘Read this,’ he says,

13 For the polemical strain in the deuteronomical writings, see Margaret Barker,Older Testament, 142–60.

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‘I cannot, for it is sealed.’ And when they give the book to one who cannotread, saying, ‘Read this,’ he says, ‘I cannot read.’ (Isa. 29: 11–12)

Up to nowwe have been looking at the common apocalyptic theme ofa gap between the composition of a writing and what we may call itspublication. That is what the first half of this quotation is about; asealed book is a closed book: no one can read it until it is opened. Theilliterate person, for whom even an open book is effectively closed,always stands in need of an interpreter. The convention according towhich a revelation comes in two stages, one shadowy and obscure,requiring elucidation, the other plain and straightforward, availableto all, is not confined to apocalyptic, unlike the convention of the twoages of revelation, which is. The twomay overlap, but they should notbe confused. Daniel and Ezra, in the passages quoted in the precedingsection, assume that ‘the wise’, those who eventually inherit thebooks written down by the two seers centuries earlier, will be quitecapable of reading them for themselves. The same holds for Enoch:

Would that they would write all my words in truth (in their names), andneither remove nor alter these words, but write in truth all that I testify tothem. And again I know a second mystery, that to the righteous and piousand wise my books will be given . . . and they will believe in them and in themall the righteous will rejoice and be glad, to learn from them all the paths oftruth. (1 Enoch 104: 11–13)

In Romans 16: 25–6, the Gentiles, perhaps a trifle optimistically, arepictured as reading the scriptures and discovering the message ofsalvation for themselves. But this was not always the case, and thefirst Gentile convert we know about, the Ethiopian eunuch, requiredan interpreter (cf. Acts 8). 1 Peter, in a passage closely resembling theone in Romans, says this:

The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched andenquired about this salvation; they enquired what person or time wasindicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferingsof Christ and the subsequent glory. It was revealed (I��ŒÆº��Ł�) to them thatthey were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have nowbeen explained to you (L F I �ªª�º� �E ) by those who preached the goodnews to you through the Holy Spirit, things into which angels long to look.(1 Pet. 1: 10–12)

According to this passage the prophets themselves were grantedsome inner enlightenment concerning the meaning of their message,but in what looks like a deliberate repudiation of the angelic element

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in the tradition Peter envisages the angels peering into the Christianmysteries in some frustration: the role assigned in apocalyptic litera-ture to the angelus interpres is now assigned to the preachers of thegospel (ƒ �Pƪª�ºØ��� Ø �A�).

The origin of the idea of a revelation requiring subsequent eluci-dation is the dream. Not all dreams require interpretation. In the OldTestament those that do are generally experienced by non-Israelites:the dreamer awakes troubled, because no one can interpret hisdream.14 The role played by Joseph at the court of Pharaoh vis-a-vis the butler and the baker (Gen. 40) and Pharaoh himself (Gen. 41)is subsequently assumed by Daniel at the court of Nebuchadnezzar—and so passes into apocalyptic.15 Like Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar istroubled, and he summons his own people to interpret his dream.The scene is reminiscent of another episode at the court of Pharaoh,the one in which Moses confutes and confuses Pharaoh’s magicians(Exod. 7), proving himself to be superior in the magical arts of whichthey are the acknowledged experts, because, as they eventuallyconcede, ‘the finger of God is here’ (Exod. 8: 19). When the magiciansprove incompetent, the king sends for Daniel, who promptly asks foran appointment, ‘that he might show to the king the interpretation’(2: 16). Very soon, ‘the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision ofthe night’ (2: 19), i.e. another dream. The fact that a dream (which ofits nature requires an immediate interpretation) can so readily bethought of as a mystery (which does not) shows how difficult it is topreserve an absolute distinction between the two ages and the twostages. The Aramaic word for ‘mystery’ is gt, that for ‘interpretation’is atuq; the Hebrew word tuq used at Qumran is borrowed from this.Both of these words are repeated frequently in the course of thischapter: small mysteries and small interpretations, but with largeconsequences. In the Greek recension of Theodotion,16 what corres-ponds to the RSV’s clumsy rendering, ‘show the interpretation’,is the expression �c ��ªŒæØ�Ø I ƪª�ºº�Ø (Dan. 2: 4, 9, 16, 24).

14 See M. Ottoson, s.v. zflh, ThDOT iv. 430.15 The book of Daniel appears to fall into two halves, the first half (chs. 1–6) being

concerned with dreams, very much in the wisdom manner familiar from the Josephstories in Genesis, the second with visions. But as Peter Coxon has pointed out to me, adetailed examination of the Greek terms for dreams and visions in Theodotion and theLXX indicates considerable overlap in both sections of the book; e.g. Dan. 1: 17, K ��fi �›æ��Ø ŒÆd K ı� �Ø� (Th); K �Æ �d . . . ›æ�Æ�Ø ŒÆd K ı� �Ø� (LXX); similarly Dan. 5: 2(4). Naturally both dreams and visions require interpretation.

16 For the date of Theodotion’s recension of Daniel see Ch. 5, p. 360 n. 60.

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I. de la Potterie has argued that in apocalyptic literature and else-where (especially Second Isaiah) the word I ƪª�ºº�Ø (which wehave just encountered in 1 Peter) has the technical sense of ‘explain’or ‘expound’.17 In the first half of Daniel (2: 2, 4, 7, 9 (bis), 11, 16, 24,25, 26, 27) the interpreter is Daniel himself, ‘showing the interpret-ation’ of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams; in the second half Daniel’s ownvisions require elucidation, either by Gabriel (9: 23) or by someunnamed angelic being (10: 21; 11: 2). Since no angelic intermediaryappears in the first half of the book, this may not be called apocalypticwriting in the strict sense; but the wisdom stories merge easily intoapocalyptic in the second half, the transition being assisted by theuse of the Aramaic language through to chapter 7.

De la Potterie is not slow to point out that ‘reveal’ or ‘unveil’(devoiler) is precisely the meaning of I ƪª�ºº�Ø in John 16: 13:‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all thetruth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whateverhe hears he will speak, and he will explain to you (I ƪª�º�E �E )the things that are to come.’ This observation is of profound signifi-cance, for in indicating that the Paraclete takes over the apocalypticrole of the angelus interpres, it proves at the same time the extentof John’s debt to a tradition to which he has seemed to mostcommentators (Odeberg is an honourable exception) either indiffer-ent or hostile. In the next chapter I shall have more to say about thefunction of the Paraclete within the Gospel genre.

3. riddle: insiders and outsiders

The distinction between the wise and the foolish is ingrained,obviously and necessarily, in the wisdom tradition. It lies not farbelow the surface in the contrast between the exceptionally gifted

17 Verite, 445–9. He also points to 2 Bar.; Hermas, Vis. 2. 1. 3; 3. 3. 1 as standing inthe same tradition. In addition, he thinks that I ƪª�ººH should be read instead of thebetter-attested I�ƪª�ººH in John 16: 25. Even if he is wrong about this, his main pointstands. It receives striking confirmation from a passage in 4 Ezra which recounts howthe angel Uriel poses three riddles (similitudines¼ �ÆæÆ�ºÆ�) to the seer: ‘Three paths Ihave been sent to show you and three riddles to set you: if you can explain one of theseto me (si mihi renunciaveris unam ex his) I in turn will show you the way you long tosee . . . ’ (4: 3–4). Here the unexpected Latin verb renunciare is certainly a literal andrather mindless rendering of I ƪª�ºº�Ø . This is the verb used in Adolf Hilgenfeld’sGreek retroversion: Messias Judaeorum (Leipzig, 1869).

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young Daniel and the sorcerers at the court of Nebuchadnezzar. Itslots smoothly into place in any invective against ‘the wicked’, whoare naturally thought of as foolish, just as ‘the good’ or ‘the just’ areusually assumed to be wise. Furthermore, when any sect, that is tosay any ‘cognitive minority’, sets about articulating its conviction ofsuperiority it is likely to do so by expressing contempt for the stupid-ity of the rest of mankind. There is more than a hint of this tendency,as we have seen, in the Fourth Gospel, especially in the systematicuse of the riddling saying or expression. It comes as no surprise todiscover that it is a common theme in apocalyptic literature also.Presumably this will have absorbed the distinction quite unreflect-ingly as part of the legacy of the wisdom tradition. The followingexample comes from 2 Enoch at the point where the patriarch isgiving his final instructions to his family:

Take these books, the books written by your father’s hand, and read them,and learn from them the Lord’s works . . . And pass these books on to yourchildren, and [see that your] children [pass them on] to their children, and[to] all your kind and all your generations, to those who have wisdom andfear the Lord; and they will receive them and take more delight in them thanin any choice food, and they will read [them] and hold fast to them. But thefoolish and those who do not know the Lord will not receive [them], butwill repudiate [them], for their yoke will weigh them down. (RecensionA: 13: 49–55)18

Humanity is divided into two classes, the wise and the foolish, andtrue understanding is reserved for the former. No extra act of inter-pretation appears to be required. There is no essential differencebetween the generation of Enoch’s own children and all subsequentgenerations (cf. 13: 71, 76; Jub. 45: 16).

The same distinction—between the wise and the foolish—mayalso be used to supplement an earlier, very different distinction—that between the two ages of revelation. One could easily conceive ofa final revelation open to all, and that is what we do find when themotif is appropriated by Christianity in the Book of Revelation and inthe doxology from Romans quoted earlier. In the Jewish apocalypses,however, the division between wise and foolish is commonly reaf-firmed when the hidden writings are eventually opened or unsealed.Here is a passage from 4 Ezra, which comes after the seer hasrequested and received the interpretation of the eagle vision:

18 Sparks, Apocryphal Old Testament, 347.

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This is the dream that you saw, and this is its interpretation (interpretatio).And you alone were worthy to learn this secret (secretum) of the Most High.Therefore write all these things that you have seen in a book, and put it ina hidden place; and you shall teach them to the wise among your people,whose hearts you know are able to comprehend and keep these secrets.(12: 35–8)

In Dan. 12: 9–10 (quoted above, p. 313) the word for ‘the wise’ iscognate with a verb meaning to instruct (ljkue) and in its participialform indicates the leaders of the sect.

Corresponding to the distinction between the wise and the foolishin wisdom and apocalyptic is the distinction between insiders andoutsiders which we find associated with the parable theme in Mark4: 11–12:

To you [i.e. ‘those who were about him with the twelve’] has been giventhe mystery (�e �ı���æØ ) of the kingdom of God, but for those outside theentire universe [i.e. the whole of reality: �a � �Æ]19 comes in riddles(K �ÆæÆ�ºÆE�);20 so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and mayindeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again and be forgiven.

Priscilla Patten has argued that there is a significant similaritybetween the understanding of parables in Mark and in apocalyptic:‘most important, for both, parables are enigmatic and need an inter-pretation to convey the extended meaning to the select group. Theteaching and event could be said to be the revelation, but without theinspired word of interpretation from the divine speaker the signifi-cance of the revelation remained obscure.’21

Patten fails to observe that the same is true of other passages in theOld Testament. Having ‘propounded his parable’, Ezekiel is thenrequired by God ‘to explain it’ (Ezek. 17: 2, 11; cf. 24: 3, 6). Neverthe-less it is reasonable to suppose that the riddling quality of certainmesalım did have some influence on apocalyptic writing. It is hard tobe sure, though, whether Mark deliberately incorporated this ideainto his general theology of the Messianic Secret, as William Wredethought he did.22 No doubt some of the sayings referred to by Mark

19 For the justification of this rendering of �a � �Æ see I. de la Potterie, Verite,162–3.; Ashton, ‘Transformation’, 184 n. 37.

20 That this is how K �ÆæÆ�ºÆE� must be translated is widely recognized. Cf.V. Taylor, Gospel according to St. Mark, 256; J. Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (London,1963), 16.

21 ‘Form and Function’.22 This is disputed by H. Raisanen, ‘Messianic Secret’.

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as �ÆæÆ�ºÆ� are figurative expressions requiring elucidation (e.g.3: 23–7; 7: 14–17). But the elucidation here follows immediately and isnot reserved for a post-Easter understanding. Here, as we shall see, itis John who, by establishing a gap between riddling teaching(�ÆæØ�ØÆ�)23 and interpretation, shows himself to be the true heirof the apocalyptic tradition.

Whether or not Wrede was right about the parable theory inMark, he was certainly right to underline its importance for John.He suggests that a memory (the historical fact that part of Jesus’preaching was delivered in parables) was reinforced by a tradition(that of the incomprehension of the disciples), and that these twostrands were woven together to form the conception of the riddlingdiscourse (Ratselreden) that for John was a characteristic feature of allJesus’ earthly sayings. But the resemblance between John and Markat this point is far from obvious and a number of difficulties arise:

1. Only one of Jesus’ sayings is actually called a �ÆæØ��Æ (theJohannine equivalent of the Synoptic �ÆæÆ�º�) in the FourthGospel, the one that concerns the Good Shepherd (10: 6). Thismay be extended to cover the image of the door to the sheepfold inthe same context, but apart from these the only other comparablepassage is the allegory of the vine (15: 1–10). So if �ÆæØ��Æ means‘allegory’, as it appears to do in 10: 6,24 it can scarcely be said to betypical of Jesus’ habitual manner of speaking in this Gospel.

2. Why is the idea that Jesus spoke in riddles so important for John,given that in his Gospel Jesus openly proclaims his true identityand thus appears to empty the Messianic Secret of all its mystery?

3. The relevant passage in Mark (4: 11–12, quoted above) suggeststhat the disciples have been given a clear view of the secretbut that for outsiders it is shrouded in riddling obscurity. So inMark the contrast is between two groups, respectively insidersand outsiders; in John, on the other hand (16: 25), the riddlingdiscourse (�ÆæØ��ÆØ) is addressed to the disciples.

It is best to tackle these difficulties in order.First, the evangelist outlines his theory of riddling speech in a

passage at the end of chapter 16. This represents a later reflection

23 The Suda glosses the word �ÆæØ��Æ by º�ª� I��Œæı��; in Prov. 25: 1 �ÆæØ��ÆØare called I�ØŒæØ�Ø (hard to decipher).

24 But the matter is complex: see my discussion in ‘The Shepherd’, 119–20.

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upon the fundamental difference between two stages of revelation,one partial and obscure, taking place during Jesus’ lifetime, the otherfull and clear, taking place after his death. We have already notedthat this second stage of revelation is assigned to ‘the Spirit of truth’,who will ‘take what is mine and explain it to you’ (16: 14). Appliedto the figure of the Shepherd in a saying addressed to a wideraudience, the term �ÆæØ��Æ does indeed have the same meaning as�ÆæÆ�º� in the Synoptic Gospels: both words are employed in theLXX to translate theHebrewlW

˝m

˝; and the evangelists themselvesmight

not have been impressed by Julicher’s careful distinction betweenparable and allegory. Further research may turn up other hiddenparables in the Fourth Gospel, such as the one discovered by Dodd inchapter 5 (the son in his father’s workshop)25 and many of Jesus’ ownproverbial sayings have just as good a right to be called �ÆæÆ�ºÆ� asthe challenge hurled at him in the synagogue at Nazareth, ‘Physician,heal thyself!’ (Luke 4: 23). It might even be argued that the Johanninemiracles (called ‘signs’) are enacted parables; and Wrede pointsout that some of Jesus’ actions, such as the entry into Jerusalem(12: 16) and the foot-washing (13: 7), are greetedwith incomprehensionby the disciples: ‘These actionsmean something, and consequently theyare on a par with Jesus’ words: they too are teaching’;26 Wrede ison the right track here, but by and large it would be a mistake to cullthe pages of the Gospel for examples of �ÆæØ��ÆØ.27 For this evangelist,as Wrede himself remarks, ‘Jesus would speak K �ÆæØ��ÆØ� even ifnothing of the sort existed.’28 Riddling discourse is one facet ofa carefully worked-out theory of the manner of Jesus’ revelation.

Second, the difficulty concerning the absence of any real MessianicSecret in John may be urged more strongly still. In 16: 25 Jesuspromises the disciples that ‘the hour is coming when I will no longerspeak to you in riddling discourse, but tell you plainly (�Æææ���fi ÆI�ƪª�ºH) of the Father’. But this contrast between K �ÆæØ��ÆØ�

and �Æææ���fi Æ (openly, frankly) appears to contradict what Jesus

25 C. H. Dodd, ‘A Hidden Parable’.26 Messiasgeheimnis, 206; cf. Messianic Secret, 207.27 As Lucien Cerfaux does when he suggests that �ÆæØ��Æ for John signifies ‘an

enigmatic expression, first misunderstood and then explained (la formule enigmatique, lameprise et l’explication de la formule)’, in other words: a riddle. In point of fact there areonly two passages (2: 21 and 12: 16) in which John actually explains his riddles, andneither of them figures in Cerfaux’s list: see Receuil Lucien Cerfaux, ii (Gembloux, 1954),17–26.

28 Messianic Secret, 206.

322 Revelation

says elsewhere. Perhaps the simple announcement that ‘Lazarus isdead’ (11: 14), resolving the riddle of ‘Lazarus has fallen asleep’ (11: 11)is scarcely a counter-example, but what of the occasion when some ofthe people of Jerusalem express their confidence that he is speaking tothem �Æææ���fi Æ (7: 26)? This confidence does not last: ‘If you are theMessiah’, cry the exasperated Jews at the feast of the Dedication, ‘tellus plainly’; whereupon Jesus replies, ‘I told you, and you do notbelieve’ (10: 24–5). His clearest and most conclusive statement, how-ever, comes at his interrogation by the high priest after his arrest. Thequestioning focuses on two points only, his disciples and his teaching.Jesus’ response is unequivocal: ‘I have spoken openly to the world;I have always taught in the synagogues and in the temple, where allJews come together; I have said nothing secretly (K Œæı��fiH)’ (18: 20).

There are so many examples in the Gospel of what looks likestraight talking or ‘open speech’ on Jesus’ part that we may well bepuzzled by the disciples’ reaction to what Jesus tells them in 16: 28:‘I come from the Father’, he says, ‘and have come into the world;again I am leaving the world and going to the Father.’ At last, thedisciples conclude, ‘You are speaking plainly and not in riddlingdiscourse’ (16: 29). Yet Jesus has said the same sort of thing manytimes before, once in fact earlier in the same discourse (16: 5).Evidently �Æææ���fi Æ, like �ÆæØ��ÆØ, has a technical meaning here: italludes to the second stage of revelation, which must await Jesus’final departure: ‘I have many other things to tell you, but you are notyet able to take them in (P �� Æ�Ł� �Æ����Ø ¼æ�Ø)’ (16: 12). ‘Only forthe eye of faith’, comments Bultmann, ‘does the veil of �ÆæØ��Æ fallaway’,29 summing up confidently the intentions of the evangelist,some of whose most profound reflections upon the nature of theGospel genre are contained in this passage (16: 12–33); but it has nobearing on the distinction between outsiders and insiders that was ofsuch importance in the first half of the Gospel. What distinction thereis between outsiders and insiders in John does not belong to what hesays about �ÆæØ��ÆØ: these have a different function, quite close tothe one that has to be ascribed to the term �ÆæÆ�ºÆ� in Mark 4: 13,namely a riddling discourse that requires to be interpreted later.Taken in this way, Jesus’ reply makes much more sense as an answerto the disciples’ question in v. 10: ‘Those who were about him withthe twelve asked him concerning the parables. . . . And he said to

29 Bultmann, p. 588.

Intimations of Apocalyptic 323

them, ‘‘Do you not understand this parable [i.e. the Sower]? Howthen will you understand all the parables?’’ ’

Third, what are we to make of Wrede’s suggestion that John hasadopted and adapted the tradition that Jesus spoke in parables? Thetrue origin of the distinction between insiders and outsiders is Mark4: 11, where Jesus is said, quite literally, to speak K �ÆæÆ�ºÆE� to‘those outside’. But where does this saying come from? It is clearlyirreconcilable with the presumably authentic tradition which hasJesus employing parables to proclaim the message of the kingdom,a tradition which roughly corresponds to the ordinary English mean-ing of ‘parable’ as a story with a lesson attached. Taylor, commentingon v. 11, thinks it likely that ‘4: 10–12 is a separate unit of traditionwhich has been inserted in this context’,30 but he does not speculateon its origin. H. Raisanen31 suggests that Mark may have taken thesaying from a Christian community completely estranged from itsneighbour (i.e. a ghetto). If he is right the riddling discourse will haveserved its regular function of setting apart those ‘in the know’ fromoutsiders excluded from any participation in the truth. If such acommunity existed, its experience must have closely resembled thatof the Johannine group in its dealings with the synagogue—and if inaddition the fourth evangelist knew it or of it, then of course he couldhave been influenced by it. But in that case we should expect him tohave picked up the same word rather than inventing one of his own.

Although, to conclude, the distinction between the wise and thefoolish is implicit in John’s all-important contrast between believersand unbelievers, it is not one for which he is obviously indebted toapocalyptic. There are several possible explanations, not mutuallyexclusive, of the Johannine riddle: form-critical, traditio-historical,sociological, theological, literary. The most that can be said is thathis use of riddling discourse is perfectly consonant with any moregeneral theory that the Fourth Gospel was profoundly influenced bythe apocalyptic tradition and shows strong affinities with it.

4. correspondence: above and below

The last feature of apocalyptic writing I wish to consider closelyresembles certain ideas of writers like Jakob Boehme and Emanuel

30 Gospel according to St. Mark, 256.31 Das ‘Messiasgeheimnis’ im Markusevangelium, 54.

324 Revelation

Swedenborg, whom it may have indirectly influenced via the JewishKabbalah. I call this feature ‘correspondence’, with a consciousallusion to the latter’s Treatise concerning Heaven and Hell:

the whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world in general, butalso in every particular. Therefore, whatever in the natural world comes intoexistence from the spiritual world is said to be in correspondence with it. Itmust be known that the natural world comes into existence and continues inexistence from the spiritual world, precisely like an effect from its effectingcause.32

Just such a correspondence may well have been one of the mean-ings of the Hebrew lW

˝m

˝, as is suggested in an illuminating article by

D. W. Suter on the so-called Parables or Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch37–71). Enoch’s own title is ‘Vision of Wisdom’ (ra’ya t

˙ebab), but

towards the end an alternative title appears to be offered by thecompiler, the seer’s great-grandson: ‘my great-grandfather Enochgave me the explanation [v.l. teaching] of all the secrets in a bookand the parables which had been given to him; and he put themtogether for me in the words of the Book of the Parables’ (68: 1). AsSuter says, ‘The introductory formulas in 37: 5; 38: 1; 45: 1; 57: 3; 58: 1;and 69: 29 suggest that the three sections of the work (chaps. 38–44,45–57, and 58–69) are, in some way, three mesalım and thereforereinforce this designation.’33 The fact that he is relying upon anEthiopic translation is neither here nor there; plainly the originalwas either Hebrew lum or Aramaic lim. Suter prefers the alternativename, ‘Similitudes’, because he thinks it conveys more accuratelythan ‘Parables’ the sense of the Ethiopic mesale used to designate thissection of the book in 68: 1. Closer still, as we shall see, is my ownsuggestion of ‘correspondence’. This has the additional advantage ofbeing equally well suited to the Book of Proverbs (zjlum) which aremostly correspondences on a reduced scale, and also the parables ofJesus (‘the kingdom of heaven is like . . . ’). One might add that theGreek �ÆæÆ�º�, the usual translation of lum in the LXX, comescloser than ‘similitude’ to conveying the meaning favoured bySuter, since it often retains its literal sense of ‘juxtaposition’ besidesthat of ‘comparison’ or ‘analogy’.

32 De Caelo et ejus Mirabilibus, et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis (London, 1758, § 89; ETLondon, 1968, 44).

33 ‘Masal in the Similitudes of Enoch’, 193.

Intimations of Apocalyptic 325

Each of the three main correspondences consists of one or moreprophecies concerning the fate of the wicked and/or the righteous atthe end of time, plus a vision or series of visions which Enoch asks theaccompanying angel to explain; e.g. ‘I asked the angel of peace whowent with me and showed me everything which is secret: ‘‘Who arethese four figures whom I have seen and whose words I have heardand written down?’’ ’ (40: 18; cf. 43: 3; 46: 2; 52: 3; 53: 4; 54: 4; 56: 2;60: 9; 61: 2). Somewhere in the third correspondence the explanationsbegin to be given unasked. For this author, apparently, a correspond-ence somehow encloses its earthly counterpart: in reply to one of theseer’s questions (‘What are these?’) the angel replies: ‘Their corres-pondence [Knibb: likeness] has the Lord of Spirits shown you’, andthen goes on to explain: ‘these are the names of the righteous’ (43: 4).One of the central features of an apocalypse is here—the interpret-ation of a vision or dream by a heavenly intermediary when the seerhimself cannot understand it. If he can speak of what follows, as hedoes in his introduction, as ray’a t

˙ebab, a ‘vision of wisdom’, it is only

by hindsight, with the whole of what follows in mind.Suter argues that the reason the three component discourses of the

book can be called ‘Similitudes’ is ‘because of the complex set ofcomparisons and likenesses that they contain—comparisons andlikenesses that reflect topics traditionally associated with themasal’.34 An important clue comes in 43: 4, where the Ethiopic meslis used to speak of the likeness of things above existing on the earth. HereBlack translates: ‘has shown you a parable pertaining to them (lit.:their parable)’ where Knibb has ‘their likeness has the Lord of Spiritsshown to you’. Suter cites a passage from The Ascension of Isaiah toillustrate how the Enochian Parables (which from now on, to under-line my point, I shall call ‘Correspondences’) establish connectionsbetween levels of reality: ‘As it is above, so is it also on the earth, for thelikeness [Ethiopic ’amsal] of that which is on the firmament is also onthe earth’ (7: 10). Perhaps J.M. T. Barton’s translationmakes the pointevenmore clearly: ‘As it is on high, so also is it on earth: what happensin the vault of heaven happens similarly here on earth.’35 The burdenof Suter’s argument is that the Book of the Correspondences

plays with the implications of spatial dualism (the relationship betweenthe heavenly and earthly orders) in order to solve the problems raised by

34 ‘Masal in the Similitudes of Enoch’, 211.35 Sparks, Apocryphal Old Testament, 797.

326 Revelation

the presence of disorder in society (ethical dualism) and that this pattern ofreasoning is in part derived from yet another polarity present in the wisdomtradition—a polarity between man (or society) and nature.36

The term ‘dualism’, borrowed from J. G. Gammie,37 is unfortunate.The thrust of the argument goes to prove that the persistent ethicaldualism between the good and the wicked is not matched by acorresponding dualism between heaven and earth. On the contrary,this opposition is asserted only to be denied (transcended or aufgeho-ben in the Hegelian sense of the term). A verse in one of the Odes ofSolomon puts it even more succinctly: ‘The likeness of that which isbelow is that which is above.’38 For Enoch, and for apocalypticwriters generally, there are not two worlds but one; or rather thewhole of reality is split into matching pairs (rather like the biologicaltheory of DNA) in which one half, the lower, is the mirror-image(albeit in this case a distorting mirror) of the higher. That is why arevelation of what is above is not just relevant or related to whathappens or is about to happen on earth; rather what happens onearth is a re-enactment in earthly terms of what has happened inheaven: a correspondence!

The complexity of reference of the term masal is such that Suter’sthesis cannot be said to have been proved. It is at best only probable.But that scarcely matters. His exceptionally perceptive article high-lights a central feature of apocalyptic thinking, one that our defin-ition of apocalyptic failed to bring out—the fundamental unity andstructural parallelism of the heavenly and the earthly realms.

No one has perceived this truth—and its relevance to the under-standing of the Fourth Gospel—more clearly, or expressed it moreeloquently, than J. L. Martyn. (It should be observed that in thefollowing passage Martyn’s two stages, unlike mine, are not tem-poral but spatial: he is concerned with correspondences.)

36 ‘Masal in the Similitudes of Enoch’, 203 n. 39. This is the weakest part of Suter’sargument. There is no obvious link between the ethical dualism prominent in muchapocalyptic writing and the correspondences I have been discussing. These are notconfined to apocalyptic; a clear example occurs in what may be the earliest example ofHebrew poetry that we have, the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5: 19–20): ‘The kings came,they fought; j then fought the kings of Canaan, j at Taanach, by the waters of Megiddo; jthey got no spoils of silver. j From heaven fought the stars, j from their courses theyfought against Sisera.’ The conflict on earth evidently mirrors that in heaven, but thereis no dualism here. Similar correspondences are found in other literatures of the AncientNear East.

37 ‘Spatial and Ethical Dualism’.38 Od. Sol. 34: 4 (Charlesworth—to be preferred here to Emerton (in Sparks)).

Intimations of Apocalyptic 327

John did not create the literary form of the two-level drama. It was at homein the thought-world of Jewish apocalypticism. The dicta most basic to theapocalyptic thinker are these: God created both heaven and earth. There aredramas taking place both on the heavenly stage and on the earthly stage. Yetthese dramas are not really two, but rather one drama. For there arecorresponding pairs of actors; a beast of a certain description in heavenrepresents a tyrannical king on earth, etc. Furthermore, the developmentsin the drama on its heavenly stage determine the developments on theearthly stage. One might say that events on the heavenly stage not onlycorrespond to events on the earthly stage, but also slightly precede them intime, leading them into existence, so to speak. What transpires on theheavenly stage is often called ‘things to come’. For that reason events seenon the earthly stage are entirely enigmatic to the man who sees only theearthly stage. Stereoptic vision is necessary, and it is precisely stereopticvision which causes a man to write an apocalypse.39

Part of this passage has already been quoted in the chapter vis-a-visthe Son of Man. It is clear that this mysterious figure, who hasstepped out of the Book of Daniel (and conceivably also out of theBook of Enoch) to take his place on the lower of Martyn’s two stages,is particularly well fitted to transport a heavenly revelation to man-kind. Descending to earth, he carries heaven with him. Like Jacob’sladder, he can reach up to heaven as well as down to earth and is themost powerful symbol in the Gospel of the apocalyptic correspond-ence between the two realms. When he returns, exalted ( łøŁ���),to heaven—this is surely John’s most remarkable conceit—he isstretched out on the cross.

In his book Martyn recognizes that both of John’s two dramas, thestory of Jesus’ life and the projection of this into the experience of thecommunity, are enacted on earth. There is no divine plan firstdisclosed to a seer in a vision and then repeated in earthly terms.The divine plan itself—the Logos—is incarnate: fully embodied in theperson of Jesus. It is his life that reveals God’s grand design of savingthe world, a design now being realized, lived out, by the community.During Jesus’ lifetime, as we shall see in the next chapter, thesignificance of his words and deeds remains opaque: they assumethe character of a mystery, one whose meaning cannot be graspeduntil the dawn of a new age, when, in a second stage, it will at lastreceive its authoritative interpretation. Thus the fourth evangelist

39 History1, 127.

328 Revelation

conceives his own work as an apocalypse—in reverse, upside down,inside out.

conclusion

The secret of the dynamism of apocalyptic, what makes it so muchmore than a literary convention, is the urgent conviction of God’sactive intervention in human history. The heavenly blueprint of hisplan for the world will eventually, in his own good time, be revealed,but not communicated in any ordinary way. The seer or prophetwho carries it down from the world above is an active agent and hisrevelation of what he is the first to know helps to accomplish thisgreat design.

Here, I believe, is the reason why the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel,though delivering the substance of his message orally (‘the words ofeternal life’), also speaks of his ‘works’—what the evangelist calls‘signs’—and, most significantly, in two key passages, of accomplish-ing (��º�ØF ) his ‘work’ (�æª ), a comprehensive term that coversthe whole task of revelation entrusted to him by his Father.40 In thefirst passage he speaks of his work as ‘doing the will of him who sentme’ (4: 34); in the second this is seen as equivalent to glorifying Godon earth (17: 4). Jesus’ task, then, is not just to talk about God but toestablish his glory. The concept of God’s glory (dFbk

˙˝) comes from the

Old Testament theophanies, which were manifestations of God’spower and authority to individual human beings and followed inevery case by an event of exceptional significance.

In the concluding chapter we shall see that the divine Logos withwhom Jesus is identified on the first page of the Gospel is more thanjust a Word. Jesus, as the fourth evangelist sees him, is the plan ofGod, his grand project for humanity (the world) made flesh and hisglory made manifest. This is the very essence of apocalyptic.

40 Cf. 5: 36: �a ªaæ �æªÆ L ���øŒ� �Ø › �Æ�cæ ¥ Æ ��º�Ø��ø ÆP�. It is arguablethat the plural form �æªÆ has the force of the singular in this passage. See A. Vanhoye,‘L’Œuvre du Christ’.

Intimations of Apocalyptic 329

8

THE GOSPEL GENRE

1. the messianic secret

Few works have had such a profound and long-lasting impact uponGospel studies as William Wrede’s Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evan-gelien, published in 1901. It has been mauled and modified in scores ofways, but Wrede’s central insight has stood firm. This was therecognition of an ineradicable tension (Wrede would say contradic-tion) between the presentation of Jesus as Messiah and Lord in theaccount of his words and deeds before the resurrection and thepersistent awareness that his real identity remained hidden untilafter his earthly life was over. The details of Wrede’s argument,largely based on the Gospel of Mark, need not concern us here.1

The key to Mark’s own understanding of his Gospel, according toWrede, is the injunction of Jesus to Peter, James, and John on theirdescent from the mountain of the transfiguration ‘to tell no one whatthey had seen until the Son of man should have risen from the dead.So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what the risingfrom the dead meant’ (9: 9–10; cf. 8: 30).2

Wrede himself thought that Mark had taken the idea of the mes-sianic secret from his sources but failed to carry it through consist-ently. Underlying his Gospel, nevertheless, is the picture of theincomprehension of Jesus’ followers, an incomprehension that per-sisted until the resurrection, ‘when the scales fell from their eyes’.Then and only then do all Jesus’ revelations begin to make sense:‘What was once unintelligible now becomes known and the know-ledge is and has to be spread abroad. Thus in spite of their blindnessthe disciples have had from Jesus all the equipment they need if they

1 Wrede did not, however, confine his study to Mark but recognized a profoundaffinity betweenMark and John. This is discussed by JamesM. Robinson in two articles:‘On the Gattung of Mark (and John)’; ‘Gnosticism and the New Testament’. I amindebted to these for some of the ideas in this section.

2 Messianic Secret, 67.

are to become his witnesses and apostles. Their status rests uponwhat they have received from him and preserved as tradition.’3

Wrede also held that the earliest traditions about Jesus were simplememories with no particular christological content: the secrecytheory was a way of giving them a Christian meaning withoutaltogether distorting them. But as presented in the Gospels thereports of Jesus’ words and actions are more than snippets of abiography strung together in some sort of chronological order.Every episode, every saying and story, is intended to be heard orread in the light of the resurrection. Mark’s contribution was togather together a mass of dissimilar material, some of which mayhave been put together in sizeable units before him, and to give itsome measure of shape and consistency.4 To establish the continuitybetween the time of the early Christian community and the life ofJesus that preceded it he had to provide his readers with a guiding-thread. He found what he needed in the secrecy theory.

Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly, with no clear indication apart fromthe mute testimony of its own existence how the news of the resur-rection would be either promulgated or received. But Mark does notdisguise his own faith. The Risen Jesus does not appear; the briefglimpse that we are allowed is tantalizingly indirect. Even so it isenough to illuminate all that has gone before. Those who argue thatthe resurrection alone is insufficient to account for faith in Jesus’messiahship have a good case. But the recognition that it neverthe-less marked a turning-point in the way Jesus was regarded by hisfollowers—that is to say, a change of status—is not confined to theGospels. It belongs among the most ancient of Christian beliefs. Lukedraws upon one of these for Peter’s Pentecost speech in Acts: ‘Let allthe house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made himboth Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified’ (Acts 2: 36).Paul too starts his letter to the Romans by quoting a much olderChristian creed which speaks of Jesus as ‘designated (›æØ�Ł���) Son ofGod in power according to the Holy Spirit (ŒÆ�a � �F�Æ ±ªØø�� ��)by his resurrection from the dead’ (Rom. 1: 4; cf. Phil. 2: 9–11).

These texts, all of them cited by Wrede, mark the transitionbetween the human earthly Jesus and the divine heavenly Christ;

3 Ibid. 112.4 Cf. H. Conzelmann, ‘Present and Future’. Although I have some disagreements

with Conzelmann, I owe a lot to this article.

The Gospel Genre 331

they testify to a discontinuity that no amount of theological jugglingcan entirely set aside. Yet at the same time they assert continuity:Jesus is Lord. The paradox of a discontinuity (strongly stressed byBultmann) plus a continuity (underlined by Bultmann’s critics) be-tween the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ is at the heart ofthe Gospels; indeed it is the essence of the genre. A Gospel is anarrative of the public career of Jesus, his passion and death, toldin order to affirm or confirm the faith of Christian believers in theRisen Lord:5 ‘If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord andbelieve in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will besaved’ (Rom. 10: 9). ‘Jesus is Lord’ is the simplest Christian creed aswell as one of the earliest. The earliest is probably the one affirmed byPeter in the Gospel of Mark (8: 29) and by Martha in the Gospel ofJohn (11: 27): ‘You are the Messiah.’6 The Gospels put both these intostory form.

This identity-in-difference is shared by both creed and Gospel.Studies of the gospel genre that confine themselves to observing itsresemblances to contemporary biographies or quasi-biographies7

miss the essence of the matter, the one thing necessary. Whetheror not the first readers of the Gospel of Mark recognized that theywere confronted by a new and unprecedented literary genre8 is of noimportance. A gospel is not a theological treatise, certainly, but it is

5 Norman Perrin, concluding his observations on ‘The Literary Gattung ‘‘Gospel’’ ’,4–7, remarks that ‘a ‘‘gospel’’ is, among other things, a narrative of an event from thepast in which the interests and concerns of the past, present and future have flowedtogether’ (7). There is some truth in this, but Perrin is much too vague. What he saysholds for Vergil’s Aeneid just as much as it does for Mark’s Gospel. One has to be muchmore specific not only about the subject of the narrative, but also about the temporalrelationships involved. Perrin’s student, John R. Donahue, gets it just right: ‘TheGospels are the good news of the risen one told in the form of stories about the earthlylife of Jesus’ (‘Recent Studies’, 498).

6 See V. H. Neufeld, Earliest Christian Confessions.7 See my comments on the vexed question of the uniqueness of the Gospels in the

Introduction, pp. 24–7; and for an interesting discussion of attempts to define theGospel genre cf. R. Guelich, ‘Gospel Genre’. Guelich distinguishes two categories ofanswer: ‘analogical’ and ‘derivative’. My own view is closest to the writers of theformer category who believe that the most fruitful approach is to compare the Gospelswith apocalypses (rather than with, say, biographies, aretalogies, encomia, or eventragicomedia).

8 M. Hengel, Studies in Mark, 32–3. Hengel is right to deny that Mark’s Gospel istheology, but disingenuous to suggest that it is consequently better considered as a sortof biography. Aware that the Gospels are proclamations, he should acknowledge thatthis distinguishes them just as sharply from biographies as from theological treatises.See the Introduction, p. 25.

332 Revelation

not a biography either; nor is it, properly speaking, a compromisebetween the two nor yet an amalgam of both; it is sui generis. Lukehas Peter declare that God made Jesus Lord and Christ at the resur-rection, and Paul asserts in Romans that it was then that he wasdesignated Son of God. Put in this way, as an affirmation of a changeof status, the identity-in-difference presents no great problem. Nordoes it in the creed. Only when it is fleshed out in a story does it seemstrangely paradoxical, even though the paradox is implicit in thecreed as well. For on the face of it this story is recounting the eventsof Jesus’ earthly life whilst urging on every page that this same Jesusis the object of Christian worship. He is not yet risen: but he is, so thewriter implies and expects his readers to believe, our Risen Lord.

The post-resurrection recognition scenes in Luke and Johngive the evangelists an opportunity to illustrate the identity-in-difference directly and vividly. Recognition is always slow incoming because the Risen Jesus is not only the same; he is alsodifferent in certain essential respects from the Jesus the disciplesknew before. Paul makes the same point in theological language in1 Corinthians 15. But now the problem is that to place too muchweight upon a post-Easter revelation is to run the risk of detachingthe good news from its traditional origin in the person and messageof Jesus. This is what happened in certain Gnostic circles, which haveproduced stories of the Risen Christ wherein he reveals esotericmysteries and responds to the questions of the disciples in dialogueform. Here, for instance, is the opening of the first book of the PistisSophia (one of the relatively few Gnostic documents already known inWrede’s day):

But it came to pass, after Jesus was risen from the dead, that he spent elevenyears discoursing with his disciples, and taught them only as far as the places(���Ø) of the first commandment and as far as the places of the first mystery(�ı���æØ ).9

Even this comparatively inferior grade of teaching was higher,according to the Gnostic text, than anything that had preceded it

9 Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, i. 252. Wrede quotes a passage from Clementof Alexandria according to which ‘the Lord delivered the ª H�Ø� to James the Just, Peterand John after the resurrection; and these delivered it to the other apostles, and thesein turn to the 70, including Barnabas’. This comes from Eusebius, HE 2. 1. 3–4. TheGospel of Thomas purports to be a record of ‘the secret saying which the living Jesusspoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down’ (1: 1). See C. Schmidt’s edition ofthe so-called Epistula Apostolorum, Gesprache Jesu, also in Hennecke, i. 189–227.

The Gospel Genre 333

during Jesus’ lifetime. The real mysteries, we are left to infer, hadnothing to do with his earthly career.10

The alternative solution, it might seem, is to locate the centralrevelation before the resurrection. The Gnostic gospel exaggerates thediscontinuity, widening the gap between earth and heaven so thatit cannot, even in principle, be bridged. But the opposite course hasits dangers too. No Christian teacher would wish to assert or implythat the resurrection left the basic message of the gospel unaffected.Hence the dilemma: a pre-Easter revelation ignores the most distinct-ive element of Christianity; a post-Easter revelation devalues thegreater part of its traditions—and is well on the way to Gnosticism.

As Wrede saw the matter, the device of the messianic secret wasa way of getting round this dilemma. The continuity between Jesusof Nazareth and the Risen Christ, paradoxical as it is, must bemaintained. One way of doing this, the way adopted by Mark, isthe secrecy theory; and it is the role and function of this theorywithin Mark’s Gospel that justifies Hans Conzelmann’s dictum that‘the secrecy theory is the hermeneutical presupposition of the genre‘‘gospel’’ ’.11

Strictly speaking this is not correct. John, as we have seen, makesonly limited use of the secrecy theory—at least in its Marcan form.He ensures the continuity between Jesus and Lord by operating ontwo levels of understanding. This hermeneutical device, which weshall have reason to examine closely later in this chapter, can bealigned with the secrecy theory only at the price of some strain anddistortion. The close resemblance between John and Mark, superfi-cially so dissimilar, was well spotted by Wrede, and in the course ofhis book he makes some penetrating observations on John as well ason Mark. But he realized that the crucial similarity does not lie in thesecrecy theory as such but in the profound awareness common toboth of the need to establish the identity of Jesus of Nazareth with theRisen Lord.

Reflecting on the gospel genre and comparing it with the apoca-lyptic patterns studied in the previous chapter, one can hardly fail tobe struck by the formal resemblances. Of its very nature the Christiangospel falls into two stages, the first inchoate and opaque, the second

10 An analogous move is made in a totally Jewish setting by the Book of Jubilees. SeeI. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic, 23–5.

11 Conzelmann, ‘Present and Future’, 43.

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clear and unconfined. In the Gospels the two ages of apocalyptic,where the crucial distinction is between the hidden mystery and therevealed truth, coalesce with the two stages, which focus ratherupon the difference between an initial revelation of an essentiallypuzzling character and one in which the puzzle is finally resolved.

2. two levels of understanding

Towards the end of the previous chapter I discussed the spatial aspectof J. L. Martyn’s theory of the two-level drama. Martyn is aware thathis metaphor of two stages has a temporal aspect also and he isprepared to exploit the ambiguity to good effect. Here he is comment-ing upon one of the ways in which John diverges from his apocalypticmodel:

The initial stage is not the scene of ‘things to come’ in heaven. It is the sceneof Jesus’ life and teaching. Its extension into the contemporary level ‘speaksto’ current events not by portraying the immediate future but by narrating astory which, on the face of it, is about the past, a story about Jesus ofNazareth. . . . John’s two stages are past and present, not future and pre-sent.12

One might be tempted to say that John is simply making use of adevice familiar from the Old Testament, whereby past and presentare telescoped into a single vision designed to teach the readerslessons of immediate relevance to their own day.13 But is thisright? And if not, what is the difference? Is not the remarkableliterary device Martyn discerns in the Fourth Gospel very similarto, say, Second Isaiah’s portrayal of the imminent return from Baby-lon as a second exodus? Does not the exilic prophet exhibit a similarskill in holding past and present together in a comparative vision thatshows the past to foreshadow a more prestigious future, a future thatis rapidly approaching? No doubt there is some structural analogyhere; but there is a difference too. John, unlike Second Isaiah, isostensibly writing about the past; the significance of his work forhis readers’ present is not declared, but suggested. One cannot im-agine John exhorting his readers, as the prophet does—howeverequivocally—to ‘remember not the former things, nor consider the

12 History2, 136–7. 13 Cf. D. S. Russell, Method and Message, 135.

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things of old’ (Isa. 43: 18). A more obvious example might be thechronicler’s rereading of the history of the early monarchy in termsthat invite his readers to see the Second Temple and its cult as adirect return to the First, picturing David and Solomon as no lessconcerned with the constitution and administration of the Templethan his own heroes, Ezra and Nehemiah. The differences betweenthe Fourth Gospel and the other three, all recounting what is basic-ally the same story, are perhaps no less striking than the differencesbetween Chronicles and the books of Samuel and Kings, composedcenturies earlier.

Nevertheless, present-day readers of the Fourth Gospel, acceptingthe story at face value and lacking the information that would havemade it easy for John’s contemporaries to pick up the carefully placedallusions, are unlikely to agree without protest to the suggestion thatthe evangelist is deliberately distorting the Jesus-traditions in order tomake them meaningful to the members of his own community—even though they may give notional assent to the general view of theevangelists as creative theologians in their own right. It is scarcelysurprising that it has taken a scholar of Martyn’s perspicacity, draw-ing upon contemporary sociological insights, to see that John wasnot writing a theological treatise for posterity but a work speakingdirectly to the hopes and fears of his own first readers. Yet at the sametime he is writing about the past. He telescopes past and presenttogether by operating upon two levels of understanding.14 Other

14 The alternative model, ‘fusion (Verschmelzung) of horizons’, adopted by TakashiOnuki (Gemeinde) from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s chef-d’œuvre, Wahrheit und Methode(1960) and taken over from him by Jorg Frey (Eschatologie, ii. 247–83), is unsatisfactory.Wahrheit und Methode is an exercise in philosophical hermeneutics, a transcendentalstudy in the Kantian sense: one that enquires into the conditions of the possibility ofhermeneutical understanding. How is it possible, Gadamer asks, either to understandor to interpret an ancient text or tradition, a legal document, say, or a work of art,without deviation and distortion? The interpreter has a horizon of his own, which hecan never shake off and which cannot but affect and determine his understanding ofthe past. At the same time he is genuinely trying to understand: he is not setting out todistort, he is anxious to be faithful to the original document or tradition, whichGadamer conceives as having a horizon of its own. There are accordingly two horizons,which are welded or fused together (that is what verschmelzen means) in the work ofthe historian or interpreter. The result is a third horizon, a fresh perspective thatcannot be identified directly with either of the other two. In trying to penetrate thenature and essence of historical understanding Gadamer is interested in the attempt ofmodern readers to grasp the original meaning of ancient texts and traditions. His point isthat such readers are unable to transport themselves back on a magic carpet into theworld in which these texts were composed and transmitted. They are tethered by aninvisible string to their own ‘horizon’. John the evangelist is doing something very

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scholars before him had made similar observations,15 but none haddrawn quite the same conclusions or developed the idea into a full-scale theory of how the Gospel works. Yet even Martyn left unnoticedone particular passage that furnishes John’s readers with a veryobvious clue to his intentions.

Unknown to Martyn, the temple episode was singled out, sometwenty years earlier, by the French scholar Xavier Leon-Dufour, whosubjected it to a penetrating exegesis.16 In the Synoptic Gospels theepisode immediately precedes the passion narrative and may in fact,as E. P. Sanders has argued,17 have sealed the determination of theJewish authorities to have Jesus silenced once and for all. In theFourth Gospel as we have it it is the raising of Lazarus that provokesthe murderous decision of the chief priests and Pharisees; the templeepisode comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ public career.18 It is thefirst of his confrontations with ‘the Jews’ and the first time that headdresses an audience beyond the immediate circle of his friends anddisciples. One likely reason for the transposition is the need to alertthe readers of the Gospel as early as possible to the way in whichthey have to interpret the subsequent revelations. Jesus’ enigmaticremark to his mother at the wedding-feast is too obscure to be readily

different. He is offering to his readers two ways of understanding his text, one relevantto the time they are living in, the other reaching back to the time of the gospel story. Inorder properly to appreciate his aims, far from fusing or confounding the two levels,one has to hold them apart. To the uninitiated ‘fusion of horizons’ is more likely tosuggest a catastrophic meltdown than a sophisticated hermeneutical device. In anycase it is a singularly unhelpful model, for if the horizons ever came to be fused theresult would not be an enhanced vision but a total blur. Yet in spite of their unfortu-nate choice of metaphor, both Onuki and Frey understand perfectly well what John isabout.

15 See for instance Oscar Cullmann, Early Christian Worship (London, 1953): ‘TheGospel of John indicates in so many places the necessity of a double meaning, thatenquiry into the deeper unexpressed sense is to be raised, in this gospel, to the status ofa principle of interpretation’ (57) and C. H. Dodd’s approving comment in his review ofthis book in J. Eccl. Hist. 3 (1952), 218–21: ‘The events he [the fourth evangelist] recordsmust be apprehended on two levels, as occurrences in the past, and as livingly affectinghis readers in the present. The events are ‘‘remembered’’ in the pregnant sense,and such remembrance is prompted by the Holy Spirit in the Church’ (218); see tooD. W. Wead, Literary Devices.

16 ‘Le Signe du temple’; see too, by the same author, ‘Symbolic Reading’.17 Jesus and Judaism, 61–76.18 It has already been argued (Excursus III) in favour of Lindars’s theory that the

raising of Lazarus did not figure in the first edition and that it displaced the templeepisode in subsequent editions. In any case the story existed before the evangelist gaveit a new twist by reading ‘temple’ in the way I have discussed. See Bultmann, p. 126and nn. 1 and 2.

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understood as a reference to his passion; in his version of the templeepisode the evangelist intervenes directly to suggest that the whole ofJesus’ public career will be lived out under the shadow of the cross:

Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple (�e Æe �F� ), and in threedays I will raise it up (Kª�æH ÆP�� )’ The Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-sixyears to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he spokeof the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, hisdisciples remembered (K� ��Ł��Æ ) that he had said this; and they believedthe scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. (2: 19–22)

Thus the evangelist transforms a prophecy into a riddle. The preciserelationship with the Synoptic versions of the story (cf. also Acts 6:14) is complex, but requires no discussion here; John alone, reflectingno doubt on the phrase ‘three days’, finds an allusion to the passionand resurrection.

In Chapter 2 the function of the riddle was considered from a widerform-critical perspective, and there is no need to repeat what wassaid there. But this particular riddle differs from all others in theGospel in three important respects: (1) it is the only one provided witha key; (2) the distinction it envisages and effects is first of all betweentwo stages of revelation (and therefore two levels of understanding)and only secondarily between insiders and outsiders; (3) it is the onlyriddling saying that the disciples are explicitly stated to have remem-bered after the resurrection.

The central feature of all the riddles, what constitutes them asriddles, is that they have two meanings, the plain and the esoteric.Thus ¼ øŁ� in chapter 3 means both ‘again’ and ‘from above’; theliving water in chapter 4 means both ‘fresh (i.e. spring) water’ and‘revelation’. And so on. The term Æ��, ‘temple’, in chapter 2 mayseem to be an exception, for we are explicitly told by the evangelistthat Jesus was referring to his body, and for the Christian reader thisis clearly the sense that counts. One may compare the understandingof the temple found at Qumran, where the new, eschatologicaltemple is the community itself: ‘And he has commanded that asanctuary of men (zda udsm) be built for him, that they mightoffer before him, like the smoke of incense, the works of the law’(4Q174 1: 6–7). But it must be stressed that Jesus’ identification of thetemple as his body was not available to his first hearers. Durand’sremark that the temple is a standard image of the human body isbeside the point; the desperate suggestion that Jesus was pointing to

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himself as he spoke even more so. (In the introductory story the wordfor ‘temple’, not distinguished in the English translation, is ƒ�æ�

(2: 14).) The term Æ�� here is not a metaphor but a riddle, and itsambiguity is not removed but reinforced when it is made the object ofthe verb Kª��æ�Ø . Naturally the Christian reader will associate thisterm with resurrection, but it is also a perfectly ordinary word to useof the erection of a building.

The importance of this observation lies in the clear distinction itimposes between the first level of meaning, the only one that couldconceivably be picked up by Jesus’ hearers, ‘the Jews’, and the secondlevel, exclusively reserved, as the passage itself implies, for John’sreaders.

Incisively and unobtrusively John is combining here three of theelements of apocalyptic discussed in the preceding chapter. In thefirst place, the distinction between the wise and the foolish appears ina new setting. The evangelist has no need to inform his readers, asthey survey the scene from their privileged vantage-point, of theextent of the gulf that separates them from their own contemporariesin the synagogue. This gulf reaches back to the very beginning ofJesus’ career. Part of the lesson, then, which does not require to bespelt out, is that the incomprehension of ‘the Jews’ in the story isshared by their successors. Secondly, there is the distinction betweenthe two ages, where everything preceding the resurrection of Jesus isrelegated, so to speak, to the first age, that of the mystery undis-closed. Finally, we have the distinction between two stages of reve-lation, where the first, obscure revelation stands in need of aninterpreter. In this instance, as we shall see, the interpreter is theParaclete.

The new insight into the real meaning of Jesus’ words depends, weare told, upon a recollection of ‘the scripture’ (2: 22); this is reminis-cent of the Qumran pesher, where the scriptures are scanned forhidden references to the life of the community and its history. In thisrespect the Qumran sect is closer to traditional ways of thought than,say, 1 Enoch or 4 Ezra, both of whom appeal to revelations above andbeyond the Law and the Prophets. The importance that the scrip-tures hold for the evangelist is confirmed by an aside embedded in theresurrection narrative, where a knowledge of ‘the scripture that hemust rise from the dead’ is seen to be conditional upon the experienceof the resurrection: ‘for as yet they did not know the scripture, thathe must rise from the dead’ (20: 9). This interpretation is confirmed

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by what Jesus says to Peter about the washing of the feet: ‘What I amdoing you do not know now (�f PŒ r�Æ� ¼æ�Ø) but afterwards youwill come to know (ª ��fi �)’ (13: 7).19

In 2: 22 John takes an additional step, one with momentousimplications. For it is not only ‘the scripture’ that the disciples aresaid to have remembered, but also ‘the word which Jesus hadspoken’, which is thus implicitly associated with scripture as a sourceof revelation. For John a single saying of Jesus can have the status ofa verse of scripture (18: 9). Even more startlingly, Jesus himself canbecome the object of midrash (5: 39).

In a later episode towards the end of Jesus’ public career theevangelist once again quotes a prophetic saying whose significanceremained hidden. On the occasion of his final entry into Jerusalem

Jesus found a young ass and sat upon it; as it is written, ‘Fear not, daughter ofZion; behold thy king is coming, sitting on an ass’s colt!’ His disciples did notunderstand (PŒ �ª ø�Æ ) this at first; but when Jesus was glorified, thenthey remembered that this had been written of him and had been done tohim. (12: 14–16)

In this case it is not something that Jesus said but something he didthat had to be remembered in order to give the prophecy its propermeaning. Jesus’ deeds as well as his words remain obscure until afterthe resurrection, when they are recollected by the believing commu-nity.

On the basis of the evangelist’s comment in 2: 22 we are entitled toassume, I think, that all the other riddling sayings where the audi-ence catches the straightforward meaning but misses the esoteric arelikewise intended to be read on two levels. The additional commentin 12: 16 reinforces this assumption and invites us to look for furtherexamples of events in Jesus’ life that acquire their full meaning later.If Martyn fails to use these episodes to buttress his own thesis, this isno doubt because it does not appear to have a special and immediaterelevance to the Johannine community. Even so it is reasonable tosuppose, as Martyn does, that the principle of two levels of under-standing is also to be applied in cases where the esoteric meaning isbetter concealed (at least from a modern reader) and the more

19 In this verse, for once, the classical distinction between �N�� ÆØ (know) andªØ ��Œ�Ø (come to know) is observed. Cf. I. de la Potterie, ‘ˇr�Æ et ªØ ��Œø’. In general,however, de la Potterie makes too much of this distinction. Brown translates ªØ ��Œ�Ø here as ‘understand’. Recognition and understanding are twins.

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obvious reference remains anchored to the story qua story. The ��æ��ÆØ (servants), for instance, who appear in chapters 7 and 9

are straightforwardly the Levitical temple proctors at the beck andcall of the Sanhedrin. Beneath this surface reference, suggests Mar-tyn, they are ‘the beadles of a local court, among whose functionsmay have been that of summoning litigants for trial before a localGerousia’.20 Thus the same word does service for two distinct sets ofpeople, and the shift of meaning involves a dramatic change of time,place, and circumstance. This ingenious suggestion may be hard toverify but it accords well with the declared intentions of the evan-gelist in the passages we have been examining.

How far are we justified in using the asides in 2: 22 and 12: 16 as akey to unlock the secrets of the Gospel as a whole? We have seen thatthe key fits Martyn’s hypothesis, even though he appears not to needit; moreover the dialogues in chapter 3 (Nicodemus) and 4 (theSamaritan woman) as well as the discourse in chapter 6 (the Breadof Life) contain ambiguous expressions that pervade entire episodes.The same fruitful ambiguity is exploited in chapter 11 (Lazarus) andI shall argue in Chapter 11 that it is also applicable to the FarewellDiscourse, in that it can be read as a testament and commissioneither of Jesus himself or of the Johannine prophet. Much of the firsthalf of the Gospel is dominated, as we have seen, by the debate, in themanner of a trial, between Jesus and ‘the Jews’, and there is abun-dant evidence that in speaking of ‘the Jews’ the writer has in mindthe recalcitrant leaders of his own local synagogue as well as thetemple establishment of Jesus’ day. The key turns surprisingly well inthe Gospel wherever we insert it. Future commentators on the Gospelmay well find further applications, large and small.

This technique, it may be observed, is frequently employed both inliterature and in art to draw analogies between the past and thepresent and by bestowing a new significance upon a distant episodeor event to illustrate its relevance to the circumstances of the peopleto whom the work is addressed.

One reason for adopting this procedure may be to evade censor-ship. Verdi, for instance, composing the opera Nabucco, took a leafout of the Book of Daniel by suggesting resemblances between thefate of the Hebrew slaves under Nebuchadnezzar (the eponymousNabucco) and the politically oppressed Italians of his own day, still

20 History and Theology2, 88.

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suffering in 1842 under the yoke of Austria. Sartre, in Les Mouchesand (more questionably) Anouilh in Antigone could get their messageacross during the German occupation of Paris by writing plays thatwere ostensibly concerned, like those of their great seventeenth-century French predecessors, with ancient Greek myths. Closer inspirit than either of these to the Fourth Gospel is Arthur Miller’s TheCrucible, since the witch-hunting of the Massachusetts Puritans ac-tually helped to shape the prejudices and principles of a country thathad recently spawned the equally sinister sanctimoniousness ofMcCarthyism.

The most illuminating comparison, however, comes from the bolduse of historical parallelism in Renaissance art. A painting in one ofthe Raphael Stanze in the Vatican furnishes an excellent example. Itsostensible subject is the meeting of Pope Leo I and Attila at the gatesof Rome, where Saints Peter and Paul, putting in a miraculousappearance at the last possible moment, succeeded in averting acatastrophe from the city. The Pope is given the features of Leo X,who was reigning at the time the fresco was painted (1513). ThusRaphael appears to be pointing to a contemporary event. Whatevent? Surely, suggests Rudolf Wittkower, the victory, that veryyear, of the papal armies over the French at Novara. ‘In expressingone event through the other,’ he remarks, ‘and meaning both, thepainting becomes the symbol of an exalted mystery—the miraculouspower of the Church, which remains the same throughout the ages,whether we are in the year 452 or 1513.’21

21 Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London, 1977), 180. In fact Wittkower waswrong on this point, because in the early sketches of the fresco Leo X appeared with thefeatures of the previous Pope, Julius II, recognizable by his long beard. Cf. L. Pastor,History of the Popes, viii (London, 1908), 282–3. But the point is none the less valid, sinceJulius too clearly wished to identify himself with his great predecessor. Attila himselfwould have appreciated the symbolism: Gibbon recounts how a few months before hewas turned away from the gates of Rome, having just taken possession of the royalpalace of Milan, Attila ‘was surprised and offended at the sight of a picture whichrepresented the Caesars seated on their throne, and the princes of Scythia prostrate attheir feet. The revenge which Attila inflicted on this monument of Roman vanity washarmless and ingenious. He commanded a painter to reverse the figures and theattitudes; and the emperors were delineated on the same canvas approaching in asuppliant posture to empty their bags of tributary gold before the throne of theScythian monarch’ (Decline and Fall, ch. 35 (The Folio Society, iv (London, 1986),233)). This story, which he took from the Suda, reminded Gibbon of the anecdote ofthe painted lion’s retort to the man: ‘Leo respondit, humana hoc pictummanu: videreshominem dejectum, si pingere leones scirent’: you would see the man looking miser-able if lions knew how to paint.

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Had Martyn noticed the evangelist’s careful explanations of thenecessary gap between hearing and seeing on the first level ofunderstanding and full comprehension on the second, he wouldsurely have revised his opinion that John was not ‘analyticallyconscious’ of his own procedure. On the contrary, he gave consider-able thought to the theological implications of the gospel genre. Butfirst I must take up one more important point arising directly out ofthe two passages (2: 19–22; 12: 14–16) that we have been considering.

It was remarked earlier that the temple saying differs from all otherriddles in the Gospel in three respects. The first two I have alreadydiscussed—the fact that it is the only one for which the evangelisthimself furnishes the key and the fact that it is primarily directed toestablishing the principle of the two stages of revelation. It is also theonly riddling saying that the disciples are explicitly said to remember.Now neither here nor in the other allusion in the first half of theGospel to post-Easter remembrance is there any hint that the dis-ciples will only remember when they are reminded. Reminding is oneof the functions, arguably the most important, of the Paraclete.

3. the role of the spirit

The Paraclete occupies such a prominent position in the FarewellDiscourse that with the exception of the saying in 7: 39, which wewill come to in due course, most commentators have ratherneglected the earlier references to the Spirit.22 It has often beenremarked that the Paraclete shares many of Jesus’ functions, espe-cially those associated with his role as revealer; it is less oftenobserved that in the body of the Gospel the Spirit is scarcely evermentioned without some specific association with the word. The onlyexception, 3: 6, is an example of the Spirit’s other great work, cre-ation, or, in this instance, re-creation. A good instance is the closingparagraph of chapter 3: ‘he whom God has sent utters the words of

22 Notable exceptions are Felix Porsch, whose Pneuma und Wort is an importantcontribution to Johannine scholarship and, more recently, Gary M. Burge, The AnointedCommunity. Porsch’s main aim is ‘to clarify the relationship of the statements con-cerning the Spirit-Paraclete in the farewell discourses to the sayings about the Spirit inthe remainder of the Gospel’. Accordingly, his work is intended ‘to answer the questionwhether there are two distinct conceptions (Auffassungen) of the Spirit in the Gospel orwhether there is at bottom essentially one homogeneous concept (eine einheitlicheVorstellung)’ (3). He plumps resoundingly for unity.

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God (�a Þ��Æ�Æ �F Ł�F ºÆº�E) for it is not by measure that he givesthe Spirit (P ªaæ KŒ ���æı ���ø�Ø �e � �F�Æ)’ (3: 34).23 This maynot be the ‘completely unjohannine gloss’ that Bultmann24 takes itto be but rather an illustration of the evangelist’s awareness that ifthe words of God are to be completely effective they must be accom-panied by the gift of the Spirit.

Another example is 6: 63: ‘It is the Spirit that gives life, the fleshis of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are Spirit andlife (�a Þ��Æ�Æ L Kªg º�ºº�ŒÆ �E � �F� K��Ø ŒÆd �ø� K��Ø ).’ Weknow the life-giving Spirit from Paul as one of his terms for Christ(1 Cor. 15: 45). Since for John life is the reward and consequence offaith this verse suggestively combines the twin roles of the Spirit inrevelation and creation.25

Despite the constant association of the Spirit with the proclam-ation of the word, the � �F�Æ is º�ª�. In the Hebrew Bible what isclear, fixed, and determined about God is his word: the spirit, thoughher presence is constantly felt, is never seen and never grasped; likethe sun, she is a source of light but not to be looked at; like the wind,which in Hebrew is the same word as spirit, she is elusive andimpalpable (cf. John 3: 8). There could never be any question of hertaking flesh.

The Word became flesh in time for the evangelist, on his ownaccount, to have seen his glory (1: 14). The Son, not other than theWord, entered the world at a particular time. The words of Jesus havea fixed and irrevocable quality: as they come to us in the Gospel theyare not only spoken but written. In a sense, then, the Gospel islogocentric: it shares in the definiteness and definitiveness of theWord that stands at its head. But the Prologue is not quite thecompendium of Johannine theology it is often taken to be; there isa notable absentee. The presence of the Spirit is required if the

23 The textual variants of this verse are of particular interest. The best-attestedreading is this: n ªaæ I�����غ� › Ł�e� �a Þ��Æ�Æ �F Ł�F ºÆº�E; P ªaæ KŒ ���æı���ø�Ø �e � �F�Æ. The subject of ���ø�Ø is probably God but grammatically it couldalso be ‘he whom God sent’. The first hand of B, the Codex Vaticanus, omits �e � �F�Æ,which could be a slip. Some MSS, however, including the Codex Bezae (D), the mostimportant MS of the Western tradition, insert an extra › Ł��� before ���ø�Ø . This isstrange, because one would have expected the Western tradition to leave open thepossibility that it was Christ who was giving the Spirit.

24 Bultmann, p. 164 n. 1.25 Once again Bultmann (p. 446 n. 3) raises the question whether the words � �F�

K��Ø ŒÆ� may not be an editorial addition.

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message of the Gospel is not to be confined to those who first heard it;for the Spirit has the great asset of being unfettered by limitations oftime and space.

The evangelist is so profoundly aware of the difference between thetwo stages of Jesus’ revelation that for him one salient characteristicof the first stage is the absence, indeed the non-existence, of theSpirit:

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed(�ŒæÆ�� ), ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me, and let him who believes inme drink (K �Ø� �Øłfi A Kæ���Łø �æ�� ��· ŒÆd �Ø ��ø › �Ø����ø �N� K��).26 Asthe scripture has said, ‘‘Out of his belly (ŒØº�Æ) shall flow rivers of livingwater.’’ ’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which those who believed in himwere to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit (h�ø ªaæ q � �F�Æ) becauseJesus was not yet glorified. (7: 37–9)

The next words refer to the crowd’s response to Jesus’ proclamation:it is clear that 7: 39 is one of the evangelist’s interpretative asides.Taken alone, it is puzzling and obscure. Taken in conjunction withthe Paraclete sayings, its meaning is quite plain.

Raymond Brown has shown very clearly how the functions of theParaclete, formally identified as the Holy Spirit (14: 26) and the Spiritof truth (14: 17; 15: 26; cf. 16: 13), are copied from those of Jesushimself.27 When he has departed the Paraclete will teach (�Ø���Ø)and remind ( �� ���Ø) the disciples of all that he has said to them(14: 26). He will also bear witness to Jesus (�Ææ�ıæ���Ø, 15: 26) andguide the disciples into all truth (›��ª���Ø �A� �N� �c Iº�Ł��Æ

�A�Æ ). Finally, he will speak what he hears (‹�Æ IŒ��Ø ºÆº���Ø)and expound the things to come (�a Kæ���� Æ I ƪª�º�E, 16: 13).Specifically, declares Jesus, ‘he will take from what is mine andexpound it to you’ (KŒ �F K�F º��ł��ÆØ ŒÆd I ƪª�º�E �E , 16: 14).

26 I have preferred this to the alternative, equally well-attested punctuation, ‘Ifanyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. As the scripture says . . . ’ (K �Ø� �Øłfi AKæ���Łø �æ�� �� ŒÆd �Ø ��ø· › �Ø����ø �N� K��), because it seems to me marginally morelikely that the source of the living water should be Jesus rather than the believer.Brown, ad loc., discusses the question very fully and also reviews the likely sources ofthe scriptural ‘quotation’. It is conceivable that both meanings are intended here andthat the punctuation question should consequently be left unresolved. Before theadvent of the Spirit it is Jesus alone who is the source of revelation; subsequentlyany believer, sent by him as he was sent by the Father, can be the spring from whichothers may drink the life-giving waters of revelation.

27 Brown, pp. 1141–2.

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In the first version of the Farewell Discourse (ch. 14) the revelatoryrole of the Spirit is already sufficiently characterized as teachingand reminding. In the second version (chs. 15–16) his role is thesame but described differently. The notion of ‘Spirit of truth’ isexpanded slightly: the Paraclete will now lead the disciples in orinto the truth.28 De la Potterie (1977) has shown conclusively thatDodd is wrong to think of Johannine truth as Platonic and thatBultmann is wrong to think of it as quasi-Gnostic. When Jesus tellsthe Jews, ‘the truth will set you free’, and they reply, uncomprehend-ingly and mendaciously, ‘we have never been in bondage to anyone’(8: 32–3), the lie may surprise John’s readers, but not the incompre-hension. Nor would they expect Pilate to grasp the significance ofJesus’ claim that ‘Everyonewho is of the truth hearsmy voice’ (18: 37).John’s use of irony may be less obviously divisive than his use ofriddles, but like all dramatic irony, it only works because the audi-ence, unlike the characters in the play, knows how the story ends.When Pilate asks, ‘What is truth?’ he shows that the irony of whichhe is the butt is a hair’s breadth away from being a riddle. Like theGospel’s other words for revelation, ‘living water’ and ‘bread of life’,‘truth’ too has an esoteric meaning reserved for those ‘in the know’.

‘He will not speak on his own authority (P ºÆº���Ø I�� �Æı�F) butwhatever he hears he will speak’ (16: 13). With these words Jesusestablishes the Paraclete as his own agent, invested with the samequalifications and the same authority that he himself had receivedfrom the Father. He had already promised to send the Paraclete (16: 7);now he reveals the nature of this mission more fully. Just as God,instead of speaking on his own behalf, sends his prophets and even-tually his Son, to speak for him (see Ch. 4), so Jesus, no longer able tospeak for himself, empowers the Paraclete to carry on, or rathercomplete, the task of revelation. ‘He will take what is mine andexpound it to you. All that the Father has is mine; that is why I saidthat he takes what is mine and will expound it to you’ (16: 14–15).The emphatic repetition of the verb I ƪª�ºº�Ø , used in thisconcluding summary in its technical, apocalyptic sense (see Ch. 7),confirms that his role is that of the angelus interpres. He is sent from

28 Even if we could be sure whether to read K or �N� (the MSS disagree) thedistinction between the two prepositions has become blurred in Koine Greek. In eithercase ‘the truth’ is the same, whether it is thought of as a distant country situated on thefar side of what is already known, or as a single region whose riches have yet to be fullyexplored.

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heaven to clarify what could not be fully comprehended withouthim; he completes a revelation that was previously partial andobscure. There is no aspect of John’s extremely elaborate theory ofrevelation for which he is more clearly indebted to the apocalyptictradition than his explanation of the interpretative role of the Para-clete.29 Whatever the origins and etymology of the term ‘Paraclete’(and none of the proposed explanations is totally persuasive), Johnleaves us in no doubt about his role.

One question remains: if the Paraclete has nothing new to reveal,nothing that he has not heard from Jesus, what is meant by sayingthat he will expound what is to come (�a Kæ���� Æ I ƪª�º�E) (16: 13)?Scholars disagree on the answer to this question; some are moreinclined than others to see in �a Kæ���� Æ a reference to eschato-logical truths as yet unrevealed. In the concluding paragraph, speak-ing of what the Paraclete hears or receives from him, Jesus twice usesthe present tense (IŒ��Ø, 16: 13; ºÆ�� �Ø, 16: 15). The role of theangelus interpres is not confined to elucidating dreams and visionsalready communicated to the seer. The example of Uriel in 4 Ezrashows that he can take the initiative in disclosing other mysteriesbesides. Probably those who make the Paraclete a mere mouthpieceof Jesus are being unduly restrictive. Perhaps the principle of twolevels of understanding may be brought in yet again: to the listeningdisciples ‘the things to come’ may mean nothing more than Jesus’approaching passion and resurrection, to be explained to them in duecourse. John’s readers, unless the expression has a more precisereference that is now lost to us, will have seen in it an assurancethat the Paraclete would be at hand to instruct them when necessaryin what they needed to know of a future as yet veiled from them.

After the Farewell Discourse there is no further mention of theSpirit until the scene of Jesus’ death. But the word � �F�Æ has nowacquired such resonance that on being told that Jesus ‘gave up theghost’ (�Ææ��øŒ� �e � �F�Æ, 19: 30), the reader will not stop at theobvious meaning but is sure to see an allusion to the gift of the Spirit.Not only the noun but also the verb (�ÆæÆ�Ø�� ÆØ) is a notable

29 This is not of course the Paraclete’s only role. I have omitted to examine thevarious forensic functions ascribed to him in the fourth of the five Paraclete sayings:16: 7–11. The source of these is probably not apocalyptic, but the Synoptic traditionaccording to which the disciples are promised that when they are arraigned beforegovernors and kings the Holy Spirit will prompt them what to say (Matt. 10: 17–20;Mark 13: 9–11: Luke 12: 11–12; 21: 12–15).

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instance of that fruitful ambiguity which makes it possible for twodifferent meanings (‘give up’ and ‘hand over’) to be conveyed in asingle phrase. In the first half of the Gospel John had used the word łF to suggest that Jesus’ exaltation is conditional upon and con-tained in his death, so that passion and resurrection must be viewedas a single happening. Now the expression �ÆæÆ�Ø�� ÆØ �e � �F�Æ

allows him to fuse Easter and Pentecost as well, hinting that there isno need to think of the latter as a distinct and separate event.

In strict logic John’s theology of the cross makes any resurrectionnarrative superfluous, and in his account of Jesus’ death he hasalready indicated, symbolically, the sending of the Spirit. But theidea of this mission is important to him, and in any case we mustassume that he is working with traditional material. He uses this tomake the further point that the sending of the Spirit is a consciousand deliberate act, one that involves yet another mission, that of thedisciples: ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you. And whenhe had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘‘Receive theHoly Spirit’’ ’ (20: 21–2). Placed here, just before the appearance toThomas, this scene fulfils the promise of the Farewell Discourse, justas the scene of Pentecost, in Acts, fulfils the promise made at the endof Luke’s Gospel.

4. fact and interpretation

Most of what has been said in the preceding two sections is presum-ably uncontentious. Some may find the comparison with the struc-ture of apocalyptic unconvincing; others may be left unpersuaded byMartyn’s version of the two levels of understanding. But the theoryitself is no more than a reformulation of a principle of interpretationestablished by the evangelist himself: until Jesus is glorified hismessage cannot be fully grasped.

A number of questions, however, remain unanswered. How is thetheory itself best understood? Can it bear the weight the evangelistputs upon it? How is it related to the gospel genre as such? What areits theological implications? It is to these questions that I now turn,starting with some reflections upon previous attempts to set thetheory in perspective.

We may begin with Hoskyns, the first commentator to constructhis work upon a carefully considered treatment of the evangelist’s

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own approach. John’s major aim, he argues, was to maintain andinsist upon the unity of history and interpretation. To opt either forhistory on the one hand or for what Hoskyns calls Meaning on theother in reading this Gospel is totally to misconstrue the intentions ofthe evangelist. Accordingly in his own commentary he sets out

to hear and set forth the Meaning which the author of the gospel has himselfheard and seen in the concrete, historical life and death of Jesus of Nazareth,in his separate actions and in His audible words. The purpose of this com-mentary is to barricade the roads which seek to solve the problem either byregarding this Meaning as an idea of the author or as something which itselfbelongs to the mere hearing or sight of an eyewitness, regarded as historian,for in that case his faith would be not merely irrelevant, but actually suspect,since the eyewitness who believed could not be accepted as an impartialwitness. The purpose of this commentary is also to barricade the roads whichlead to a disentangling of history and interpretation. This triple barricadingdoes not, however, originate in some perversity of the author of this com-mentary, but because these barricades have been erected by the originalauthor of the book, and the meaning of his book must remain closed to thosewho tear down the barricades which he has so carefully erected. Did we saythat he had ‘erected’ these barricades? No, we must not say this. He foundthe barricades there already, for he is persuaded that the meaning which hehas heard does veritably lie in the history. Without it the history is mean-ingless. Take away the meaning and we should have merely the record of aneyewitness. Take away the history and we should be left only with a humannotion or idea.30

Accordingly Hoskyns deliberately bars the path to anyone whomight wish to study the Gospel from outside the magic circle inwhich ‘meaning’ and ‘history’ are bound together in an inextricablewhole. Neither the historian asking ‘Did Lazarus rise from the dead?’nor the philosopher asking ‘What is the central idea of the book?’ is tobe admitted to this hallowed spot, which is reserved for initiates—forthose prepared to make the act of faith which, according to John,Jesus himself required: ‘The commentator is therefore continuallybrought back to respect this deep-seated interlocking of history andinterpretation. Separate the two, and the extremity of violence isdone to the text. What Jesus is to the faith of the true Christianbeliever, He was in the flesh: this is the theme of the Fourth Gospel,and it is precisely this unity that constitutes the Problem of the

30 Hoskyns, p. 132.

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Gospel.’31 In suggesting, however, that the problem of the Gospel liesin its ‘steady refusal to come to rest in any solution which conserva-tive or radical scholars have propounded’,32 Hoskyns is really speak-ing of his own problem and his own refusal. In associating theevangelist with his own concern ‘to barricade the roads which leadto a disentangling of history and interpretation’,33 he is obviouslywriting with nineteenth-century scholars in mind. Equally obvi-ously, however, as we have just seen, the evangelist does invite usto read the meaning into the story. But it should be observed that byusing the term ‘history’ Hoskyns implies that the narrative possessesan irreducible factual content quite apart from the interpretationwhich the evangelist puts upon it. At the same time, by refusing todisentangle fact and interpretation, Hoskyns evades the questionthat can be put concerning every single episode in the Gospel: whathistorical residue would be left if the interpretation were, so to speak,steamed off? To Hoskyns this question is illegitimate, for to attempt tointerpret the Gospel otherwise than on its own terms is ‘to destroy it,to make it irrelevant and therefore meaningless’.34

Hoskyns did not live to complete his introduction, and it was hiseditor, F. N. Davey, who supplied the crucial chapter, ‘The FourthGospel and the Problem of the Meaning of History’. Davey pretends toconfront the question, ‘Did Lazarus rise from the dead?’: ‘essentially,’he avers, ‘a right question . . . because the conscious purpose of theFourth Evangelist seems to be to force his readers back upon thehistory—the flesh of Jesus, in which, according to his account,the raising of Lazarus played so vital a part. But for this very reason,’he adds, ‘the answer cannot be either a simple ‘‘Yes’’ or a simple‘‘No’’.’35 Davey, like Hoskyns, is confusing two very different ques-tions. One is the historian’s question: if, as Hoskyns maintains, ‘Johninsists with the whole power of his conviction that what he records iswhat actually and really occurred’,36 was he right to do so? Thehistorian is surely entitled to ask this question, just as he may ask it ofthe infancy narrative that follows immediately upon Luke’s claim torecount his story accurately (IŒæØ�H�, 1: 3). The other question is theexegete’s question: in searching for the meaning of the Gospel, canone separate the story from the interpretation without distortion?These two questions are not necessarily miles apart. If the historian

31 Hoskyns, 35. 32 Ibid. 131. 33 Ibid. 132.34 Ibid. 49. 35 Ibid. 109. 36 Ibid. 119.

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reaches the conclusion that Lazarus did not actually rise from thedead, or even that he is a fictitious personage, fabricated on the basisof a Lucan parable, then one may ask why, when composing aGospel markedly different from the other three, John was so strik-ingly unconcerned (pace Hoskyns) with factual accuracy. Is thereperhaps a sub-text here that should convey to the perspicaciousreader a message that actually contradicts the surface story, namelythat none of this really matters—it is the interpretation that counts,not the history? If Bultmann, who strenuously denied the relevanceof history to faith, had chosen to address the question, he might havecome out with a reply more or less along these lines. In my opinion,however, the very use of the term ‘history’, with all its acquiredconnotations of a reliable factual account, begs the question. Ifinstead we speak of ‘story’, or adopt Martyn’s imperspicuous term‘einmalig’, then we must agree that in the Fourth Gospel story andinterpretation are inseparably locked together.

Would Hoskyns have admitted this substitution? I doubt it. LudwigWittgenstein, speaking of Christianity, declares that it ‘is not basedon a historical truth; rather it offers us a (historical) narrative andsays, now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the beliefappropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe through thickand thin.’37 That is the view of an interested outsider; Bultmannwould agree, but he is not perhaps fully representative of mainstreamChristianity. None the less it is a fair assessment of the thrust of theFourth Gospel, and perhaps of the other three as well. Theologicallyspeaking, one may be justified in allowing the Synoptic Gospels toshoulder the burden of historicity: in that case all that the committedChristian needs to say about the Fourth Gospel is that it is about ahistorical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. What it says of him is not historyin any meaningful sense, but story—story plus interpretation.

Suppose, then, that the historian has given his answer to thequestion whether Lazarus actually rose from the dead, and that theanswer is ‘No’. Does this mean that the Gospel narrative has no truthand no validity? Only if there is no truth in narrative other thanhistorical truth and no validity without historical verifiability. Thestory of the raising of Lazarus sums up, vividly and effectively, thewhole of Jesus’ healing ministry, and at the same time carries itscentral lesson: ‘I have come that they may have life and have it more

37 Culture and Value (Oxford, 1970), 32 e.

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abundantly.’ It is at least arguable that the essential purpose andeffect of Jesus’ ministry is better conveyed by this short narrativethan by any amount of abstract theologizing. Moreover if part of theevangelist’s purpose was to emphasize that Jesus’ offence to theJewish establishment lay as much in his healing as in his teaching,then he was right to place this episode in its present, climacticposition in the Gospel. Why should he be expected to share thescruples and prejudices displayed by the modern reader in whatKeats calls ‘the irritable reaching after fact’?

To many people, no doubt, this defence will seem lame and inad-equate. Ford Madox Ford included in the dedication to his first bookof memoirs, Ancient Lights (1911), the following remark: ‘This book isfull of inaccuracies as to facts but its accuracy as to impressions isabsolute . . . I don’t really deal in facts; I have for facts a most pro-found contempt.’38 To which a later commentator retorted: ‘Thisobviously will not do; an account of actual events must be verified bysuch historical records as we have of those events, and by anyobjective test Ford’s impressions appear as falsehoods.’39 But if Fordwas deliberately dealing in impressions, why should he be required tomeasure up to standards of historical objectivity that he professed todespise? What evidently disturbed the reviewer was a confusion ofgenres: flights of fancy that might be perfectly acceptable in a histor-ical novel are reprehensible in a book of memoirs; this, howeverfallible the author’s memory, should at any rate strive for accuracy.A similar unease is likely to affect modern readers, even in theserelatively sophisticated days, as they try to come to terms with thefourth evangelist’s frequent disregard of the facts, surely more ac-cessible to him than to us, of Jesus’ ministry.

One modern writer who strongly objects to what he regards as thecavalier dismissal by the scholarly establishment of John’s claims toobjectivity is J. A. T. Robinson, whose book The Priority of John (1985)is one of the curiosities of contemporary Johannine studies. Hoskyns,as we have seen, believed that the evangelist deliberately blocked theway to any separation of history and theology; he himself was careful

38 Compare what Proust’s Marcel says about a staircase in Swann’s house: ‘Monamour de la verite etait si grand que je n’aurais pas hesite a leur donner ce renseigne-ment meme si j’avais su qu’il etait faux; car seul il pouvait leur permettre d’avoir pourla dignite de l’escalier des Swann le meme respect que moi’ (A la recherche du tempsperdu (Editions de la Pleiade, 1954), i. 505).

39 TLS (1972), 519.

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to leave the barricade in place: he even reinforced it. Robinson showsless patience and less prudence. He begins by asserting his convictionthat ‘John does not take us further from the history but leads moredeeply into it’.40 This sounds a bit like Hoskyns, but whereas Hos-kyns might use such a remark to justify a refusal to engage indetailed historical probing, Robinson’s long book is largely a defenceof John’s historical accuracy in such matters as his portrayal of thecareer of John the Baptist and his dating of the temple episode.

Those who take the Gospel on its own terms, whatever their viewof its general historicity, will remain unmoved by Robinson’s pon-derous arguments. The test case, for him as for Hoskyns and Davey,must be, ‘Did Lazarus rise from the dead?’ On this point Robinsonexhibits more caution than usual: ‘The tradition that Jesus raised thedead is an inalienable part of the proclamation of the powers of thenew age, and what would call for explanation would be if John didnot, like the Synoptists, present us with the same picture.’41 Leavingaside the obvious but trivial objection that none of the Synoptistssays that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead (why?), the real difficultypersists. Did he? Are we meant to infer from Robinson’s evasiveremark about the tradition that Jesus actually did raise the dead tolife? He does not say so; but nor does he attempt to dispel thesuggestion that the story of Lazarus (whom he certainly regards asa historical personage) is grounded upon factual reminiscences. Butdoes the author of Honest to God really believe that Jesus raised analready rotting corpse to life in the way that John describes? And if hedoes not, then why does he regard the widespread scholarly scepti-cism concerning John’s historical accuracy as ‘an unwarrantedpresumption’?

Early in The Priority of John, Robinson singles out for special praisetwo famous lines from Browning’s A Death in the Desert, taken fromthe ageing apostle’s long address to his disciples as he prepares fordeath:

What first were guessed as points I now knew stars,And named them in the Gospel I have writ.

It must be said that throughout his book Robinson shows moreinterest in the points than in the stars, being apparently blind tothe difficulties, both practical and theoretical, of reconstructing

40 Priority, 33. 41 Ibid. 221.

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points from stars. Besides, as James Dunn pertinently enquires,‘What if John’s Gospel was not intended primarily to serve as a sourceof historical information about Jesus in his ministry on earth? In thatcase an enquiry which sought to vindicate John by demonstrating thehistorical roots of his traditions would in fact be missing the point,John’s point.’42 Certainly there is nothing wrong, pace Hoskyns, insifting through the Gospel in the hope of finding authentic historicaltraditions. Dodd’s second great book on the Gospel (1963) is a morecircumspect essay in this direction. But Dodd realizes, as seeminglyRobinson does not, that this was not the purpose of the evangelisthimself. You can use a table-cloth as a bath-towel, but it won’t do thejob very well because that is not what it is designed for. In short,though well-informed and even, in an idiosyncratic way, quite in-formative, Robinson’s book does nothing to advance the understand-ing of the Gospel.

One may ask, more generally, whether the purpose of anyonerecounting past events is simply to record the facts. The truth isthat any such attempt is doomed to frustration from the outset, forthere are no plain facts lying around like nuggets of gold waiting tobe picked up by keen-eyed prospectors: there is no uninterpretedinterpretable.43 If Leopold von Ranke ever seriously held that theonly function of history was to record what actually happened, thenhe was wrong. No doubt most historians aim to be as impartial aspossible. Tacitus, a contemporary of the fourth evangelist, tried, hetells us, to write sine ira et studio (without rancour or partiality). But itwould be wrong to think of John as a historian of this kind. Certainlyhe wants to preserve a valuable tradition and to keep its source inmind; but his main concern is to offer a new reading, one thattranscends any understanding that was possible in the time ofJesus himself. The same is true of all four evangelists. They are not

42 ‘Let John be John’, 316.43 This image is borrowed from the journalist Claud Cockburn, who expounds as

well as any philosopher the dangers of what he calls ‘the factual heresy’: ‘there are nosuch facts. Or if there are they are meaningless and entirely ineffective; they might aswell not be lying about at all until the prospector—the journalist—puts them intorelation with other facts: presents them, in other words. Then they become as much ofa pattern presented by him as if he were writing a novel. In that sense all stories arewritten backwards—they are supposed to begin with the facts and develop from there,but in reality they begin with a journalist’s point of view, a conception, and it is thepoint of view from which the facts are subsequently organised. Journalistically speak-ing, ‘‘in the beginning is the word’’ ’ (In Time of Trouble (London, 1956), 232–3).

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historians and they are not biographers; what they have written isneither history nor biography. To see this one has only to reflect howabsurd it would be to apply the term ‘Gospel’ to any of the hugenumber of Lives of Jesus studied in Schweitzer’s Quest or indeed to anymodern historical investigation such as E. P. Sanders’s Jesus andJudaism. It is not just that these modern works of imaginative schol-arship are not in any sense canonical and do not carry the imprima-tur of the Church. It is because a Gospel is more of a creed than abiography: it is a proclamation of faith. Wittgenstein was right, ornearly so. Of its very nature a Gospel requires a response from itsreaders that differs toto caelo from that demanded by a historicalnarrative.

Edith Stein recounts in her own autobiography how, left alone byher hosts over the weekend in a country house, she came across andread, with mounting absorption, the Life of Teresa of Avila. Onfinishing it she said to herself—and it was the moment which sheafterwards thought of as the time both of her conversion to Chris-tianity and of her vocation to the Carmelite Order—‘Dies ist dieWahrheit’: ‘This is the truth.’ That is close, very close, to the kindof truth proclaimed by the Gospels. Though writing of revelations, StTeresa certainly did not think of her work as revelatory in the waythat the Gospels are. But the central purpose of all four Gospels has aclose affinity with the impact that her work had upon Edith Stein.John especially wrote his Gospel, as he says, ‘that you may believe’.Unlike the ordinary historian, whose main aim is to write the truthabout the past, the evangelists are chiefly interested in projecting amessage of immediate relevance to their own present. I believe this tobe true of all four Gospels; it is certainly true of the Fourth. One earlycommentator who recognized this was Origen. He believed that theevangelists intended

to give the truth where possible at once spiritually and corporeally (out-wardly), but where this was not possible to give preference to the spiritualover the corporeal, the true spiritual meaning being often preserved in whatat the corporeal level might be called a falsehood.

�æ�Œ�Ø� ªaæ ÆP�E�; ‹�ı �b K ���æ�Ø; Iº�Ł���Ø � �ı�Æ�ØŒH� –�Æ ŒÆd

�ø�Æ�ØŒH� ‹�ı �c K ����� I����æø� �æŒæ� �Ø �e � �ı�Æ�ØŒe �F

�ø�Æ�ØŒF; �ø��� ı �ººŒØ� �F Iº�ŁF� � �ı�Æ�ØŒF K �fiH �ø�Æ�ØŒfiH; ‰�¼ �Y�Ø �Ø�; ł����Ø:44

44 Comm. in Joann. 10: 4: Migne, PG xiv. 313 C.

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Like Ford Madox Ford, but unlike Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, Origen is notafraid to speak of falsehood here—though he does soften the expressionslightly and probably has in mind a falsehood akin to Plato’s famous‘noble lie’ (ŒÆºe ł����) or Wallace Stevens’s ‘supreme fiction’.He recognizes that John cannot always succeed in combining spiritualtruth with historical accuracy. Interestingly, though, he takes nonotice of what to a modern reader is the most fascinating and originalfeature of John’s technique: the device he has invented for straddlinga temporal gap.

The comparison with Stevens deserves to be pressed because of theextraordinarily far-reaching analogy between Stevens’s vision ofpoetry as the application of the imagination to reality and John’sconsidered view of the Gospel as tradition remembered and inter-preted in the light of faith. The poet in Stevens felt inhibited by a toobold and overpowering presence of the real, an inhibition which,paradoxically, furnishes him with the theme of some of his finestpoems (e.g. ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’, ‘The Plain Sense ofThings’, ‘The Motive for Metaphor’). Nevertheless what he calls his‘necessary angel’ was, when it counted most, the angel of reality45

and he was aware that ‘to be at the end of fact is not to be at thebeginning of imagination but to be at the end of both’.46 Equally,however, to attempt to extract the fact from the poem is to be at theend of both fact and imagination—at the end of poetry. The absenceof any fruitful interaction between the imagination and reality wasfor him a grim and intolerable poverty of spirit.

Stevens saw imagination as having virtually ousted faith from itsthrone: imagination was now what he called ‘the reigning prince’.47

In his work the transforming power of the imagination has seizedand irradiated reality in such a way as to make it irrecoverable in theform in which the poet found it. Similarly the visionary glow of theJohannine prophet has welded tradition and belief into the shiningaffirmation of the finished Gospel. If the result appears new andextraordinary this is because his religious genius impelled him to

45 ‘For nine readers out of ten, the necessary angel will appear to be the angel of theimagination and for nine days out of ten that is true, although it is the tenth day thatcounts’ (Letters of Wallace Stevens (London, 1967), ed. H. Stevens, 753): ‘I am the angelof reality j Seen for a moment standing at the door . . . j I am the necessary angel ofearth, j Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, j Cleared of its stiff and stubborn,man-locked set’ (Collected Poems, 496–7).

46 Opus Posthumous (London, 1959), 175.47 The Necessary Angel (New York, 1965), 171.

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disclose more and more of what he called ‘the truth’, that is to say,the revelation of Jesus. What he saw and what he inherited are nowcontained in the book he wrote. Attempt to prise them apart and theconsequence will be at best what Stevens calls somewhere ‘an inertsavoir’.

5. the consciousness of genre

The purpose of this section is to emphasize, by means of a number ofcomparisons, the remarkable extent to which the reflections Johnmakes upon his own work, the asides discussed in section 2, and theParaclete-sayings considered in section 3, indicate his artistic self-awareness, his consciousness of genre. It is this above all, I believe,that justifies our comparing John with some of the very greatestartists, painters, and composers as well as poets and novelists, inthe history of Western civilization.

Since the advent of Symbolism in the latter half of the nineteenthcentury Western art has exhibited a degree of self-consciousness thatfar exceeds anything that preceded it. I shall not be suggesting thatJohn’s deep interest in the implications of his own work approxi-mates that of James Joyce or, still less, Stephane Mallarme, whobelieved, or said he believed, that the whole world existed ‘pouraboutir a un livre’ and who describes one of his own poems as‘allegorique de lui-meme’. John does not write about writing: he isnot a Proust, composing a novel about the making of a novelist, or aThomas Mann, inventing a character (Doktor Faustus) who wouldembody all that is dangerous and Dionysiac in the arts.

It must be added that it would certainly be a mistake to attribute toJohn any close awareness of genre as such. There were of coursegenres in Hellenistic literature as well as in Ancient Israel. The booksof Chronicles were modelled on those of Kings, the Qumran psalmson those of David. Certain conventions persisted in what we call thewisdom literature; and so on. But the imitation of what we can see tobe widely differing literary genres does not mean that the imitatorswere conscious of these as genres. Indeed John Barton has arguedthat the writers of the Second Temple were largely oblivious to thedistinctions between, say, prophecy and apocalyptic that modernscholars are so keen to establish.48 I believe that he overstates his

48 Oracles of God, 198–202.

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case somewhat; even so Martin Hengel has a cogent point when, inclaiming for the Gospels (mistakenly, in my view) some sort ofbiographical or quasi-biographical status, he argues that no readerof Mark would have been conscious of being confronted by a totallynew literary genre.49 So in suggesting that the Fourth Gospel is notonly an instance of the Gospel genre but also a reflection upon it, amI not guilty of an anachronism?

Not entirely. Without entering into the largely sterile disputeconcerning the so-called intentional fallacy, we can detect in Johna very deep understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of whathe was attempting, however little he may have been interested ingeneric distinctions between Gospels and other forms of narrativeprose. Bousset was wrong as well as illogical to assert that what hecalled John’s großer Gedanke was not the product of deliberate reflec-tion,50 and Martyn equally wrong to suggest that John was not‘analytically conscious’ of the two levels of understanding withwhich he worked.51

The world of European literature offers dozens of examples ofconscious indebtedness to and divergence from tradition. Amongthe most celebrated are Don Quixote, which at once satirizes andexemplifies the romances that so enthralled its eponymous hero,curiously similar in this respect to that other literary Don, Byron’sDon Juan, sardonically pillorying the epic genre of which it is itselfsuch a striking specimen. Another outstanding example is Lycidas, inwhich Milton follows Vergil in ‘strictly meditating the thanklessMuse’, invoking as he does so not only the smooth-sliding Minciusof Vergil’s native Mantua but his own equally smooth-sliding Cam.Lycidas is one of those especially brilliant works of art that compel thereader to look back upon a whole series of earlier works in the samegenre and in doing so force him to reflect also on what is and what isnot essential to it. From Theocritus onwards pastoral was a self-conscious and artificial genre, its fields and rivers having somethingof the stylized quality of the formal gardens of Watteau and Frago-nard, its shepherds and shepherdesses already anticipating thewhims and fancies that Marie-Antoinette wished to capture, indeedto embalm, in Le Petit Trianon. Without some knowledge of thetradition Milton exploits and adapts, one can have at best a partial

49 Studies in the Gospel of Mark, 32–3. 50 Kyrios Christos6, 159.51 History and Theology2, 77.

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and superficial understanding of a poem that stands at the end of thistradition, as the poet bids farewell to it and moves on ‘to fresh woodsand pastures new’—pastures in which pastoral will have no place.52

Even music, unlikely as it may seem, offers analogies to thisprocedure. Janet Johnson, writing of Rossini’s late opera Il Viaggio aRheims, which she had to piece together from a number of scatteredmanuscripts, concludes that ‘like many final works of a genre, Viag-gio is really an opera about opera’.53 Richard Strauss’s Capriccio,Wagner’sMeistersinger, and even Mozart’s Schauspieldirektor attemptsomething similar. Other examples include Bach’s B Minor Mass andBeethoven’s Diabelli Variations and, at the other end of the musicalspectrum, Robert Simpson’s comments, themselves in quartet form,upon Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartets.

Painting, too, offers a number of striking parallels. One example isManet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe, which shockingly exposes the bolderimplications of the discreet but suggestive genre of pastoral scenesthat it both copies and challenges, thus paving the way for the more‘honest’ and ‘truthful’ works of impressionism. More challengingstill, and to a modern eye more obviously revolutionary, is thework of the early Cubists, especially Gris, Picasso, and Braque.Though out to break the conventions of single-perspective portrait-ure, they remained interested in painting portraits, as well as inopening up and setting down on canvas the hidden ambitions thatmotivate all true portrait painters. Like all paintings, portraits arecreations or inventions: but the cubist portrait, even when paintedfrom life, offers much more to prospective viewers than they couldget by standing in front of the traditional flat canvas. At the sametime it underlines the truth that no portrait is simply an immediaterepresentation of reality: ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (Magritte); and‘things as they are—are changed upon the blue guitar’ (Stevens).Of course there was already a pressure towards abstraction. Picassosays of his Girl with a Mandolin that he allowed Fanny Tellier to posefor him against his better judgement, because her presence preventedhim ‘from painting what I wanted’.54 John the Evangelist, who also

52 ‘An avowedly conventional poem like Lycidas’, remarks Northrop Frye, ‘demandsthe kind of criticism that will absorb it into the study of literature as a whole’, Anatomyof Criticism (Princeton, 1971), 100.

53 In the booklet accompanying the discs. Deutsche Grammophon, 1984.54 Quoted and discussed by Christopher Green in TLS (20 Mar. 1980), 331.

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distrusted direct vision, would have appreciated the force of Picasso’smisgivings.

Finally, a particularly brilliant example, there is Rembrandt’sNightwatch, whose erroneous and misleading name shows howearly its bright beauty must have been overlaid by grime. This is anexample of what the Dutch call schutterstukken, group pictures ofguilds of militiamen that were extremely popular in Amsterdam rightup to the middle of the seventeenth century. But in exemplifying thegenre, Rembrandt also transcends it, merging portraiture with pa-geantry so as to bring out the historical significance of the city’smilitia at a time when their role as defenders of the city had alreadylost any real importance. At the same time his painting is an effectivecritique of the ordinariness of the work of some of his contemporar-ies, including certain pieces painted to hang in the same hall, thegroote sael of the Kloveniersdoelen where members of Banning Cocq’scompany used to gather for festive occasions. Rembrandt was famil-iar with the tradition he had inherited and his masterpiece provesthat he had reflected upon it deeply.55

These varied examples of artistic self-awareness may help to high-light John’s own obvious desire to draw attention to the implicationsof the Gospel genre and in particular his debt to apocalyptic.

Note on Pseudonymity

In conclusion, a word may be added about one aspect of John’stechnique that has been widely disregarded. I call this, with somehesitation, the device of pseudonymity.

At first sight the pseudonymity of John’s Gospel, like that ofMatthew, seems far removed from the audacious pretensions of somany near-contemporary apocalypses to reach far back into history,and in some cases (Adam and Enoch) prehistory. But John, too,insists from the outset that he was living at a time and in a placewhen great mysteries were being revealed. We shall see in the lastchapter that the Prologue is more about revelation than creation. Itsname for revelation is › ¸�ª�, the Word, which ‘became flesh, anddwelt amongst us . . . and we have seen (KŁ�Æ���ŁÆ) his glory’ (1: 14).

55 See E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt: The Nightwatch (Princeton, 1982).

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This familiar verse must have made a deep impression upon its firstreaders. There is a similar effect at the beginning of Madame Bovary.By numbering himself among Charles’s classmates, Flaubert takeshis readers aback in the same way: ‘Nous etions a l’ecole, quand . . . ’.Although he will take no further part in the action, the writerimplicitly asserts his authority to tell the tale that follows by estab-lishing his presence in the room where it began.

The ‘we’ of John’s Prologue is perhaps more open to misunder-standing. Bultmann for one is anxious to dispel any impression thatit implies some sort of claim to privileged witness:

Those who speak the KŁ�Æ���ŁÆ are believers. The old dispute whether thespeakers in v. 14 are eye-witnesses or those who see in a spiritual sense, isbased on a false alternative, inasmuch as the precise character of ‘spiritual’sight is not defined. For on the one side it is clear that the specificallyJohannine ‘seeing’ is not concerned with eye-witnessing in a historical orlegal sense. For in this sense the ‘Jews’ were also eye-witnesses, and yet theysaw nothing (9: 39–41). On the other hand such ‘seeing’ has nothing to dowith the ‘spiritual’ sight found in the Greek contemplation of Ideas or inmysticism. . . . This ‘seeing’ is neither sensory nor spiritual, but is the sight offaith.56

The ‘eye-witnesses’ as such are considered not as those who standguarantee for some later generation for the truth of the revelation,but as those who confront every generation anew with the offencethat the ���Æ must be seen in the one who became �æ�. . . . TheKŁ�Æ���ŁÆ, in which the offence is overcome, is renewed again andagain.57

For all its insight, this interpretation is too dismissive of the obvi-ous reading according to which the evangelist is associating himselfwith those who saw the glory of the Incarnate Logos while he wasactually dwelling ‘among us’. That, after all, is how the very firstcommentator upon the Prologue, the author of 1 John, understoodthe passage,58 and while he is not an infallible guide, his commentsmust carry a certain weight, representing as they do the views of aprominent group of Johannine Christians.

56 Bultmann, p. 69. 57 Ibid. 70.58 ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen

with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerningthe word of life’ (1 John 1: 1).

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6. ‘the disciple at second hand’

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

The Philosophical Fragments, from which the heading of this section isderived, was published in 1844. It contains Kierkegaard’s response towhat Lessing called his ‘ditch’ (der garstige breite Graben), the asser-tion that ‘Accidental truths of history can never become proof ofnecessary truths of reason.’59 The work is concerned, then, with therelationship between Christian faith and philosophical idealism. Les-sing distinguished sharply between the eyewitnesses of a historicalevent, for whom it is a truth of experience, and subsequent gener-ations, for whom it can be no more than an ‘accidental truth ofhistory’. There is consequently a great gulf between Christian faithand true philosophy: the claim that the former is somehow con-cerned with eternally valid truths that have entered history at aparticular time and place must be rejected.

Kierkegaard’s response to this dichotomy is largely derived from aprofound reflection upon the Fourth Gospel. In the last chapter of thePhilosophical Fragments he concludes that the concept of a disciple atsecond hand is illusory, in particular that there is no basis for theimplication that the first generation of Christian believers, Jesus’ owncontemporaries, is privileged over all subsequent believers:

There is no disciple at second hand. The first and the last are essentially onthe same plane, only that a later generation finds its occasion in the testi-mony of a contemporary generation, while the contemporary generationfinds the occasion in its own immediate contemporaneity, and in so far owesnothing to any other generation. But this immediate contemporaneity ismerely an occasion which can scarcely be expressed more emphatically thanin the proposition that the disciple, if he understood himself, must wish thatthe immediate contemporaneity should cease, by the God’s leaving theearth. . . . This thought, that it is profitable for the disciple that the God[Guden, i.e. Christ] should leave the earth, is taken from the New Testament:it is found in the Gospel of John.60

As indeed it is: ‘It is good for you that I go.’ In one respectKierkegaard agrees with Lessing: Christianity is incompatible withphilosophical idealism. Never one to shirk paradox, Kierkegaard

59 Gotthold E. Lessing, Uber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (1777).60 Philosophical Fragments, 131–2.

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takes the opposite path to Lessing, refusing to admit that the truthupon which Christianity is based is merely or simply historical:

If our fact is assumed to be a simple historical fact, contemporaneity is adesideratum. . . . If the fact is an eternal fact, every age is equally near. . . . If thefact in question is an absolute fact, it would be a contradiction to supposethat time had any power to differentiate the fortunes of men with respect toit, that is to say, in any decisive sense.61

Kierkegaard’s own view is that ‘the fact’ is neither simply historicalnor yet eternal (i.e. non-historical) but absolute, and ‘the absolutefact is also a historical fact’. Kierkegaard himself, I believe, wouldclaim to have leapt over Lessing’s ditch, but it might seem to othersthat he has really refused the jump. Can one resolve a paradox simplyby emphasizing it?

However that may be, Kierkegaard’s idea that in Christ (‘the God’)historical and eternal were somehow indissolubly fused together inwhat he calls an ‘absolute’ fact is conceptually very close to thenotion of the incarnation of the Logos found in the JohanninePrologue. The pre-existent Word (¸�ª� ¼�ÆæŒ�), God’s design forthe world from the beginning (K Iæ�fi B) can easily be thought of as aneternal truth; the Incarnate Word (¸�ª� � �ÆæŒ�) is ineluctablyhistorical—but not simply historical. Like Wisdom, of whom it is themasculine surrogate, the Word is naturally timeless. But when shebecame identified with the Law (which had entered the world at aparticular time and in a particular place—Mount Sinai) Wisdomacquired a history, and so did the Word when he came to dwellamong men. Conversely, whereas the Law was invested with eter-nity on being identified with Wisdom, Jesus Christ had from thebeginning the eternity that belonged to the Word: in chapter 17,the only other point in the Gospel in which the name ‘Jesus Christ’occurs, ‘the glory as of the Father’s only Son’ (1: 14) is said to havebeen given him ‘before the foundation of the world’ (17: 24).

Though Kierkegaard was certainly unaware of the remote originsof the fusion of the historical (the Law) with the eternal (Wisdom),they help to explain, over a gap of many centuries, the affinity of histhought with that of the fourth evangelist. John, too, was constantlyconcerned to emphasize the enduring validity of the Christ-event.After establishing this strongly in the Prologue he takes a very

61 Ibid. 124–5.

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different tack in the body of the Gospel, but without ever relinquish-ing his central insight. The lesson is driven home in the concludingepisode of the Gospel, the story of the appearance of the Risen Jesus toThomas.

Kierkegaard alludes to this episode and to the beatitude thatrounds it off towards the end of his book: ‘The immediate contem-poraneity is so far from being an advantage that the contemporarymust precisely desire its cessation, lest he be tempted to devotehimself to seeing with his bodily eyes and ears, which is all a wasteof effort and a grievous, aye a dangerous toil.’62 Kierkegaard is surelyright to associate the blessing of those who do not see with thebenefits arising from Jesus’ departure. Having identified himself, onthe first page of the Gospel, with those who have beheld the glory ofthe incarnate Logos, the evangelist concludes by disclaiming anyspecial privilege for these—and even, by implication, for himself.‘These [signs] are written that you may believe’ (20: 31). A witnessis needed, but to believe on the word of the Gospel-writer is to believethe words of his Gospel, and these are the words of Jesus, recorded bythe evangelist with the active assistance of the Paraclete.

Apart from 13: 17, the blessing on those deprived of sight is the onlybeatitude in this Gospel: it is an admirable epitome of the extraordin-ary favours reserved, according to John, for later Christian believers.Bultmann disagrees. He asks, ‘Does this blessing extol those bornlater, because they have this precedence over the first disciples, inthat they believe without seeing, and precisely on the basis of thedisciples’ word?’ That, he answers, ‘can hardly be possible’.63 Ratherhe sees Thomas as ‘representative of the common attitude of men,who cannot believe without seeing miracles’. But this is more than acautionary tale. It must be taken in conjunction with the conclusion,which succeeds the blessing without a break and expresses theevangelist’s purpose in composing his Gospel. The evangelist is de-liberately contrasting the situation of those for whom he writes withthat of Jesus’ contemporaries, and showing them how mistaken theywould be to think of these as somehow privileged over againstthemselves.64 Where faith is concerned, physical vision is a handicaprather than an advantage, since there is always a risk of confusing

62 Philosophical Fragments, 133. 63 Bultmann, p. 696.64 We shall see in Ch. 11 how on a second level of meaning the Johannine prophet is

also comforting the community as they prepare to mourn his own imminent death.

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vision with faith and even of preferring it. Thomas is rebuked forinsisting on touching as well.

Lessing had dug his ditch by applying a philosophical distinctionborrowed from Leibniz to one of the most distinctive features ofChristianity, its appeal to history and to historical truth. Muchnineteenth-century New Testament scholarship can be seen as anattempt to come to terms with his famous dictum and to cross orbridge his famous ditch.65 Most of the solutions can be located quiteeasily on one or other side of the divide. Hoskyns, whether or not inconscious opposition to Lessing, was one of the few theologians toadmit no barrier—or ditch—between history and what he called ‘themeaning’ of the Fourth Gospel. It is worth remembering that Kierke-gaard, taking his inspiration from the Gospel itself, had made asimilar move nearly a century earlier, thus proving himself foronce a better exegete than Bultmann, who had learnt much fromhim and was in other ways theologically closer to him than to anyother philosopher except Heidegger.

65 See R. Slenczka, Geschichtlichkeit und Personensein.

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9

THE STORY OF WISDOM

introduction

Like all good narratives, the Fourth Gospel has a plot. In this chapterwe will be reflecting on how an enquiry into this plot can enhanceour understanding of the meaning of the Gospel.1

Knowing as we do how closely the plot of this Gospel resemblesthat of the other three, we may be tempted to think that the differ-ences are insignificant. Of course there are many of these. Jesus nolonger preaches the kingdom of heaven, but proclaims himself, andhis work takes longer, three years, not just one. He rarely speaks inparables, and performs fewer miracles. The temple-episode is placedat the beginning of his ministry rather than at the end. Certainindividuals (Nathanael, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman) arenew to the story, and others, especially Lazarus, the brother ofMartha and Mary, take on a more important role. Yet in spite ofthese and many more minor differences the broad outline of the storyis much the same, telling of a Jewish prophet who after a brief careeras a teacher and wonder-worker ends up in Jerusalem as a victim ofthe machinations of a ruthless hierarchy which contrives his deathat the hand of the Roman colonial authorities. The bleak simplicity ofthis story can be obscured by the emphasis, especially in Matthewand John, upon the discourses of Jesus, but it helps to explain whyIrenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the late second century, grouped all theGospels together in the expression ‘the fourfold gospel’.

1 Plots of course have to be plotted. But even in a many-layered work like the FourthGospel the critic is entitled to take it as it stands in its final form, as long as difficultiessuch as those presented by the clumsy conjunctions between chs. 5 and 6 and chs. 9and 10 are taken into account. In what follows great importance will be attached toJesus’ assertion in 7: 34 (awkwardly slotted into the story of his attempted arrest by thetemple proctors) that he will be sought but not found (see Excursus III). In its presentposition this assertion acquires a special significance, as will be argued, when con-sidered in relation to the actual arrest in the garden in ch. 18.

Nevertheless the Fourth Gospel as a whole has a very different feelto it from the others, and it is worth asking why. The most importantreason, I believe, is this: through all the reminiscences of Jesus’ publiccareer the Gospel derives its dynamic thrust from the fate of revelation.

In the concluding chapter we shall be paying close attention to thetheme of revelation, unquestionably, as Rudolf Bultmann recognizedlong ago, the basic idea or Grundkonzeption of the Gospel. But revela-tion, besides providing the Gospel’s dominant theme, also gives it itsplot. Like certain other concepts around which plays or fictions havebeen constructed (e.g. jealousy, ambition, revenge) revelation comesalready fitted with a pattern or structure (the movement from con-cealment to disclosure) and already projecting, implicitly at least, astory. The happy coincidence of theme and plot goes a long waytowards explaining the excellence of the Fourth Gospel as a work ofliterature. Like Othello, in whose speeches we detect the corrosiveeffects of jealousy, Macbeth, who can neither disguise nor resist thetugs of ambition, and Hamlet, who broods so often on his desire forrevenge, the hero of the Gospel discourses on revelation even as helives out its story.

If we pare down the individual episodes of the Gospel, discardingthe colourful details fromwhich each of them derives its own distinct-ive character and flavour, we are left with a skeletal outline of thehistory of revelation. In fact this is sketched out in the Prologue, whichalso gives both the before and the after of Jesus’ brief sojourn on earth.Before taking flesh the Logos, himself divine, is close to God. His visitterminated, he nestles in God’s embrace. Neither what precedes norwhat follows belongs to the Gospel narrative, but between theseunseen eternities comes the account of Jesus’ rejection, his finalmessage to his disciples, and his promised departure. Both the rejec-tion (‘his own people received him not’) and also a partial acceptance(‘those who did receive him’) are adumbrated in the Prologue, whichexhibits the startling insight that Jesus, the hero of the gospel story,somehow re-enacted on earth the chequered career of heavenlyWisdom (Logos/revelation) and thus may be said to have incarnatedthe wisdom tradition, to have given it flesh.

Observing the striking correlation between the summary state-ment of the Prologue concerning the rejection of revelation (plus avery limited success), and the series of rebuffs Jesus encounters in thecourse of his preaching career, only partially offset by the veryrestricted welcome he receives from his disciples and a handful of

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other people, we may conclude that the plot of the Gospel, in whichthe theme of the fate of revelation plays itself out, is relativelystraightforward. And in one sense this is right. The general observa-tion that darkness did not comprehend the shining light (1: 5) is soonmade more specific: ‘He came to his own home, and his own peoplereceived him not’ (1: 11). This is such an accurate summary of Jesus’experiences in the first half of the Gospel that one might think that itwas composed with these in mind.2

This being so there is no need to subscribe to Bultmann’s seductivethesis that the evangelist, having before him a mythological accountof the descent and subsequent ascent of a redeemer figure, set aboutridding this account of its dominant myth. The truth is almost theopposite. Far from relieving a story in some otherwise unknownGnostic document of its mythological elements, the evangelist, wemight think, has injected his own myth (which I have alreadyidentified as revelation) into a recital broadly similar to that of theSynoptic Gospels.

I have argued elsewhere3 that to do full justice to the Prologue oneway in which it should be read is as an expression of the correspond-ence between Jesus’ rejection by his own people and a particularversion of the wisdommyth that appears in several places both in theHebrew Old Testament and in the apocrypha. On this understanding,however, the myth has not so much been injected into the gospelstory as read off from it.

Alternatively, however, the Prologue may be rightly seen as noth-ing more than a variant of the myth,4 especially as it occurs in apassage in the so-called Parables section of 1 Enoch: ‘Wisdom wentout in order to dwell among the sons of men, but did not find adwelling; Wisdom returned to her place and took her seat in themidstof the angels’ (42: 1–2). Coming as it does bereft of any contextual

2 Although this is a faithful account of the general thrust of the first half of theGospel it is in some respects incomplete, necessarily so because the story of theantipathy between Jesus and ‘the Jews’ does not really kick in until ch. 5 and is inany case less in evidence in chs. 6 and 11. This is because these two chapters,representing as they do a different stage of the developing relationship between thecommunity and ‘the Jews’, were added subsequently. Similarly much of the material inchs. 1–4, drawn from earlier sources, is unrelated to the great rows between Jesus andhis ‘Jewish’ adversaries that dominate what follows. The step-by-step composition ofthe Gospel means that any attempt to trace its plot more closely is doomed tofrustration. See the chapter entitled ‘Narrative Criticism’ in my Studying John, 141–65.

3 Studying John, 18–26. 4 Ibid. 26–31.

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clues in a part of the book that has been suspected of Christianinterference, this passage is not easy to handle. It looks like a del-iberate contradiction of Baruch and Ben Sira, both of whom pictureWisdom finding a home in Israel. According to Enoch, however, itwas not Wisdom but Iniquity who, on leaving her chambers, ‘foundthose whom she did not seek . . . and dwelt among them . . . like dewon parched ground’ (42: 3). In the preceding section Enoch had offereda view of Wisdom as a revelation of mysteries outside the law, indeed arevelation in which Wisdom herself could virtually be identified withiniquity, since in so far as theywere transmitted by heavenly beings inrevolt against God these ‘eternal secrets which were made in heaven’were themselves the cause of human corruption. In yet anothersection of his book Enoch contests the official teaching of orthodoxwriters like Ben Sira: the true, pure wisdom, did not, as Ben Siraaffirms, find a home among men: on the contrary she remained inheaven ‘in the midst of the angels’: Wisdom ‘does not turn away fromyour throne, nor from your presence’ (84: 3).

It is evident then that some Jewish thinkers disagreed with theorthodox view that Wisdom, identified as the Torah, found a homeon earth, and in this respect they concurred with the author ofthe Prologue, for whom the Logos is not just a masculine surrogateof the feminine Wisdom but a conscious rival of the Law in his claimto be the unique vehicle of revelation and grace (1: 17). This writer tobe sure differs from Enoch in taking a positive view of this alternativerevelation: to disclose ‘the eternal secrets which were made inheaven’, far from being the work of a malign demon, was the properfunction of Jesus Christ. What he disclosed was God himself (1: 18),which he could not have done unless he had been not just close toGod but actually identified with him in a way left undefined.

This means that although in some respects, as Rendel Harrisshowed as long ago as 1916, the Prologue is the natural successorof the wisdom tradition, it stems from a part of that tradition whichexhibits no tendency to domesticate Wisdom and attenuate hermystery. Moreover, if the Logos did find a home among men, it wasnot where he might naturally have been expected to settle (‘his ownpeople received him not’), and his eventual tabernacling is recordedby the writer with some amazement. For if I am right in supposingthat the author of the Prologue emanated from the Johannine circlethen he must initially have seen the revelation of Jesus as the last anddefinitive manifestation of the shining of the light, a shining which

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has no end. Such a vision implies that the life and teaching of Jesusare the climax of the divine plan, but it does not yet identify theperson of Jesus with the plan: in theory he could be quite simply thelast of the prophets sent out by Wisdom, a representative of Wisdomin the same uncomplicated sense as the prophets who had precededhim. Luke puts a saying of Wisdom into the mouth of Jesus: ‘I willsend them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill andpersecute’ (11: 49). In fact this is what the career of Jesus looks likein all four gospels if we take them simply as stories. The realizationthat rather than being just a messenger or a prophet he wasactually Wisdom in person, represents a fresh insight, complement-ing and enriching the christology of the body of the Gospel. Thisis the insight that finds expression in verse 14: ‘And the Word wasmade flesh’.

In the verses that precede this ringing declaration the rejection ofrevelation, highlighted both in the Prologue and in the Gospel thatfollows, is qualified quite significantly: ‘But to all who received him,who believed in his name he gave power to become children of God’(1: 12). As a significant (though secondary) motif in the structure ofthe Gospel, this theme of limited acceptance deserves a brief com-ment. Even in the first part of the Gospel, in which the dominant noteis one of Jesus’ failure to win over his own people, there are frequentindications that he was nevertheless accorded a partial welcome,5

though it should be added that few, perhaps none, of those whoacclaimed him fully appreciated who he really was. The disciplesalso must be numbered among the restricted group spoken of in thePrologue as those to whom ‘he gave power to become children of

5 First there is the series of messianic titles in the first chapter, culminating inNathanael’s recognition of Jesus as Son of God and King of Israel (1: 49). John theBaptist proclaims him as Lamb of God (1: 29, 36), as God’s Chosen One (1: 34), and asthe Bridegroom (3: 29). His disciples believe in him after the miracle at Cana (2: 11).Some Samaritans acknowledge him to be the Saviour of the World (4: 42) and someGalileans see him as ‘the prophet coming into the world’ (6: 14). Peter calls him theHoly One of God (6: 69); different groups of people in Jerusalem declare him to bethe prophet or the Messiah (7: 40–1); the man born blind, exceptionally, accepts him asthe Son of Man (9: 38), and Martha proclaims him as the Messiah, the Son of Godcoming into the world (11: 27). The observation of the chief priests and Pharisees that‘if we let him go on like this everyone will believe in him’ (11: 42) is a maliciousexaggeration, but even so at his solemn entry into Jerusalem he receives a rapturouswelcome from the people as the King of Israel (12: 13). Thomas’s stunned response toJesus’ demand for faith at the end of the Gospel, ‘my Lord and my God’ (20: 28), whichpicks up on 1: 18 (where the reading Ł��� is surely to be preferred to ıƒ��) is undoubtedlythe classic expression of the attitude the evangelist expects from his readers.

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God’ (1: 13)—on account of their reception of the Logos and theirbelief in his name.

I conclude this section with a few remarks upon certain of theliterary devices whereby the evangelist enlivens what could other-wise have been a somewhat monotonous account of the aggressiveincomprehension of Jesus’ Jewish interlocutors, an account onlypartly offset by the positive response he receives elsewhere.

There is one constant, the figure of Jesus, always on centre stage.But the scenery is always shifting and new characters keep appear-ing. Perhaps the most striking example of the changes of scene andmood comes between chapters 3 and 4, where we move from town tocountry, night to day, secrecy to openness, from Pharisee to Samar-itan and from a named man to an unnamed woman. The scene of thefollowing chapter is a pool in Jerusalem and of the one after that alake in Galilee. And so on.

Equally noteworthy is the evangelist’s use of symbols, bread andwater, the staples of life, which appear as living water and the breadof life. Life too, of course, is a symbol, whether or not it is qualified bythe adjective ÆN� Ø�, so difficult to translate. But unquestionably themost important of the Gospel’s symbols is that of light, wonderfullyapt for illustrating the central theme of revelation. From its firstmention in the Prologue, where it appears shining in an uncompre-hending darkness, what is especially emphasized is its divisiveness.The light separates the sighted from the blind, the wise from thefoolish, and ultimately the good from the bad (see 3: 20), separationstypical, as I have noted, of the apocalyptic genre. Nothing in theGospel furnishes us with a better summary of this divisiveness thanJesus’ reflection on the response of the Jews to the healing of the manborn blind: ‘For judgement I came into this world, that those who donot see may see, and that those who see may become blind’ (9: 39).

In this summary reflection we also have an accurate indication ofthe verdict not only of the evangelist but also of his readers. Theforegoing discussion of the plot of the Gospel has been conductedthroughout on what I have called the second level of understanding,the one available to the readers of the Gospel, familiar with the storyof Jesus’ rejection by his own people that culminated in his trial andexecution. No doubt too the excommunication of their own commu-nity from the synagogue will have been perceived as echoing Jesus’own experience. These readers, having themselves accepted therevelation brought by Jesus (‘we have seen his glory’), are aware

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that in spite of his failure to get his message across in his own lifetimethey are living in an era of recollected truth. They are conscious tooof the irony implicit in the repeated condemnation of Jesus, knowingthat ‘the Jews’ were equivalently passing judgement on themselves.

The first level of understanding, the only one available to thesecondary characters of the Gospel, is very different, and it is thisdifference that accounts for the dramatic irony whereby ‘the Jews’, intheir blindness, are portrayed as putting Jesus on trial and passingsentence on him. The best-known and most frequently cited exampleof dramatic irony in European literature, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex,affords an interesting contrast with the Fourth Gospel. The epony-mous hero of Sophocles’ play, unaware of the fate that awaits him,systematically plots his own destruction. His act of self-mutilation atthe end of the play symbolically underlines his earlier stubbornrefusal to see. Only the chorus, privy to an understanding not sharedby any of the actual characters of the play, hints darkly at the terribleoutcome, enabling the dramatist to communicate with the audiencehis sympathy with their horror. In the Fourth Gospel, by contrast,the protagonist knows his own fate from the outset and is the onlycharacter in the story to share the subsequent awareness of theGospel’s readers.

1. the search for wisdom

(a) The Story Level

What is true of the main plot, the rejection of revelation, that it is tobe read on two levels of understanding, is equally true of the sub-plotor counter-plot, the search.6

The story of the search, like that of the rejection, may be said tobegin with the Prologue, and at the same point: the darkness did notmaster it (the light)—# �Œ��Æ ÆP�e P ŒÆ��ºÆ�� (1: 5). The firstmeaning of ŒÆ�ƺÆ�� �Ø is to seize or lay hold of; to seize intellec-tually is to comprehend. One English word that covers both these

6 In some respects the analysis that follows resembles Mark Stibbe’s account of ‘theelusive Christ’, a motif he compares to the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel (John asstoryteller, 21). He expands this idea later in the book, pp. 89–90, and more fully in hisarticle, ‘Elusive Christ’, which includes a paragraph on ‘The Elusive Wisdom’, 31. Butthere are differences too.

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senses is ‘master’, which also includes the furthermeanings of controland repression. The word can also mean to catch or overtake. Whenlight is confronted by darkness it does not react by attempting tohide; nevertheless, right at the end of the Book of Signs, when hehimself is about to be apprehended, Jesus warns his disciples to ‘walkwhile you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you’: ¥ Æ �c

�Œ��Æ �A� ŒÆ�ƺ�fi � (12: 35).The story of Jesus’ confrontation with the Jews really begins with

the first angry flare-up that follows thehealing of the cripple in chapter5. But even as early as the beginning of chapter 4 Jesus is portrayed asanxious to evade the Pharisees: ‘When Jesus heard that the Phariseeshad heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples thanJohn . . . he left Judaea and departed again to Galilee’ (4: 1–3).

Moving on to chapter 5, we come to the start of the bitter quarrelsbetween Jesus and the Jews. The consequence of Jesus’ healing of thecripple is stated simply in the text: ŒÆd �Øa �F� K��øŒ ƒ ��ı�ÆEØ �e

� ���F . . . (5: 16). RSV translates the verb as ‘persecuted’. AnthonyHarvey, who sees this as the beginning of the great trial-scene thatcontinues over the next several chapters, argues for an alternativetranslation: ‘they sought to bring a charge against him’.7 JeffreyStaley suggests ‘stalked’.8 The literal meaning of the verb �Ø�Œ�Ø isto follow or pursue, allowing a further possible rendering: ‘This is whythe Jews began to hunt Jesus down . . . ’ Throughout this long sectionwe see Jesus eluding the grasp of his enemies, both literally andsymbolically, in spite of the fact that the story would be ruined andthe history falsified unless they caught up with him from time to time.Chapter 7, for instance, opens with the statement that Jesuswould notgo about in Judaea because the Jews (Judaeans?) were seeking hisdeath. But only a few verses later we read that he did go up to the feast(of Tabernacles) ‘not openly (�Æ �æH�) but in secret (K Œæı��fiH)’ (7: 10).If he had remained in hiding in Galilee an important series of episodeswould have been left untold.

The confrontations at the feast build up to a climax at the end ofchapter 8, when the Jews take up stones to throw at Jesus. Hisresponse is to leave the Temple and go into hiding (8: 59); but thevery next verse (9: 1) introduces the episode of the encounter with theman born blind, an encounter that leads, inevitably, to yet anotherconfrontation. The narrative then proceeds without a break to the

7 Jesus on Trial, 51. 8 ‘Stumbling’, 62.

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last of the attempts to stone Jesus, and the last of his challengingclaims to equality with God: ‘the Father is in me and I in the Father’(10: 38). The consequence is another attempt to arrest him, ‘but heslipped from their grasp’ (ŒÆd K�BºŁ� KŒ �B� ��Øæe� ÆP�H ) (10: 39).

There follows the story of the resurrection of Lazarus and thenarrator’s observations on the final (and only effective) decision toput Jesus to death. But once again, we are informed, ‘he no longerwent about openly (�Æææ���fi Æ) among the Jews, but moved to Eph-raim, where he stayed with his disciples’ (11: 54). Meanwhile the huntwent on (the imperfect of ����E is used here) and the Jews said toone another, ‘What do you think? That he will not come to the feast?’(11: 56). The reader knows that he will indeed come to the feast, butthis little question is just one of many devices employed by thenarrator to convey the sense that Jesus was being continually trackeddown, even though he seems to have been able to come and go as hepleased, every appearance provoking a renewed outburst of hostilityand another attempt to seize or stone him, which in turn leads to yetanother disappearance, another retreat into hiding. The conclusionof the Book of Signs states explicitly that ‘he went and hid from them’:ŒÆd I��ºŁg KŒæ��� I�� ÆP�H (12: 36). Yet as John’s first readers wereaware, the outcome of this deadly game of hide-and-seek was prede-termined. Jesus’ warning to his disciples not to allow the darkness tocatch up with them was uttered in the full realization that in oneimportant sense it was about to catch up with him.

When it does, there is a single pregnant allusion to the symbolismof darkness: ‘and it was night’ (13: 30), but then the story takes overand the symbolism is replaced by a characteristic irony. The forcesthat come to arrest Jesus in the garden are huge: the servants( ��æ��ÆØ) of the high priests and Pharisees, last seen as the templeproctors in chapter 7, arrive backed up by a whole Roman cohort(���EæÆ), 600 men (or at the very least a maniple, 200 men) (18: 3).The irony in the question with which Jesus greets them (‘Whom doyou seek?’) is readily detected by the reader—though not by thearresting-officers. The really crucial irony, however, emphasized bythe narrator, who includes it in an authorial aside and allows Jesusto repeat it, is to be found in his answer to their response: � ¯ª� �N�� :‘I am [he]’ (18: 6–8).9 To appreciate fully the significance of this

9 Catrin Williams argues that in this context the answer � ¯ª� �N�� which causessuch fear and awe among the soldiers that they fall prostrate to the ground, conveys a

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assertion we must recall Jesus’ last encounter with the temple proc-tors in chapter 7, when their attempt to arrest him came to nothing.He addresses them on that occasion in language that is intentionallymystifying: ‘You will seek me and you will not find me; where I amyou cannot come’ (7: 34). The wording is important: ‹�ı �N�d Kª�—where I am. ‘The Jews’ take this assertion literally and do not disguisetheir bewilderment: ‘Where is he about to go that we cannot findhim?’ But if we read what Jesus says as a reply to the temple proctorswho have been sent out to arrest him, then the full irony does notemerge till later. For at their next appearance they have actuallyfound him, and the reader is aware that their success in doing so isa condition of Jesus’ final departure to somewhere where they willbe unable to follow him. (Here it is more than usually difficult toseparate out the different levels of understanding, for of course on thestory level the arresting-officers ( ��æ��ÆØ) have no awareness at allof the full import either of Jesus’ words or of their own actions.)

(b) The Spiritual Level

Jesus then said: ‘I shall be with you a little longer, and then I am withdraw-ing ( �ªø) to him who sent me; you will seek me and you will not find me;where I am you cannot come.’ The Jews said to one another, ‘Where doesthis man intend to go (�æ����ŁÆØ) that we cannot find him? Does he intendto go to the Diaspora among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What is thissaying (º�ª�) of his, ‘‘You will seek me and you will not find me,’’ and,‘‘Where I am you cannot come’’?’ (7: 33–6)

Jesus’ mysterious challenge to the temple proctors (for in its presentplace in the Gospel, as we have just noted, this is a response to theirattempt to arrest him) lies at the heart of the search sub-plot. Wehave seen that it slots into place smoothly on the story level, in whichthe response of the Jews is unsurprisingly one of total incomprehen-sion. The reader, however, responding at a level to which Jesus’adversaries have no access, recognizes in Jesus’ response one ofthose riddling expressions which serve to single out the privilegedinsiders, the community, from everyone else, those who are not ‘inthe know’.

sense of Jesus (derived ultimately from Deut 32: 39) ‘as one who steers and controlsevents rather than as a helpless victim of fate’ and as the agent of salvation (I am He,294–6).

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The riddle in question centres upon the term �ª�Ø , to depart.(The majority of English translations fail to distinguish between thisand the unambiguous word �æ����ŁÆØ, the word used by the Jewswhen they repeat what Jesus says. I have used the rather stiltedEnglish term ‘withdraw’ in order to emphasize the distinction.) Inits special sense the word refers to Jesus’ withdrawal from this worldto rejoin his Father in heaven.10 In its present context, where itfigures as a response to the temple proctors ( ��æ��ÆØ) sent by thechief priests and Pharisees (7: 32), the passage is something of apuzzle, i.e. an aporia.11 For the first response it elicits comes notfrom the proctors themselves but from ‘the Jews’, who wonder outloud what Jesus means by his assertion and go on to speculatewhether he is about to go (�æ����ŁÆØ) and teach the Greeks in theDiaspora, and fail to understand how he can be going to a placewhere they cannot follow him. The proctors themselves, who haveheard Jesus’ pronouncement on the last day of the feast (7: 37–8),give as the reason why they did not arrest them that ‘No man everspoke like this man’ (7: 46).

What Jesus says concerning his own inaccessibility (‘You will seekme and will not find me’) is virtually a quotation from the Book ofProverbs: ‘They will call upon me, but I will not answer,’ declaresWisdom, ‘they will seek me diligently but will not find me’ (Prov.1: 28). Although the figure in Proverbs who actually utters thesewords is Wisdom the Teacher, this saying—one of the few in thebody of the Gospel to refer explicitly to the wisdom tradition soprominent in the Prologue—naturally calls to mind the rather differ-ent figure, no less important, of remote, inaccessible Wisdom. (I willsay more about this distinction in the next section of this chapter.)

One cannot over-emphasize the importance of this saying. Thewhole passage carries the informed reader up onto a level of spiritualunderstanding high above anything available to the actors in thestory. The exchange between Jesus and his adversaries is picked upmuch later, as we have seen, at the very moment at which, on theliteral level, they have at last succeeded in hunting him down. For

10 See the discussion of this term in the section on riddle in Ch. 2, pp. 130–3.11 Bultmann (p. 287) argues that the servants sent out in 7: 32 would hardly wait a

further three days until the end of the feast before returning. So he places 7: 37–44,which records a saying uttered ‘on the last day of the feast’ before the story of theattempted arrest. My own view is rather that the whole dialogue is out of place. SeeExcursus IV.

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the informed reader, however, it marks the failure of the hunt. Forwhilst the arresting officers in the garden and those who sent themcongratulate themselves on the successful outcome of their search,John’s readers know that in so far as Jesus is the embodiment of divinewisdom, he has actually once again slipped from the grasp of hispursuers.

2. the revelation of wisdom

‘Little children, I amwith you only a little longer. You will look for me, and asI said to the Jews, so now I say to you, ‘‘Where I am going [i.e. where I amwithdrawing ( �ªø)] you cannot come. . . . ’’ ’ Simon Peter said to him,‘Lord, where are you going ( �ª�Ø�)?’ Jesus answered, ‘Where I am going,you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterwards. . . . And you knowthe way (�c ›�� ) to the place I am going to.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, wedo not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said tohim, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father exceptthrough me.’ (13: 33, 36; 14: 4–6)12

The search sub-plot is rounded off satisfactorily, though with deepirony, by the episode of Jesus’ arrest in the garden. Before this,however, the theme of the search receives an extra twist that isquite hard to disentangle. Both scene and scenario, of course, arecompletely different. Jesus is now inside, in private, surrounded notby enemies but by friends, from whom he is about to take a finalfarewell. But this does not explain why he employs the same veiledlanguage to his disciples as he did to the Jews.

The reason is that the function of the riddling language is different.In the original exchange between Jesus and the Jews the riddleserves, as often, to reinforce the original readers’ gratifying sense ofsuperiority to those who do not belong to the community. Thedistinction, therefore, is between insiders and outsiders. When speak-ing to Peter Jesus says something slightly different—not ‘you will notfind (� æ��Œ�Ø )’ but ‘you cannot follow (IŒºıŁB�ÆØ)’. He is nottalking about hidden wisdom but about discipleship. Moreover the

12 Peter’s question in 13: 36 is obviously a response to Jesus’ statement in 13: 33,‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ The intervening love commandment (13: 34–5)is a later insertion, belonging to the same level of redaction as ch. 15. (For a fullerdiscussion, see Ch. 11, pp. 432–3.) I have also bracketed out the prophecy of Peter’sdenial (13: 37–8) and the first few verses of ch. 14.

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distinction is now a temporal one, between now and later. It is thedistinction between Jesus’ own disciples who have heard his messagebut cannot yet carry its burden (16: 12) and those later disciples,paradoxically privileged, who will be led into the wonderful realm of‘the truth’ under the guidance of the Paraclete (16: 13). It is thetypically apocalyptic distinction between two stages of revelation,one shadowy and obscure, the other open and plain, that is statedmore fully in 16: 25. (See above, pp. 322–3.)

In the first half of the Gospel Jesus had spoken of truth and life(both terms that belong to the secret language of the community) butnever of the way. The meaning of this term seems at first sight quiteobvious. When he first uses the word (14: 4) it refers to his ownjourney back to the Father, a journey which will eventually be takenby his disciples also. But then, in response to Thomas’s protest thathe does not know the way, where he is going, he ignores the impliedquestion and suggests in his response that he himself is the path toGod: ‘I am the way; no one comes to the Father except by me.’

I want to argue that this extraordinary statement is equivalent tothe Prologue’s identification of Jesus as the Logos of God, the divineplan for the world. That is to say it is yet another appeal, the last anddefinitive appeal, to the wisdom tradition which, as we have seen,illuminates and informs the plot of the Gospel. To justify this claimI need to go back and take a look at a facet of that tradition that hasnot yet been fully explored.

There is a lot of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible, most of it in thesection given the general name of theWritings. Two broad streams oftradition may be distinguished. I call these the available and theremote. The most striking difference between them is that availablewisdom, which is essentially a matter of experience, may be taught;whereas remote wisdom, never transmitted by human agency, isonly ever sensed indirectly, and must be revealed in order to beknown at all. ‘Happy the man who finds wisdom and the man whogets understanding’, proclaims the sage (Prov. 3: 13), and then goeson to assert only a few verses later that ‘the Lord by wisdom foundedthe earth; by understanding founded the heavens’ (3: 19). The sameword carries two distinct meanings.

These two types of wisdom are personified in startlingly contrast-ing ways in a single chapter of the Book of Proverbs. The brash,importunate teacher who had already put in appearance on thetop of the walls and at the entrance to the city gates (Prov. 1: 21)

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reappears in chapter 8 calling for people to attend to her wisecounsels (8: 1–21). Then, quite unexpectedly, we are confronted bya very different personage, no longer forthcoming but evasive. This isWisdom the favourite of Yahweh, whom he created, acquired, orengendered (there is continuing disagreement about how the Hebrewword should be translated)13 ‘at the beginning of his work’ and endsup ‘rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men’(8: 22–31). Her role is to illuminate the creative work of Yahweh, totell the men to whom she speaks, subtly and indirectly, of his atti-tudes; she reveals a mystery but says no more about it than whatis known already.14 Elsewhere, borrowing a phrase of Bultmann,I have remarked that she reveals no more than that she is therevealer.15 Immediately after this brilliantly evocative passage thechapter is rounded off by further advice fromWisdom as teacher, whoconcludes with a verse that is echoed in the Gospel of John: ‘he whomisses me injures himself; all who hate me love death’ (8: 36; cf. John8: 21, ‘youwill seekme and die in your sin’—closer to the LXX version,which instead of the Hebrew ‘he who misses me injures himself’ has‘those who sin against me (ƒ �b �N� K�b ±�Ææ� ���) dishonourthemselves’).

There is evidently a world of difference between Wisdom theteacher on the one hand, who states reassuringly that ‘those whoseek me diligently find me’ (Prov. 8: 17; cf. Sir. 6: 17), provides thosewho fear God with the bread of understanding, and gives them thewater of wisdom to drink (Sir. 15: 3); and on the other hand themysterious figure who assists God in his work of creation, who isknown to him alone (Bar. 4: 31, 36), and who eventually ‘appearedupon earth and lived among men’ (Bar. 3: 37). This second figure, notwisdom the teacher, is evidently the figure eventually incarnated asthe Logos.

Yet alongside this tradition of revealed wisdom, whose story, as wehave seen, constitutes the central plot of the Fourth Gospel, there isan equally strong tradition of a wisdom that remains hidden, knownof course to God but defeating all human attempts to find her. The

13 The various possibilities are fully considered by Angelika Strotmann (‘Relativeoder absolute Praexistenz’. She concludes (p. 100) that the poet is deliberately makinguse of equivocal (uneindeutig) concepts in this ‘almost cryptic’ text.

14 This passage is quoted by Eusebius, HE 1. 2. 15, who has just made a clearassociation between Logos and Sophia.

15 Studying John, 10.

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best-known and most powerful statement about this hidden wisdomcomes in Job 28. The opening section of this chapter, which praisessome of the more remarkable achievements of the human spirit, endswith a cryptic statement to the effect that man ‘brings forth to lightthe thing that is hid’ (28: 11). What follows, however, is an account ofwhat he will never succeed, despite his best efforts, in ‘bringing forthto light’:

But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of theliving.

The depth saith, It is not in me: and the sea saith, It is not with me.It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the pricethereof.

It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or thesapphire.

The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not befor jewels of fine gold.

No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom isabove rubies.

The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with puregold.

Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of theair.

Destruction and death say, We have heard the fame thereof with our ears.God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof.For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven;To make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure.When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of thethunder:

Then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out.(Job 28: 12–27)

In his classic study Wisdom in Israel Gerhard von Rad opened achapter entitled ‘The Self-Revelation of Creation’ by quoting Job 28

in its entirety, thus placing it alongside the series of poems beginningwith Prov. 8: 22–31 that hymn Wisdom’s role in creation. But thepoem in Job, unlike these, is not about revelation but about hidden-ness or concealment, contrasting as it does the achievements ofhuman energies and skills with the unsearchable mystery of God.

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The deuteronomists insist on the line to be drawn between what hasbeen revealed to Israel (the Law) and ‘the secret things’ that belongto God (Deut. 29: 28), and whether or not there is any link betweenthis insistence and Job’s meditation it must have been welcome tosages like Ben Sira, who condemns the search for esoteric knowledge:‘hidden wisdom and unseen treasure, what advantage is there ineither of them?’ (Sir. 20: 30; cf. 3: 21–3; 18: 4–5).

Both Deuteronomy and Ben Sira are contesting the legitimacy ofhuman speculation concerning matters they regard as inappropriatefor mere humans. Much later the Mishnah H

˙agigah names four

topics which a man cannot even reflect upon without risking hislife ‘what is above, what is beneath, what was before time, and whatwill be hereafter’ (2.1), thus neatly encapsulating, as ChristopherRowland has pointed out, the broad themes of the apocalypticists.16

There was a great deal of wisdom speculation going on at the endof the era.17 This fact alone, whether or not any of the texts that havecome down to us were known to the fourth evangelist, lends indirectsupport to my suggestion that he too was reflecting on these tradi-tions.

A number of late apocalyptic writings contain what Michael Stonehas called ‘Lists of Revealed Things’, and included in these there isone item in particular that needs to be considered here. Job put thekey question, ‘Whence then comes wisdom? And where is the placeof understanding?’ but shied away from an answer: ‘God under-stands the way to it, and he knows its place’ (28: 20, 23).18 Formost of the apocalypticists, however, there is no limit to the rangeof their knowledge. Enoch claims omniscience (2 Enoch 40: 20), andBaruch includes in a long list of things that he has been shown‘the root of wisdom, the riches of understanding, and the fount ofknowledge’ (2 Bar. 59: 5). In this respect it is 4 Ezra who is the trueheir to Job. Uriel, his relentless and tough-minded angelic guide,poses him a series of unanswerable questions which as Stone rightlysees ‘amounts to a denial, daring, perhaps even polemical, of theavailability of certain types of special knowledge, a denial therefore

16 Open Heaven, 7617 Three of the Dead Sea Scrolls texts are particularly important in this regard:

4Q27, 299–300 Mysteries; 4Q415–19 Instruction; 4Q420–4 Ways of Righteousness.18 LXX is slightly different here: ‘God understood (�ı ������ ) the way to her (ÆP�B�

�c ›�� ) and he knows her place (�e ��� ÆP�B�).’

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of a specific part of the apocalyptic tradition’.19 But this denial is atthe same time a reaffirmation of the message of Job, in which Godalone understands (LXX, ‘understood’) the way to wisdom (ÆP�B� �c ›�� ) and knows its place (�e ��� ÆP�B�) ( Job 28: 23). In 4 Ezra, as inJob, the way of God is the heart of the mystery, different in kind aswell as in degree from the natural phenomena that surround it. Uriel,fully aware that Ezra will be baffled and frustrated by the riddles he issetting him, knows that unlike these natural things the way of God,his plan for the world, is inaccessible even in principle to mere mortals.Like Job, he places God’s way at the centre of his list of things that theseer cannot be expected to comprehend: ‘for the way of the MostHigh is created immeasurable’ (4: 11, Syriac text). This picks up onEzra’s complaint, towards the end of the previous chapter, that Godhas not shown anyone how ‘his way’ might be understood (3: 31).

Especially relevant to the theme of hidden wisdom is a beautifulpoem in the apocryphal Book of Baruch:

Who has gone up into heaven, and taken her, and brought her down fromthe clouds?

Who has gone over the sea, and found her, and will buy her for pure gold?

No one knows the way to her (�c ›�e ÆP�B�), or is concerned about the pathto her.

But he who has knowledge of the universe (�a � �Æ) knows her, he foundher by his understanding. He who prepared the earth for all time filled it withfour-footed creatures;

he who sends forth the light, and it goes, called it, and it obeyed him in fear;the stars shone in their watches, and were glad; he called them, and theysaid, ‘Here we are!’ They shone with gladness for him who made them.

This is our God; no other can be compared to him!

He found the whole way to knowledge (�A�Æ ›�e K�Ø������), and gave herto Jacob his servant and to Israel whom he loved.

Afterward she appeared upon earth and lived among men.(Baruch 3: 29–4: 1)

Baruch has clearly reflected deeply on Job 28 and used his ownversion of this hymn to refine the message of Sirach 24. Wisdomhere, rather than being utterly inaccessible to humanity, is portrayedas having been searched out by God himself and then given to Israel

19 ‘Lists’, 420.

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in the form of the Law. As such she remains a source of life to ‘all whohold fast to her’.

Just before the start of the Farewell Discourse a puzzled Thomas,picking up on Jesus’ reply to a question Peter has just asked, pusheshim harder. Jesus had told the disciples, ‘you know the way [to]where I am going’ (‹�ı �ªø Y�Æ�� �c ›�� ). ‘We do not knowwhere you are going,’ protests Thomas, ‘how can we know the way?’Jesus replies, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes tothe Father, but by me’ (John 14: 5–6). In one respect this answerseems to miss the point of the question, since Thomas is asking aboutJesus’ imminent departure, not about the way to God. In respondingas he does, however, Jesus is restating in his own fashion the insightof the Prologue that he is the incarnation of wisdom: for the way toGod, as the sapiential tradition makes plain, is wisdom, and he is thatway.

In the Fourth Gospel the Logos (¼ Wisdom), just as in Baruch,‘appeared on earth and lived among men’,20 but took the place of theLaw as the source of life to all who accept the message of Jesus. Assuch he is not the path to knowledge, as Baruch would have it, butthe way, the only way, to God. And in so far as he is also ‘the truth’ (astronger word than Baruch’s knowledge, even though this must beacknowledged to be in synonymous parallel with wisdom) he is alsolife: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’.

Like Baruch, the Fourth Evangelist appears to have reflected bothon Job 28 and Sirach 24 (whose term, ‘tabernacle’, [�Œ� F ], isemployed in 1: 14), and, again like Baruch, presented his ownvariations on both. Of course this is a speculative suggestion on mypart, but its plausibility is enhanced, I believe, by the evidence of aslightly earlier writer’s equally profound meditation on the sametwo texts.21

20 The Ethiopic version of this verse has ‘she appeared on earth and became like ahuman being (mortal) (wa-ona kama sab’)’. W. Harrelson (‘Wisdom Hidden’,165)defends the authenticity of this reading against the charge that it must be a Christianinterpolation, but it scarcely accords with the identification of Wisdom and Law.

21 Interesting, but perhaps only marginally relevant to the theme of this chapter(and therefore relegated to Excursus VIII) are the curious parallels between the FourthGospel and the Wisdom of Solomon, which focus on another of the three elements ofJesus’ reply to Thomas—life. This excursus repeats the conclusion of an earlier essay ofmine, ‘Riddles and Mysteries’.

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Excursus VIII: The Fourth Gospel and theWisdom of Solomon

In appropriating the central motifs of the Jewish wisdom traditionand reapplying them to the person of Jesus, the fourth evangelist wasat the same time laying claim to territory already staked out by theauthor of the Wisdom of Solomon. Whether he was actuallyacquainted with this apocryphal work (written, like his own, in theGreek language) cannot now be determined. But the two writingsexhibit a number of striking similarities that deserve to be empha-sized, for a comparison sheds light on the central purposes of each.

In the first place, both the fourth evangelist and the author ofWisdom of Solomon can be seen to be reflecting directly on the genreexemplified by their respective works. But whereas John is workingwith the quite recent (and quite limited) gospel tradition, the authorof Wisdom of Solomon is able to draw upon the literary corpus of theentire Hebrew Bible. He is not the first Jewish writer to have acted inthis way: the narrative section of Deuteronomy is largely a midrashof Exodus and Numbers; Deutero-Isaiah, working with the pre-exilicprophetic tradition, was able at the same time to reflect on theessential characteristics of prophecy itself. Our author, whom wemight call Deutero-Solomon, standing outside the Hebrew canonbut clearly harking back to it, is bolder still, incorporating in hiswork elements from all the major biblical genres. His last chaptereven includes apocalyptic, and an earlier passage is highly reminis-cent of Stone’s ‘lists of revealed things’ (Wis. Sol. 7: 17–20).

In the second place, both Deutero-Solomon and the fourth evan-gelist use a private language to bolster the pride and confidence ofwhat was no doubt a tightly knit group of fellow-believers sur-rounded by a hostile majority. In the case of Greek Solomon wemay suppose that if his Egyptian hosts had even guessed at thenature and extent of the vilification he was heaping upon themthey would have reacted with anger and hostility. And whereas theJewish readers for whom he wrote would have greeted the recastingof the biblical legends in the second half of the book, along with theirattribution to a series of unnamed men and women, with delighted

recognition, their pagan fellow-citizens must have responded withblank incomprehension. They are even less likely to have identifiedthe man who pleased God and was ‘perfected in a short time’ (Wis.Sol. 4: 13) with the 365-year-old Enoch, or to have seen in the claimfor immortality made on behalf of the righteous man at the begin-ning of the book (who boasted that God was his father: 2: 16; cf. 18:13) an acknowledgement of God’s determination to rescue his chosenpeople from all adversity. Yet the key to these riddles lies in theHebrew scriptures.

Third, in both books a reflective section (very short in the case ofJohn) is followed by an extended narrative section, with the figure ofWisdom playing a major role in each. In the first (meditative) half ofWisdom of Solomon an exhortation to seek wisdom (6: 1–21) isfollowed by a long disquisition on Solomon’s quest for wisdom thatculminates in a midrashic version of his great prayer (9: 1–18; cf. 1Kings 8). This intricately patterned passage is punctuated by numer-ous reminders of hymn-like praises of Wisdom from the earliertradition: Prov. 8: 22–31; Sir. 24; Bar. 3: 9—4: 1. The second half ofthe book begins with a narrative (summarized in 9: 18) listing theachievements of personified Wisdom. In the Fourth Gospel the medi-tative section is restricted to the Prologue, often seen as a hymn tothe Logos, Wisdom’s masculine surrogate, while the hero of the longnarrative that follows (who now has the human name ‘Jesus’) is to beseen among other things as a figure of Wisdom.

Finally, we should remember the place each of these authors givesto the theme of life, found everywhere in the Hebrew Bible from itsfirst appearance as the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, but especiallycommon in the wisdom literature. I suspect that ‘life’ always carriessome of the resonance already discernible in the symbol of the tree oflife. This of course holds out for human beings the enticing prospectof immortality, an idea taken up directly by Greek Solomon whenhe promises IŁÆ Æ��Æ to everyone who heeds the laws of wisdom(Wis. Sol. 6: 15; cf. 1: 12, 15; 4: 1; 5: 15; 6: 18; 8: 13, 17). The Odes ofSolomon, claiming the authority of the same name, add a slightlydifferent nuance by speaking of the deathless life that ‘rose up inthe land of the Lord, and . . . became known to his faithful ones, andwas given unsparingly to those who trust in him’ (15: 10; cf. 28: 31; 38:3; 40: 6). The promises of the Odes are more than matched by thefourth evangelist; there is no need to list the numerous passages inthe Fourth Gospel that guarantee eternal life to those who believe in

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Jesus. But John goes further. When Jesus says of his adversaries, ‘theJews’, that they ‘search for life in the scriptures’, he could well bespeaking to the readers of Wisdom of Solomon, in so far as this book,as we have seen, sets out to encapsulate the whole biblical tradition.But, declares Jesus uncompromisingly, ‘I am the one to whom theybear witness’ (John 5: 39).

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10

DUALISM

The Fourth Gospel announces its dualism clearly and unequivocallyfrom the very first page: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and thedarkness has not mastered it’ (1: 5). This light, already declared tobe ‘the life of men’, that is to say of the human race, continues toshine in spite of the futile attempts of the darkness to overcome it.1

A few verses later this opposition is repeated in different terms:‘He was in the world . . . yet the world knew him not’ (1: 10). Thenit is explained—reflected—in a declaration of further hostility: ‘Hecame to his own home (�a Y�ØÆ), and his own people (ƒ Y�ØØ) receivedhim not’ (1: 11). And a little further on ‘he’ (the light that is the lightof the human race) is identified as ‘the Word made flesh’.

Thus in a few short sentences the writer declares not just thenature of the opposition encountered by Jesus (yet to be named)during his sojourn on earth, but also the way in which he perceivesthis opposition, in terms of the refusal of Jesus’ own people (yet to beidentified) to accept him. This means that both the cosmic battlebetween light and darkness and the unremitting enmity of whatBultmann rightly sees to be ‘the world of men’ are focused quitenarrowly upon the short life on earth of a single individual, andindirectly also upon those who witnessed it. The writer counts him-self among these: ‘we have beheld his glory’ (1: 14).

Most of the themes of the present chapter, then, are alreadyindicated in this brief analysis of just a few sentences of the Prologue,either explicitly: (1) light and darkness, (2) the world, (3) life, or(implicitly) (4) judgement (which the evangelist saw as a responseto the opposition encountered by Jesus) and (5) trial (which is judge-ment as displayed and enacted in the events of the story).

1 The Greek word here translated ‘mastered’ is ŒÆ��ºÆ�� . There is some uncertaintywhether the verb ŒÆ�ƺÆ� �Ø means ‘overcome’ or ‘understand’. Although theformer meaning is probably right here, there is perhaps a hint of ambiguity, and‘mastered’ is intended to convey this.

Bultmann maintained that it is a mistake to look for the origins ofthe Gospel’s central ideas independently of one another: ‘for John’slanguage is a whole and it is in this whole that each individual termfinds its meaning (seine feste Bestimmung)’.2 But Jorg Frey showsthat this opinion, although shared by many subsequent commenta-tors, is simply an assumption. Earlier scholars—Heitmuller,Holtzmann, Bousset—took a broader perspective, and it was onlywhen Reitzenstein began to look for the origins of the Gospel in someform of oriental Gnosticism that the idea of a single source tookhold.3 Once this assumption is called into question, argues Frey, wehave to ask first whether the various elements that constitute whatwe call John’s dualism may have different origins, and secondlywhether they function in the same way in the Gospel, whetherthey have what he calls ‘a functional unity’, and if so with whatpurpose. As they are variously expressed in the Gospel whathistorical experiences (of the community) do they reflect and howare they intended to impact upon its readers? Finally Frey asks quitespecifically,

is the polemical opposition between Jesus and the Jews in chapter 8 to beunderstood within the same framework (Rahmen) as the confrontation ofcommunity and world in chapters 15–17? What is the relevance (Stellenwert)in this context of the antithesis between light and darkness? What is meantby talking of the devil or the ‘ruler of the world’?4

These questions alert us to the possibility that the Gospel’s dualismmay not function in the same way throughout. Bultmann says of thetwo short sentences that comprise 1: 5 that they relate to the aspect ofthe Gospel that is developed in chapters 3–12, whereas the otheraspect, outlined in 1: 12–13, is developed in chapters 13–17.5 Thelight/darkness contrast, in fact, is confined to the first half of theGospel, where it serves to reinforce the reader’s sense of the radicalantagonism between Jesus and ‘the Jews’. We shall see that the samecontrast is frequently employed in the sectarian literature of SecondTemple Judaism to emphasize the difference between good and bad,between insiders and outsiders, between the writer and his readersand everybody else.

2 ‘Johanneische Schriften’, 154. 3 Frey, ‘Licht aus Hohlen’, 170–1.4 Ibid. 174 5 Bultmann, p. 48.

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1. light and darkness

There can be few societies if any in the course of history that have notseized upon the contrast between light and dark, night and day, tosignify the contrast between good and evil or misery and content.This is an archetypal symbol, rooted in the deepest instinct of thehuman race. No doubt the firm monotheism of Israel’s official faithmeans that the contrast has less religious significance than in someother cultures, for after all God created darkness as well as light, evilas well as good (Isa. 45: 7). Nevertheless Amos’s question retains itsanguish: ‘Is not the day of the Lord darkness and not light, andgloom with no brightness in it?’ (Amos 5: 20).

The symbolism is found occasionally in the Synoptic tradition,6

not surprisingly in view of its universality; but in John its importanceis evident, as we have seen, from the outset. The amazing statementthat the darkness failed to overcome the shining light (1: 5) setsout the fundamental opposition to God’s revelatory plan in thestarkest possible terms. The opposition undoubtedly has a cosmicdimension—the light is encompassed by darkness—but the light isthe light of revelation and is not distinct from the Logos even in hishuman form. There is no question of light succeeding darknesshere. The light of revelation accompanies the existence of thehuman race; indeed it is ‘the life of men’ (1: 4) and the presenttense in v. 5 (�Æ� �Ø), ‘shines’, which has puzzled many commenta-tors, does not indicate the bright start of a new age, but a continuousillumination that finally flames out in the incarnation of the Logos.7

Later in the Gospel the same idea is taken up in one of the famous‘I am’ sayings: ‘I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not

6 Cf. Mark 13: 24 and parallels: one sign of the coming of the end will be thedarkening of the sun. Even where there is a deliberate reversal of the natural symbol-ism the new meaning rises as a descant over a basso ostinato heard strongly by theinner ear. The reversal is surprisingly widespread. A good instance is Ps. 139: 11, wherethe paradox is particularly vivid in the rendering of the Vulgate, nox illuminatio mea, aphrase that made a profound impression upon John of the Cross; similar are Ruys-broek’s doncker claer (‘dark radiance’) and Henry Vaughan’s ‘deep but dazzling dark-ness’. Literary examples range from Romeo and Juliet andWagner’s Tristan und Isolde totitles of books by Arthur Koestler and William Golding, Darkness at Noon and DarknessVisible (see too the ‘black lightning’ that is such an important symbol in PincherMartin). Bultmann (p. 43 n. 2) draws attention to Denys the Areopagite (De myst.theol. 1 and 2); also to Novalis and Rilke.

7 For a fuller version of this reading of the Prologue see Ashton, ‘Transformation’.

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walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’ (8: 12). Bultmanncomments on this verse: ‘The decisive feature is not the universalitybut the dualism; for without the revelation the world is in darkness.’8

This is true up to a point, for John’s view of the world is oftennegative and pessimistic. On the other hand, the entry of light intothe world must at least partially dispel the darkness: the dualism isnot absolute. The picture offered by the Gospel is one of a lightshining in the darkness and attracting men by its radiance. Drawnto the source of light they come to attach themselves to it, extendingand magnifying it and thereby limiting still further the domain ofdarkness: ‘While you have the light,’ Jesus tells his followers, ‘believein the light, that you may become sons of the light’ (12: 36). Thecommunity becomes conscious that in assuming Jesus’ mission, sentinto the world as he was, it takes on both his pains and his respon-sibilities.

The ambivalence of John’s view of the world is to be explained bythe fact that though in darkness it is potentially lightsome. Theelliptical brevity of the Prologue can be misleading: ‘his own peoplereceived him not . . . But to all who did receive him . . . ’ (1: 12). Thisstatement is verified in the Gospel both in what is said there about thedisciples and also in the references to conversion, of which the firstclear instance is the coming to belief of the Samaritans (4: 39–42).

Accordingly, what looks like and has often been interpreted as acosmological dualism close to Gnosticism is really a moral dualism:the good (in this case those who accept the revelation of Jesus) versusthe wicked (those who reject that revelation—‘the Jews’). This kindof polarization (regularly accompanied and supported by the light/darkness symbolism) is very common in the sectarian literature ofthe period. Just how easy it is to pass from an apparently cosmicdualism to a moral dualism may be seen from a rabbinic comment onthe first page of Genesis: ‘and God divided the light from the darkness,i.e. the works of the righteous from the works of the wicked, ‘‘andGod called the light Day’’; this refers to the works of the righteous;‘‘and darkness he called Night’’; this is the works of the wicked’ (Gen.Rab. 3: 8).9 This is a late passage, but a similar moral dualismpervades virtually the whole of the Old Testament, especially thePsalms.

8 Bultmann, p. 343.9 Cited by Odeberg, p. 140. Cf. 2 Enoch 30: 14–15; Barn. 18: 1–2.

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Nevertheless the division of mankind into good and bad becomesmore noticeable and more extreme in the writings of the SecondTemple era that emanate from circles outside the establishment.Characteristic is the separation of the wicked from the righteous atthe end of time (something to be discussed in a subsequent sectionunder the heading ‘Judgement’). In view of Israel’s profound andpervasive sense of divine election we might expect the wicked to beidentified with the Gentiles. This happens quite frequently, the Qum-ran War Scroll being a particularly clear example (cf. also Pss. Sol. 3:3–8; 15: 4–13). The appellation ‘righteous’ is also quite commonlyreserved for the members of the writer’s own sect; in that case thewicked are either their special enemies or even conceivably the rest ofthe human race. The so-called Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 92–105),written probably towards the beginning of the second century,labours the point with wearisome insistence from beginning toend: ‘And the righteous man will rise from sleep . . . and he will livein goodness and righteousness and will walk in eternal light. Andsins will be destroyed in darkness for ever and from that day willnever be seen’ (92: 3–5). The conclusion of the whole book is similar:‘And they will see those who were born in darkness thrown intodarkness, while the righteous shine. And the sinners will cry out asthey see them shining, but they themselves will go where the daysand times have been written down for them’ (108: 14–15).10

A manuscript from Qumran exhibits very clearly the rich blend ofeschatological and moral dualism that makes it so difficult to insistupon the kind of distinction that was later to become so important inWestern philosophy:

And this shall be the sign for you that these things should come to pass.When the breed of iniquity is imprisoned, wickedness shall then be banishedby righteousness as darkness is banished by the light. As smoke clears and isno more, so shall wickedness perish for ever and righteousness be revealedlike a sun governing the world. All who cleave to the mysteries of sin shall be

10 D. Hill, ‘Dikaioi’, traces the use of the term ��ŒÆØØ in Matthew back to 1 Enoch,e.g. 11: 1; 82: 4, and Qumran. He suggests reading the meaning ‘sons of righteousness’into the phrase ‘sons of Zadok’ in CD4: 2–3, a midrashic exposition of Ezek. 44: 15; andproposes that the same term in 1QS5: 2 and 1QSa1: 2, 24; 2: 3 refers to a leading groupwithin the community, priests as distinct from laity. Many of the passages he cites from1 Enoch are from the Parables section, which is probably the latest part of the collection.It is surprising that he does not refer to the Epistle of Enoch. To his list could be added 1:7–8; 5: 6–9; 27: 2–3; 41: 8; 45: 6; 48: 6; 50: 2; 53: 2–7; 81: 7–9. See too Apoc. Abr. 13: 10–11;29: 18–19; T. Abr. 11.

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no more; knowledge shall fill the world and folly shall exist no longer. (1Q27.1: 5–7; cf. also 4Q299–301; 542–9)11

One senses in these passages vindictiveness as well as hope; thewriters already know who the righteous are and who the impious.The threat of divine punishment is not employed here, as it would belater in certain Christian circles (splendidly satirized in Joyce’s Por-trait of the Artist), to terrorize the faithful into subservient rectitude.Nor is the judgement preceded by an arbitrary decision on the part ofGod to single out certain chosen souls, whatever their subsequentbehaviour, for final salvation (a doctrine savagely lampooned inJames Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner). Rather what we havehere is a way of assuring the members of the writer’s own sect that inspite of all appearances they are really on the winning side. Thestruggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil canhave only one outcome: the good will prevail. ‘Now is the judgementof the ruler of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out’(John 12: 31; cf. 14: 30).

Less picturesque than the opposition between light and darkness,but closely associated with it, is the contrast between truth andfalsehood: ‘Truth abhors the works of falsehood, and falsehoodhates all the ways of truth’ (1QS4: 17). This is to be expected in thewritings under discussion, in so far as they are the work of sects,groups who have either broken away from the religious establish-ment like the covenanters at Qumran, or else remain focuses ofdissent within it. They are therefore what Peter Berger12 calls cog-nitive minorities: their discontent finds expression in the burningconviction that they and they alone possess the truth. They mayhave good reasons for their dissatisfaction; in any event they need tojustify it to themselves and if possible to others also on rationalgrounds. Inevitably too their benefits will reinforce and be reinforcedby their sense of isolation. Given the right conditions they mayeventually become strong and numerous enough to go it alone; ifso, their fear of being swamped or engulfed by the establishment islikely to fade, and with it the strength of their beliefs. This is a familiar

11 This passage shows how easily the ostensibly sapiential distinction betweenknowledge and folly coheres with the moral distinction between good and bad. TheBook of Wisdom itself evinces a clear moral dualism; and many apocalyptic writings,e.g. Daniel and 4 Ezra, attest to the pervasive influence of wisdom motifs.

12 Rumour of Angels, 18.

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pattern. If, on the other hand, the conditions are not right, or if thegroup somehow needs enemies for its faith to survive, then theoutcome may be different, for its sense of identity is buttressed byits fears and may well collapse without them. A group of this kind,seeing itself in the nature of the case as a persecuted minority, willrequire some assurance that things will come right in the end. At thesame time it will retain a powerful conviction of being on the side oftruth as well as on that of righteousness.

The opposition between the good and the wicked so prominentin the Epistle of Enoch is already found in the original conclusion ofMalachi, the last of the biblical prophets, a passage composed to-wards the beginning of the Second Temple era, at a time when, as wesaw in Chapter 1, the returning exiles from Bablyon were gatheringas an inner echelon within the ranks of Judaism—ƒ � �ı�ÆEØ.13

Then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another, the Lord heeded andheard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of thosewho feared the Lord and thought on his name. They shall be mine, says theLord of hosts, my special possession on the day when I act, and I will sparethem as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shalldistinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between one who servesGod and one who does not serve him. (Mal. 3: 16–18)

According to Shemeriyahu Talmon this passage alludes to the situ-ation of the Samaritan schism, precipitated by the returningexiles’ rejection of those who had remained behind. The innergroup eventually came to constitute a confessional community thatcontrolled the new temple-state in and around Jerusalem. If, as isconceivable, even likely, the fourth evangelist was himself a memberof this establishment group,14 one can understand how easily, oncehe had pledged allegiance to Jesus, he could redeploy the dualistic

13 See Talmon, ‘Emergence’, 60114 I used to think that the evangelist was a convert from Essenism. But I am now

persuaded that my arguments in favour of this view in the first edition of Understand-ing, based largely on a comparison between John and a particular passage from theCommunity Rule, were unsound. Three scholars, Richard Bauckham (‘Qumran’),David Aune (‘Dualism’), and Jorg Frey (‘Licht’), have pointed out how much thepassage in question (1QS3: 13–14: 26) differs, both in thought and vocabulary, fromthe Fourth Gospel. Moreover this is now believed to be an earlier, self-containedwriting, incorporated only later into the Community Rule. It is included in only oneof the relatively numerous fragmentary copies of the Rule found in Cave 4, namely4QSc(¼ 4Q452). (See Aune, ‘Dualism’, 292–3; Frey, ‘Licht’, 148–50.)

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metaphors already familiar to him and apply them to the newsituation in which he found himself.

Truth abhors the works of falsehood, and falsehood hates all the ways oftruth. And their struggle is fierce for they do not walk together. But in themysteries of his understanding, and in his glorious wisdom, God hasordained an end for falsehood, and at the time of his visitation he will destroyit for ever. (1QS4: 17–19)15

In John the struggle between truth and falsehood is equally bitterand the upshot equally certain. The symbolism of light and truth isexploited to greater effect than at Qumran, for Jesus is identified notonly as the light of the world (8: 12) but also as the truth (14: 6). ForJohn the main task of the ‘spirit of truth’ will be to recall to hisdisciples’ minds the words of Jesus and to lead them into all truth(14: 26; 16: 13). There is certainly an affinity between the FourthGospel and the Dead Sea Scrolls,16 but it is not close enough tosuggest a direct relationship, and in any case there is a depth and adeftness in the Gospel that surpasses anything in the Scrolls.

To answer Frey’s questions concerning (a) the experiences of thecommunity that are reflected in the Gospel and (b) the likely impactupon its readers we can scarcely do better than to turn to John 9,where the light/darkness symbolism is brilliantly deployed to ensurethat the significance of the blind man’s cure is fully understood.About to perform the miraculous cure, Jesus declares: ‘We must

15 Becker compares this extract from the Community Rule with John 3: 19–21: ‘andmen loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For everyone whodoes evil hates the light, and does not come into the light, lest his deeds be exposed . . . ’.He qualifies the dualism of this passage, quite wrongly, as ‘pradestinationisch-ethisch’(‘Beobachtungen’, 79). In his commentary he emends this to ‘deterministisch-ethisch’(149). But whatever determinism is present here is self-determinism. This sharplydifferentiates it from the relevant extract of the Community Rule, which does indeedsuggest that mankind is divided into good and bad by the prevenient will of its creator.Both passages, however, are embedded in contexts that appear to contradict them. Thevaried instructions that constitute the bulk of the Community Rule imply the possibil-ity of free, i.e. undetermined, human decisions. As for the Gospel, the good aregenerally distinguished from the bad not by their earlier moral choices but by theirresponse to the message of Jesus. To argue, as Becker does, that 3: 19–21 is represen-tative of one particular stage of the Johannine community’s dualistic thinking is tobuild a rather tall theory on a very narrow base.

16 See now J. A. Fitzmyer, ‘Qumran Literature’, 128, where he stresses that theconnection, though indirect, is nevertheless stronger than Bauckham is prepared toadmit. For the parallelisms do at least ‘suggest familiarity with the type of thoughtexhibited in the scrolls’.

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work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; nightcomes, when no one can work’ (9: 4), the awkward plural (‘we’)guaranteeing that the readers of the Gospel will apply the teaching tothemselves (the second level of understanding). ‘As long as I am inthe world,’ continues Jesus, ‘I am the light of the world’ (9: 5). Hishearers pick up the strong hint that he may be leaving soon; but thereaders of the Gospel know that in another sense he is still with them.The chapter ends with a brief dialogue between Jesus and thePharisees: Jesus said, ‘For judgement I came into the world, thatthose who do not see may see . . . ’

We are now in a position to answer Frey’s question concerning theway in which the Gospel reflects the experiences of the communityand its intended impact upon its readers. Accepting Martyn’s thesisthat chapter 9 alludes to the dramatic rupture between the Jesus-group and the synagogue, we note that the deliberate application ofthe light/darkness symbolism serves to strengthen the conviction ofthe former that in attaching themselves to the one who has identifiedhimself with the light they have thereby moved out of the realm ofdarkness—now associated with their previous fellow-worshippers,who are still blindly proclaiming that they see.

What Adele Reinhartz, in an exceptionally hard-hitting article,says of the Gospel’s use of the term � �ı�ÆE� is equally applicable tothe symbolism of darkness:

we must reckon with the possibility that the potential of an anti-Jewishmeaning exists not only for a contemporary audience ignorant of the histor-ical experience of the community but also for ancient readers within thatcommunity itself. How else to account for the fact that the universalizingterm � �ı�ÆE� is used not once but repeatedly when ‘Jewish authorities’would have been more precise? Or for the shocking identification of theJews not as the children of Abraham, but of the devil (8: 44)? Expressions ofrage and trauma these may be, but in labeling the Jew as Other, the Gospelnot only reflects rage but also provides the antagonist demanded by theGospel’s narrative form and the negative pole against which the commu-nity’s identity can be defined. It is difficult to imagine that these words, andindeed, the manifold repetition of the term � �ı�ÆE� itself are not calculated tobreed not only distance but also hatred, just as the words of rival political andreligious groups do in our time.17

17 ‘On Travel’, 254–5.

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2. the world

The concept of the world, as it appears in the Fourth Gospel, is farfrom simple. On the contrary, there are two quite distinct oppositionsimplied by the term Œ����, and although these may coincide theyalso differ significantly. Sometimes › Œ���� appears to mean earth asopposed to heaven, down below as opposed to up above. Thus Jesuscan say of his disciples: ‘they are not of the world, even as I am not ofthe world’ (17: 16) and inform Pilate that his kingdom is ‘not of thisworld’ (18: 36). In these two instances KŒ of KŒ �F Œ���ı indicatesthe nature of what Jesus confronts; often it expresses origin as well:‘He who is of the earth belongs to the earth . . . he who comes fromheaven is above all’ (3: 31).18

This meaning, which implies what one may call a vertical oppos-ition, is most clearly expressed in 8: 23: ‘You are from below (KŒ �H

Œ�ø); I am from above (KŒ �H ¼ ø); you are of this world, I am not ofthis world.’ It is also present in the numerous allusions to Jesus’ entryinto the world: he does not come into the world like the rest ofmankind; he arrives from another place.19 But it is to be stressedthat the world he enters is, as Bultmann remarks, ‘the world ofmen’20 or simply ‘mankind’.21 Only in two instances (17: 5, 24)does Œ���� bear the meaning ‘cosmos’. The immediate source ofthis vertical opposition is the relative location of heaven and earth,respectively above and below, something we are in danger of forget-ting because it is always simply assumed. The constant shift ofmeaning, or rather connotation, makes it impossible to give any singledefinition. Sometimes the contrast between above and below appearsabsolute, especially when there is mention of ‘the ruler of this world’(12: 31; 14: 30; 16: 11), a term used elsewhere in Jewish and earlyChristian literature to denote Satan or Belial (T. Sol. 2: 9; 3: 5–6; 6: 1;Asc. Isa. 1: 3; 2: 4; 10: 29).22 Jesus, however, in his coming (or rather inhis passing) defeats the ruler of this world; and in any case in thebiblical tradition the gap between heaven and earth is constantly

18 See Bultmann, p. 138 n. 1.19 J. A. T. Robinson affirms that as applied to Jesus the expression ‘to come into the

world’ is the equivalent of being ‘born’ or ‘born into the world’ (16: 21), ‘which isapplied to Jesus [where?] and to any woman’s child’ (Priority, 370). This is surely eitherobtuse or perverse.

20 Bultmann, p. 54. 21 ‘Eschatology’, 166.22 See Aune, ‘Dualism’, 287, and the literature cited there.

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being bridged, sometimes by theophanies, sometimes by angelic orhuman messengers, prophets, conceived as sent directly from theheavenly court. Jesus himself is the last of these divine emissaries,entering the world with the God-given task of bringing life (3: 16;10: 10), light (8: 12; 12: 46), and salvation (3: 17; 4: 42; 12: 47). Clearestof all in the Fourth Gospel, and surprisingly unequivocal, is the asser-tion that ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only son . . . ’ (3: 16).

Contrasted with this there is a horizontal opposition, which isplayed out on earth. This is genuinely dualistic, but the dualism ismoral or ethical, not cosmological or metaphysical, what Bultmanncalls a dualism of decision (Entscheidungsdualismus).23 The Prologueappears to identify the world with darkness (1: 5, 10) and those whodid receive the Logos (1: 12) may be conceived as not belonging to theworld at all. Later, in the earliest version of the Farewell Discoursethe unreceptivity of the world towards the spirit of truth (14: 17)follows and matches its response to the Logos (1: 10).24 One mighthave expected a third opposition also—the temporal opposition be-tween the present world and the world to come. But the term y�� ›

ÆN� (the most usual rendering of the Hebrew ege¯

zl

˝Fpe

˝), quite

common elsewhere in the New Testament, especially in Paul, isnever used by John.25 Its absence in the Fourth Gospel may be dueto a resistance on John’s part to the temporal implications of the term.Whatever the reason, there is no hint of any temporal connotation

23 Theology, ii. 21. Luise Schottroff, who otherwise offers an uncompromisinglyGnostic interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, endorses Bultmann’s view here: DerGlaubende und die feindliche Welt, 231 n. 3. Many scholars rightly emphasize the incom-patibility of Judaism with true Gnosticism: ‘We have always to keep in mind thatgnosticism was a religious phenomenon diametrically opposed to everything Jewish; infact the God of the Jews was considered by the gnostics as an evil deity’ (I. Gruenwald,Apocalyptic, 111); ‘What distinguishes a gnostic dualism from all other types (e.g.Platonic or Indian) is that it is essentially anti-cosmic: that is, its conception includesan unequivocally negative evaluation of the visible world, together with its creator; itranks as a kingdom of evil and darkness’ (K. Rudolph, Gnosis, 60). Finally, see S.Petrement, Le Dieu separe, passim.

24 Many commentators, including Bultmann, see the term ‘his own’ (ƒ Y�ØØ) in thefollowing verse as alluding to the whole human race. I side with those who think itrefers to ‘the Jews’. If this is right, and 1: 11 is designed to narrow the focus frommankind in general to ‘the Jews’ in particular, then in the Gospel as we have it thefocus is enlarged once again in the second version of the Farewell Discourse. This hasthe effect of reversing the movement of the Prologue, which is one of descent.

25 See Matt. 12: 32, where it is explicitly distinguished from › ÆNg › ��ººø , the ageto come; Mark 10: 30; Luke 16: 8; 20: 34; Rom. 12: 2; 1 Cor. 1: 20; 2: 6, 8; 3: 18; 2 Cor. 4: 4;Eph. 1: 21; the Pastorals prefer › F ÆN� (the present age): 1 Tim. 6: 14; 2 Tim. 4: 10; Tit.2: 12. For John’s preferred expression › Œ���� y��, see 8: 23; 9: 39; 11: 9; 12: 25, 31;13: 1; 16: 11; 18: 36; 1 John 4: 17. Cf. Bultmann, p. 340 n. 1.

Dualism 397

in the way he uses it. We cannot add the contrast between the twoages to the two spatial oppositions we have already noted.

Closely connected with the above/below motif, and interwovenwith it in the elaborate conceptual web that sets apart those whobelong to this world from those who do not, is the figure of the Son ofMan. Wayne Meeks, who draws attention to the combination ofmotifs designed to emphasize the sheer otherness of Jesus, speaks inthis context of ‘redundance’, comparing the Gospel’s insistent repe-tition of this bundle of themes with the way in which the ‘noise’ thatmay interfere with electronic communications is overcome byrepeating the signal in as many different ways as possible.26 Oneimportant motif associated with the Son of Man is that of being ‘liftedup’ (on the cross, and thereby back to heaven).27 In its secondoccurrence (8: 28) the lifting up results in the disclosure of theidentity of the Son of Man. Over thirty years before Jorg Frey askedhis question concerning the function of Johannine dualism (seeabove), Meeks had expressed his astonishment that the social func-tion of the Gospel’s myths had been almost totally ignored.28 Clearlythere is myth in the dualism and dualism in the myth, and these twoquestions are effectively the same. So also, not surprisingly, are thetwo answers, although Meeks stresses an element missed by Frey,that ‘the book functions for its readers in precisely the same way thatthe epiphany of its hero functions within its narratives and dia-logues’.29

In telling the story of the Son of Man who came down from heaven and thenre-ascended after choosing a few of his own out of the world, the book definesand vindicates the existence of the community that evidently sees itself asunique, alien from its world, under attack, misunderstood, but living in unitywith Christ and through him with God.30

One final question remains to be answered. To quote Frey onceagain: ‘Is the polemical opposition between Jesus and ‘‘the Jews’’ inchapter 8 to be understood within the same framework (Rahmen) as

26 ‘Man from Heaven’, 144. 27 See Ch. 6, pp. 267–71, and Ch. 12, pp. 468–9.28 Meeks, ‘Man from Heaven’, 145. 29 Ibid. 162.30 Ibid. 163. Frey criticizes Meeks, unfairly, I think, for his ‘psychologizing transfer-

ence of the literary picture of an alien, misunderstood revealer to the believer’s feelingof alienation, corresponding to the sectarian isolation of the community’ (Eschatologie,i. 335). He says that this is hard to establish (begrunden). Of course it is: no hypothesis ofthis kind can be proved. As in all such cases, the strength of Meeks’s suggestion lies inits explanatory power.

398 Revelation

the confrontation of community and world in chapters 15–17?’ Be-hind this question lies the observation that ‘the Jews’ are virtuallyabsent from the Farewell Discourse—as indeed are the figure of theSon of Man and the symbolism of darkness. Frey makes no attempt toanswer his own question. The sheer generality of the term Œ���� isthe main difficulty; but we have to accept, I think, that at least from15: 18 onwards the clear antagonism towards the world that isevident in the Prologue, quickly narrowed in the Prologue itself tofocus on Jesus’ own people, has broadened out once more to bedirected to the world at large. Interestingly, Frey does not includechapter 14 in his question, rightly so, because despite the concludingreference to ‘the prince of this world’ (14: 30) we do not yet get theimpression of radical enmity, even hatred, that startles the reader byits sudden appearance in the following chapter: ‘If you were of theworld, the world would love its own; but because you are not of theworld, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hatesyou’ (15: 19). Right at the beginning of the discourse, in 13: 33, Jesus’reference to something he had said to ‘the Jews’ enables the evan-gelist to remind the readers of the Gospel that they are no longerpresent: of course they have no place in the supper-room, the cena-cle. But if, as we may suppose, chapter 14 belongs to the same level ofredaction as what precedes, then their absence cannot be taken tosignify any slackening of hostility on the part of the community.Chapters 15–17 are quite different. The allegory of the vine shows thecommunity turning in on itself: the simple instruction ‘love oneanother’ is in fact restrictive. The community has begun to huddletogether with occasional frightened glances at the world outside.Jurgen Becker speaks in this context quite justifiably, I believe, of a‘churchified dualism’ (verkirchlichter Dualismus).31

3. life

The Synoptic Gospels have been left on one side thus far because thepolar opposites that I have been considering up to now have rela-tively little place in them. But life (and implicitly death) is different.The richness of this concept in the Johannine writings is due to the

31 Becker, p. 151. For Becker this characterizes the third stage of a developingdualism. He may be right too about a first, pre-Gospel stage, with no hint of anydualism. He is surely wrong, however, about the middle stage. See above, n. 15.

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complexity of the traditions it reflects. To begin with it virtuallyreplaces the proclamation of the kingdom as the object of the gospelpromise; and in the single context in which this does occur, thedialogue with Nicodemus, the real topic of discussion is rebirthfrom on high, soon to be reinterpreted in John’s characteristic fash-ion as �øc ÆN� Ø�, a term usually translated as ‘eternal life’. Sowhere does this term come from and why does John select it to denotethe fruits of the gospel message?

Its immediate source is the Synoptic tradition. Jesus speaks ofentering into life and entering into the kingdom in a passage wherethe two expressions are clearly equivalent: ‘it is better for you to enterlifemaimed than with two hands to go to hell . . . it is better for you toenter the kingdom of Godwith one eye than with two eyes to be throwninto hell’ (Mark 9: 43, 47). Just how close the two concepts are may beseen from Matthew’s adaptation of this passage, for he actuallyreplaces Mark’s ‘kingdom of God’ with ‘life’ (18: 9). There is also thestory of the man anxious to know what to do in order to ‘inheriteternal life’ (Mark 10: 17). To his disappointment he is told to get rid ofhis wealth; whereupon ‘he went away sorrowful, for he had greatpossessions’. At this Jesus drove the lesson home to his disciples:‘How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdomof God’ (Mark 10: 22–3; cf. Matt. 19: 24; Luke 18: 24).

The passage that points most strongly to John’s dependence uponthe Synoptic tradition is this: ‘He who loves his soul (�c łı�c ÆP�F)loses it and he who hates his soul in this world (K �fiH Œ���fiH �ı�fiH)will keep it for eternal life (�N� �øc ÆN� Ø )’ ( John 12: 25).32 Now thisis an adaptation of a saying found, with slight variations, in all threeSynoptic Gospels: Mark 8: 35; Matt. 10: 39; 16: 25; Luke 9: 24; 17: 33.But John has made a significant advance by introducing his ownspecial term, �øc ÆN� Ø�, into the saying. As Dodd remarks, he alone‘has given it a form which obviously alludes to the Jewish antithesisof the two ages: he who hates his soul in this world/age (ege

¯

zl

˝Fpe

˝)

will keep it for the world/age to come (ab˝e

¯

zl

˝Fpl

˝) and consequently

will possess ab˝e

¯

zl

˝Fpe

˝jj:h¯

(the life of the world/age to come)’.33

32 Unfortunately English is unable to preserve the distinction between natural andsupernatural life. In this context łı�� means ‘self ’, as its Syriac equivalentregularly does, and often enough the Hebrew uqn too. And we shall see that theRSV’s ‘eternal life’, which makes little sense, should be replaced here by ‘the life ofthe new age’.

33 Interpretation, 146.

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If Dodd is right then John has made two changes, first in distinguish-ing between łı�� and �ø� and secondly in selecting the term Œ����,in which the spatial or local sense predominates, rather than ÆN�

(age), which preserves the temporal meaning of the classical Hebrewzlfp.34 Nevertheless John continues to attach an eschatologicaldimension to ‘life’, as is proved by the way in which he opposes itto the traditionally eschatological ‘wrath of God’: ‘He who believes inthe Son has �øc ÆN� Ø�; he who does not obey the Son shall not seelife, but the wrath of God rests upon him’ (John 3: 36). (Paul estab-lishes an even starker contrast between righteousness (�ØŒÆØ�� �)and the wrath of God when he summarizes his gospel at the begin-ning of Romans (1: 17).)

John sees �øc ÆN� Ø�, then, as a present possession. In the Psalmsof Solomon (a work in which, incidentally, the eschatological force ofthe term ‘kingdom of God’ is especially evident) the meaning isdifferent: ‘But they that fear the Lord shall rise to eternal life (�N��øc ÆN� Ø ) and their life (�ø�) shall be in the light of the Lord andshall never again fail’ (Pss. Sol. 3: 12). The ‘sons of truth’ at Qumranare promised both ‘abundant peace with long life’ and ‘eternal joywith life for ever’(hrn jjhb) plus ‘a crown of glory and a robe of majestyin eternal light’ (zjmlfp tfab) (IQS 4: 6–8).35 The elect in 1 Enoch areto have ‘light, joy and peace, and inherit the earth’; once wisdomis given to them ‘they will all live’ (1 Enoch 5: 7–8; cf. Matt. 5: 5).

34 Schnackenburg (ii. 521 n. 5) says of Dodd’s suggestion that �øc ÆN� Ø� in John isconnected with the Jewish idea of the life of the age to come that ‘it can hardly beright’, but he offers no argument. In fact the suggestion that the Aramaic zl

¯

p

˝l might

be an abbreviation of jva˝d am

˝lp

¯

l was made as long ago as 1898 by G. Dalman in DieWorte Jesu, 121–2. The first occurrence of the Hebrew equivalent of �øc ÆN� Ø� is inDan. 12: 2. ‘And many of those who sleep in the ground of dust shall awake, some toeverlasting life (zl

˝Fp jj:h

¯

l), and some to reproach, to everlasting abhorrence (wFatdlzl

˝Fp).’ The word zlfp is a noun. There are relatively few adjectives in classical Hebrew,

and nouns are often employed to qualify a preceding noun. (‘Holy Spirit’, literallytranslated from Hebrew, is ‘the spirit of holiness, � �F�Æ ±ªØø�� �� (cf. Rom. 1: 4). zl

˝Fp

signifies either the remote past or the distant future; but it can also mean ‘perpetuity’.In the latter case it is often hard to know whether this is thought of as never-ending,i.e. eternal, or simply as of indefinite duration. One must let oneself be guided by thecontext. The Daniel passage appears to imply both another age and forever.

35 The traditional biblical promise of long life is combined remarkably easily withthe seemingly very different promise of eternal life. The transition is assisted by theambiguity of zl

˝Fp, as the notion of indefinite duration slips into that of perpetuity. Did

God really, as the RSV translation of Ps. 21: 5 implies, promise the king ‘length of daysfor ever and ever’? (See n. 34, above.)

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In the Parables section too we are told that ‘the righteous will be inthe light of the sun, and the chosen in the light of eternal life; andthere will be no end to the days of their life’ (1 Enoch 58: 3).

In these passages eternity undoubtedly includes the notion ofendlessness, but also (particularly at Qumran) a special quality oflife peculiar to the new age. It is this special quality—not endless-ness—that is suggested by John’s term �øc ÆN� Ø�, which mighttherefore be translated ‘the life of the new age’. In none of thepassages quoted, including those from the Synoptic Gospels, is thereany difficulty in thinking of a life that, in the words of Pss. Sol. 3: 12,‘will never fail’ (PŒ KŒº��ł�Ø ��Ø). But once transferred to this world(and the present age) life has become a symbol, and if one insists onretaining the rendering ‘eternal’, which is what ÆN� Ø� alwaysmeans in secular Greek, then ‘eternal life’ can only be a metaphor.The new life enjoyed by the faithful is more than ordinary physicalexistence: it is the life of faith. Christians are no more immune fromphysical death than other folk.36 But the benefits that accrue to themfrom their acceptance of the message of Jesus are, for this evangelist,best symbolized by life and all that is associated with it; the termÆN� Ø� indicates its radical difference from natural life. Once this isunderstood it matters little whether the word is taken metaphoricallyand translated as ‘eternal’ or given an alternative rendering(this after all is where the logic of Dodd’s argument leads) so as tosuggest a different kind of life—‘the life of the new age’.37 Used as a

36 It just might occur to an attentive reader of the words P �c I�ŁÆ fi � �N �e ÆNH Æ(John 11: 26) that ÆN� , like ÆN� Ø�, is used metaphorically. But the English (‘shallnever die’) is harder than the Greek. One must sympathize with the correspondent inthe pages of Theology, 89 (1986), 383–4, who suggests substituting ‘shall not dieeternally’ as a way of alleviating the perplexity of the bereaved when they hear thewords ‘shall never die’ read out over the coffin of a loved one. But ‘eternally’ too mustbe construed as a metaphor.

37 It has been suggested that there is something of the same idea at Qumran,especially in the hymnic conclusion of the Community Rule (1QS 10: 9–11: 22) and inparts of the Thanksgiving Scroll. The first to argue this was H.-W. Kuhn in Enderwar-tung und gegenwartiges Heil followed by G. W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortalityand Eternal Life, 152–6; J. J. Collins, ‘Apocalyptic Eschatology’; D. Aune, Cultic Setting,29–44. I used to think that these scholars were misapplying theological categories thatsimply have no place in the Qumran community. But I now think that I was mistakenin this criticism, and that Collins, for instance, was right to observe that ‘death does notarise as a theological problem in the Hodayot because the community believed that ithad already transcended death by passing over into the community of the angels’(‘Apocalyptic Eschatology’, 35). Additional support for this viewmay be found in 4Q418Instruction (e.g. lines 69 and 81) and 4Q181 Ages of Creation.

402 Revelation

complementary adjective attached to �ø�, the term ÆN� Ø� does notdescribe life, nor does it indicate that this new life differs from ordinaryhuman life in extent, not, at any rate,merely in extent. Another termthat serves equally well to convey the same idea and found fre-quently in the Odes of Solomon is ‘immortal’ or ‘deathless’ life( ): ‘Immortal life rose up in the land of the Lord,and it became known to his faithful ones, and was given unsparinglyto those who trust in him’ (15: 10; cf. 28: 6; 31: 7; 38: 3; 40: 5). A life thatis not subject to death differs from natural life in essence, not just induration. Conceptually the Odes and the Gospel are nowhere closerthan in the way they envisage the believer’s participation in the life offaith: ‘All his children will praise the Lord, and they will receive thetruth of his faith. . . .We live in the Lord by his grace, and we receivelife through his Messiah’ (41: 1, 3).

Lying behind the eternal life of the Fourth Gospel, therefore, andthe immortal life of the Odes of Solomon is not just a profound faith inGod as the author of life but the very different belief that God wouldultimately ‘swallow up death for ever’ (Isa. 25: 8), a belief that wouldlater find orthodox expression in the prayer of the Eighteen Benedic-tions: ‘may you be praised, Lord, you who give life to the dead’.(Eventually this prayer came to be recited three times a day: m.Ber. 3: 3; 4: 1.38)

All the eschatological and dualistic implications that could bedrawn from such a faith are prominent in a passage from theTestament of Asher: ‘Death succeeds to life, dishonour to glory, nightto day, and darkness to light; but the universe is subject to the day,and darkness to light; and so death is confronted by eternal life (�e Ł Æ� # ÆN� Ø� �øc I Æ�� �Ø)’ (T. Asher 5: 2).39 The same ideaoccurs in Joseph’s beautiful prayer for Aseneth:

Lord God of my father Israelthe Most High, the Powerful One of Jacob,who gave life to all (things)and called (them) from the darkness to the light,

38 Paul says in his speech before Felix in Acts 24 that he shared his belief in ageneral resurrection with the Pharisees. The view of Josephus is a good deal less clear(AJ 18. 14; BJ 2. 163). According to G. F. Moore it was ‘the primary eschatologicaldoctrine of Judaism’ ( Judaism, ii. 379). For extended discussions see Str.–B. iv. 2:1166–98; Schurer, History2, ii. 539–44, with bibliography.

39 The meaning of the concluding part of this passage is not entirely clear. De Jongetranslates: ‘that is why eternal life has to wait for death’ (Sparks, Apocryphal Old

Dualism 403

and from the error to the truth,You, Lord, bless this virgin,and renew her by your spiritand make her alive again by your life.(Jos. As. 8: 9)

By now it should be clear that John has two sources for his notionof �øc ÆN� Ø�: first Jewish eschatology, from which he derives hisconcept of a life that transcends human life as we know it; andsecondly the Synoptic tradition, which allows him to replace thepreaching of the kingdom by a term more suggestive of the benefitsthat follow upon the acceptance of the gospel. In the symbolicstructure of the Fourth Gospel, for the most part strikingly inter-locking and consistent, the concept of life occupies a central place.40

Applied to the water that represents revelation (4: 10–11; 7: 38), theword �H , ‘living’, has a riddling quality, but like ‘bread of life’(6: 35, 48) or ‘living bread’ (6: 51), which have an identical refer-ence, ‘living water’ is a particularly appropriate term for what theevangelist sees to be the true source of life—‘a spring of waterwelling up to eternal life’ (4: 14). We have already seen how inthe prophetic ‘I am’ sayings Jesus is offering life to all prepared tolisten to his message. Bread and water, the staple necessities of life,are natural symbols of supernatural life. Wine, in the context of thefruitfulness hoped and prayed for at a wedding-feast (2: 1–11), fitseasily into the same broad symbolic field, as does the suggestion ofrebirth attendant upon baptism (3: 1–8). In fact all Jesus’ greathealing miracles carry with them something of the same idea. Inthe first of them Jesus promises the royal official at Capernaum,‘Your son will live’ (4: 50), whilst the second, the healing of thecripple at the pool (ch. 5), is seen as a fitting occasion for a discoursein which Jesus claims to have been given the power to bestow life.The cure of the blind man symbolizes his allegiance to the life that islight; and the most important sign of all, the raising of Lazarus, isthe occasion of Jesus’ extraordinary claim that he is in person ‘theresurrection and the life’ (11: 25).

Testament, 580). If that is correct, then this conception of eternal life is diametricallyopposed to John’s insistence that it precedes physical death.

40 In an otherwise exhaustive discussion of Johannine symbolism R. A. Culpepper(Anatomy, 180–98) fails to include life. It is a notable omission, for life is the symbolround which all the others cluster.

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It should be added that life is conceptually very close to salvation,and the proximity both assists and enriches its symbolic significancein the gospel tradition. In Syriac the same word, , means bothlife and salvation,41 and a similar ambiguity is not uncommon in theSynoptic Gospels, where ����Ø , which in classical Greek simplymeans ‘to save’, is often used of a physical cure: ‘your faith hasmade you well’ (Mark 5: 34; 10: 52; cf. 5: 23, 28; 6: 56). In the FourthGospel, told by Jesus that Lazarus is asleep, the disciples reply, ‘Lord,if he has fallen asleep he will recover (�N Œ�Œ����ÆØ �øŁ����ÆØ)’ (John11: 12): Lazarus will be cured, he will recover, he will live.

Here, in the Lazarus episode, late as it is, lies the clearest indicationof the likely origins of John’s conception of life. Rising from the dead,Lazarus symbolizes—though he does not exemplify—the new lifethat Jesus has come to bring. The link between this life and resur-rection had already been noticed in the great discourse of chapter 5:‘For as the Father raises the dead, and gives them life, so also the Songives life to whom he will’ (5: 21). Certainly John evinces little interestin the futuristic eschatology implicit in the doctrine of the resurrec-tion of the dead; nevertheless this is most probably the origin of hisown concept of the life of the new age.

The occasion of the fusion of these two ideas is doubtless theresurrection of Jesus. This had had a similar impact upon the think-ing of Paul. But Paul never quite existentializes or internalizes theconcept of resurrection as he does that of death (Romans 6). This taskis left to John.

4. judgement

If life is what is promised to those who accept the revelation of Jesus,judgement is what is promised to those who do not. So in this respectthe theme of judgement (Œæ��Ø�) is simply the obverse of that of life.Judgement is also, however, the process of separating the sheep fromthe goats, the actual sorting out whereby believers and unbelieversare placed on opposite sides of the divide. The Greek verb Œæ� �Ø

means both ‘judge’, with the additional connotations of separationand discrimination, and ‘condemn’. No English translation can dofull justice to this ambiguity, as can be easily perceived by comparing

41 This root should be distinguished from , which means redemption,saving from.

Dualism 405

the following two quotations. The first is the most complete state-ment of the theme found in the Gospel:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believesin him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into theworld, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved throughhim. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe iscondemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Sonof God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, andmen loved darkness rather than the light. (3: 16–19)

Here the translation moves from ‘condemn’ to ‘judge’, but the Greekword is the same. In the following quotation ‘judge’ and ‘judgement’are used throughout.

The Father judges no one, but has given all judgement to the Son, that allmay honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He who does nothonour the Son does not honour the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I sayto you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternallife; he does not come into judgement but has passed from death to life.(5: 22–4)

Just as eternal life is anticipated in the present existence of thebeliever, so eternal punishment is anticipated in the present ofthe unbeliever. John nowhere uses this phrase: unlike the Synoptists,especially Matthew (18: 8; 25: 41, 46), he reserves the term ÆN� Ø� forthe bright side of the divide. Nevertheless the absolute gulf betweenthe two groups is nowhere more emphatically or eloquently con-veyed than in passages dominated by the judgement motif:

I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may notremain in darkness. If anyone hears my sayings, and does not keep them,I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save theworld. He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge;the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. (12: 46–8)

For John, then, darkness is revealed to be darkness by the coming ofthe light; men are discovered to belong to the darkness only whenthey refuse the light or insist, in spite of their blindness, that they areactually sighted: ‘If you were blind you would have no guilt; but nowthat you say, ‘‘we see’’, your guilt remains’ (9: 41; cf. 15: 22). So fromone perspective the shining of the light is a judgement, in so far as itdiscloses the true nature of darkness; from the other it is left to themen of darkness to condemn themselves.

406 Revelation

The theme of judgement is the most important single vehicle ofJohn’s ethical dualism and the one where all the others culminateand coincide. Despite its subtlety and profundity it is not hard tograsp—except for one point: the extent to which the evangelistretained a properly eschatological belief in the idea of a final judge-ment on the last day.42 Certain passages, including 12: 48, quotedabove, suggest that in spite of his conviction that the crucial decisionfor or against Jesus is made in this world he has not altogetherabandoned the belief that there will be a future judgement as well.

At this point it is necessary to insert a parenthesis on the meaningof that slippery word ‘eschatological’, often used, like much jargon, asa substitute for thought. It was coined as a shorter way of saying‘pertaining to the last days’, and this is the sense I wish to retain. In alucid and penetrating discussion on the modes of prophecy in Oraclesof God, John Barton allows two main meanings of ‘eschatology’; onein which it refers to the belief that the world as we know it will sooncome to an end, the other in which it refers to belief in ‘an end or goalwhichwill one day arrive and the path towards which passes throughvarious distinct phases or epochs’.43 He is concerned to stress ‘a reallycrucial difference in mentality between what we may call ‘‘immi-nent’’ and ‘‘non-imminent’’ eschatology’.44 Most of the texts withwhich I am concerned are eschatological in the first sense, but what Iwant to emphasize is that the word properly refers to the future, ‘thelast days’, whether or not the end is expected very soon—within thelifetime, say, of the writer and his readers. In fact it is often verydifficult to tell from any particular description of the events of thelast days just how soon the writer expects them to occur. The openingof 1 Enoch furnishes us with a good example of this unclarity:

Concerning the chosen I speak now, and concerning them I take up mydiscourse. The Great Holy One will come forth from his dwelling, and theeternal God will tread from thence upon Mount Sinai. He will appear with hisarmy, he will appear with his mighty host from the heaven of heavens. Allthe watchers will fear and quake, and those who are hiding in all the ends ofthe earth will sing; all the ends of the earth will be shaken, and trembling andgreat fear will seize them (the watchers) unto the ends of the earth. The highmountains will be shaken and fall and break apart, and the high hills will be

42 The secondary literature on this vexed question is vast, but does not require to beassessed here since there is virtual unanimity that John’s primary understanding ofjudgement is that it attends acceptance or rejection of the message of Jesus.

43 Oracles of God, 218. 44 Ibid. 219.

Dualism 407

made low and melt like wax before the fire; the earth will wholly rentasunder, and everything on the earth will perish, and there will be judgmentupon all. With the righteous he will make peace, and over the chosen therewill be protection, and upon them there will be mercy. They will all be God’s,and he will grant them his good pleasure. He will bless (them) all, and he willhelp (them) all. Light will shine upon them, and he will make peace withthem. Behold, he comes with the myriads of his holy ones, to executejudgement on all, and to destroy all the wicked, and to convict all flesh forall the wicked deeds that they have done, and the proud and hard words thatwicked sinners spoke against him. (1 Enoch 1: 3–9, Nickelsburg)45

The most obvious way of reading this text is to assume that ‘thechosen’ and ‘the righteous’ are the members of the writer’s owncommunity, and that he looks forward to an imminent judgement.But we cannot be sure of this. On the other hand, the Qumran WarScroll, which identifies the enemies of the community as the Kittim,i.e. the Romans, is obviously alluding to a battle that is about to bejoined.46 In the sense in which I am using the term, however, bothtexts are concerned with the last days. It follows that judgement isessentially an eschatological concept: of its very nature it is God’s lastact, his ultimate verdict upon the human race. Judgement can be antici-pated; but to place the act of judgement in the present dispensation isto de-eschatologize it. This is why the expression ‘realized eschatology’is virtually a contradiction in terms: theoretically it would be possiblefor God, surveying the scene after he had passed his final verdict,to speak of a ‘realized eschatology’: ‘this is the end and that is myjudgement’; but if one wishes to retain the reference to the last daysthere is no other context that would allow any meaningful use of theexpression, unless it is understood metaphorically, much as the term‘eternal life’, I believe, should be understood in the FourthGospel. This, I take it, is what Bultmann means when he speaks of‘eschatological existence’:47 it is an alternative way of saying ‘eternal

45 For a commentary on this text, picking up all the biblical allusions, see L. Hartman,Prophecy Interpreted, 112–18. He finds the same basic structure in a selection of some65 apocalyptic texts, ‘which covers the following situation: against the background ofa sinful and/or otherwise abnormal period there occurs a divine intervention,which is accompanied by judgement and punishment for the wicked and by joy forthe faithful’ (54).

46 This is true of the first and the concluding five columns (15–19), less obviously soof the rest of the work, which may have been inserted later. Cf. G. Vermes, Dead SeaScrolls3, 103–4.

47 Theology, ii (1955), 75–92. It is odd, not to say astonishing, that in this longsection, devoted exclusively to the Johannine understanding of ‘eschatological exist-ence’, Bultmann totally ignores the concept of life.

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life’ but no more to be taken literally than the term ‘eternal’ which itreplaces. The reason why Bultmann’s usage is so confusing is hisapparent failure to recognize that he is using ‘eschatological’ meta-phorically throughout. The advantage of substituting ‘the life of thenew age’ for both these expressions is that one can see straight awaythe source of this idea and so run less risk of misunderstanding it.

Be that as it may, John’s idea of judgement is unmistakably rootedin traditional Jewish eschatology, specifically in the idea that therighteous and the wicked are to be definitively separated on the lastday. For the most part John effectively de-eschatologizes judgement bymaking it the immediate consequence of an option for or againstChrist in the lifetime of each individual. Naturally even those writersmost committed to the inevitability of a final judgement have theirown views about the respective identity of the wicked and the right-eous. Although the judgement affects all mankind, it is the circum-stances and behaviour of the writer’s own contemporaries thatprovide him with a paradigm of the moral gulf dividing the wickedfrom the good. This is illustrated with striking clarity in Matthew’sparable of the sheep and the goats (ch. 25). The place that people willoccupy in the life to come is entirely determined by moral decisionsmade in the present life. John differs from Matthew in two importantrespects: in the first place he pulls the actual act of judgement backinto the present; in the second place he reduces Matthew’s richvariety of moral options (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,etc.) to one: the act of faith. The latter modification is not withoutprecedent: ‘For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in thisadulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also beashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holyangels’ (Mark 8: 38). Indeed the idea is so fundamental to the faith ofthe early Christians that it comes as no surprise to find it in a widevariety of New Testament authors: cf. Matt. 10: 33; Luke 9: 26; 12: 8–9;Rom. 10: 9–11; 2 Tim. 2: 12; 1 John 2: 28. Cyprian’s uncompromisingslogan nulla salus extra ecclesiam (‘no salvation outside the church’) issimply an especially succinct version of the spurious ending of Mark:‘He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does notbelieve will be condemned’ (Mark 16: 16).

In spite of these parallels—and conceivably debts—to other NewTestament writings, the central position of the judgement motif inthe Fourth Gospel marks it out as the most dualistic of the fourGospels, and the closest in spirit to numerous sectarian works,

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composed in roughly the same period, that are dominated by a senseof the moral division between the good and the wicked. Since theseare Jewish it may be that the opposition between Jew and Gentileunderlies them all: it is easy to see how Israel’s overwhelmingconviction of divine election might be carried over into the beliefsof individual sects. Every Jewish writing of the period that I can thinkof is permeated with the sense of the divine election of Israel. WhenJohn places ‘the Jews’ among the enemies of God (‘You are of yourfather, the devil’ (8: 44)), he is being profoundly ironical; from aJewish perspective his is a topsy-turvy world: white is now black,and black white—but the basic pattern is the same.

According to Bultmann, as is well known, the remnants of futur-istic belief that persist in the Fourth Gospel are the work of ‘theecclesiastical redactor’. But at least one of the passages in question(11: 25–6) resists source analysis48 and there is a simpler explanationavailable. John may have been converted from what Barton calls an‘imminent’ eschatological belief to a ‘non-imminent’ one. In otherwords, he may have continued to pay lip-service to the idea of afuture judgement, as many Christians do today, but no longer withany sense of urgency. In fact the nature of Christian belief entailssome reduction in the importance attached to eschatological expect-ation of any kind. For by far the most crucial revolution in man’srelationship with God has been achieved by Christ; without someconviction of this kind the Gospel would be relatively small beer. Thedecisive event, the divine intervention that occupies the gap between‘before’ and ‘after’ has already taken place. The point of rupturealong the line of human history has been displaced, shifted back tothe time occupied by the Gospel narratives.

Consequently, alongside unmistakable traces of futuristic eschat-ology, we should expect to find in the New Testament evidence of itsdemise (and not just of the kind of conceptual adaptation observablein the Book of Revelation and elsewhere). Which of course is whatwe do find. Just how far Jesus’ own preaching was eschatologically

48 In his careful study of the relevant passages (Interpretation, 144 ff., 320–8, 364 ff.),C. H. Dodd suggests that the evangelist is deliberately juxtaposing two contrastingeschatologies: ‘whether the gift of life is conceived as a present and continuingpossession (‘‘he who is alive and has faith in me will never die’’) or as a recovery oflife after death of the body and the end of the world (‘‘even if he dies he will come tolife’’), the thing that matters is that life is the gift of God—and Christ’s gift to men, weknow, is Himself (6: 51)’ (364).

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coloured is still disputed. But even if, as I am inclined to believe, thekingdom of God was for him an eschatological concept,49 it is obvi-ous that it gradually gave way, in the preaching of the early Church,to the good news about Jesus—the Christian Gospel. Thus by virtu-ally abandoning the term ‘kingdom of God’ in favour of the term‘eternal life’, and by insisting that the divine judgement is effectivelyenacted in the earthly life of every individual, John is simply drawingout the most important implications of the Christian message. But hedoes so in a way that, paradoxically, remains verbally and concep-tually very close to contemporary Jewish sectarian writings, inspite of the fact that he had more thoroughly divested himself thanany other New Testament writer of the futuristic eschatology theycontain.

5. trial

Starting from the first major confrontation in chapter 5, Jesus’ publiccareer takes the form of a prolonged and bitter dispute with the Jews.From one perspective this may be seen as a trial50—a trial whoseeventual outcome, never really in doubt, is the sentence of crucifix-ion passed by Pilate. But the trial motif in the Fourth Gospel is notjust another theological theme, distinct and separable from that ofjudgement. It is judgement in action, judgement as story or drama. Intwo great sequences, the first extending from chapter 5 to chapter 10,the second from chapter 18 (the arrest) to chapter 19 (the crucifix-ion), John shows how Jesus successfully refutes his accusers: inbringing him to trial and eventually sentencing him to death, theyare actually passing judgement on themselves. Judgement (Œæ��Ø�),which we have so far regarded as a theme or motif, is embodied in anarrative. Theology, in other words, is fleshed out as gospel. Thisenables the evangelist to turn the experience of Jesus into an effectivesymbol of the experience of the Christian community. They too will be

49 This is yet another issue on which there is no scholarly consensus. It will be plainthat I agree with Christopher Rowland (Open Heaven, 133–6) against Bruce Chilton(Kingdom of God). The latter has a good bibliography.

50 A. E. Harvey devotes a whole book to substantiating his claim that ‘it is possibleto understand the Fourth Gospel as a presentation of the claims of Jesus in the form ofan extended ‘‘trial’’ ’ (Trial, 17). In spite of this he unaccountably ignores the Romantrial.

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challenged by the Jews and the world. They too will see themselvespitted against the forces of darkness. They too will see life emergingout of death.

To trace in detail the story of Jesus’ trials would take us too farfrom the subject of the present chapter. But it is worth remarkingupon the skill with which John moulds together fragments of trad-ition and infuses them with his own special brand of dualism. Thetraditions are of three kinds: (1) accusations of breaking the sabbath;(2) accusations of claiming to be king (Messiah) and Son of God; (3)the trial sequences themselves, first Jewish and then Roman.

Comparing John’s sabbath episodes (5: 1–9; 9: 1–7, 14) with thosein the Synoptic Gospels, A. E. Harvey comments upon the manifestdiscrepancy between the two:

The fourth evangelist presents two sabbath episodes in a formwhich makes itquite clear that Jesus was running the risk of immediate prosecution;whereas, in the Synoptic Gospels, no illegality is proved and the discussioninvolves, not the defence by Jesus of a specific action, but a criticism of theexisting sabbath customs and legislation.51

In fact in the first of the episodes it is not Jesus but the healed cripplewho breaks the law, by carrying his bed on the sabbath, and inneither case is the evangelist deeply interested in this particularaccusation. In chapter 5, he uses it, as we have seen,52 as a way ofintroducing the charge of blasphemy (for claiming equality with God,5: 18); in chapter 9 the healing miracle is the occasion of the expul-sion of the blind man from the synagogue on the grounds that,implicitly at least, he confessed Jesus to be the Messiah (cf. 9: 22).Thus although still observable in the Gospel text, the traditionalcharge of breaking the sabbath simply opens the way to more seriouscontroversy.

The charge of aspiring to be king, like that of breaking the sabbath,was found by John in his signs source. It too belongs to the prehistoryof the Johannine community and of its Gospel, to the time when themessage addressed to the synagogue was simply, ‘We have found theMessiah’ (1: 41). The title ‘King of the Jews’ marks the only point atwhich John’s usage of the term ‘Jews’ converges with that of theSynoptists. Seizing hold of this nugget of tradition, he turns itto good account in his version of the Roman trial. Uninterested

51 Trial, 76. 52 Above, p. 83.

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in any fragment of historical truth the tradition might comprise, hecomposes a scenario to illustrate how Jesus’ claim to kingship, suchas it is, proceeds from his revelation, for his sole claim to authority isthat he speaks ‘the truth’. Listening to Jesus’ voice, but not hearinghis words, Pilate shows that he is not ‘of the truth’ (18: 37). Failingto recognize that truth in person is standing in front of him, heranges himself alongside the imperceptive ‘Jews’, and stands as self-condemned in the eyes of the evangelist and his readers.

Even now the irony is not over. Having had Jesus scourged, Pilatehas ordered him to be brought out, and in the presence of the Jews,the evangelist records, KŒŁØ�� K�d ���Æ�� (19: 13). The verbŒÆŁ���Ø , like ‘sit’ or, in some English dialects, ‘lay’, can have both atransitive and an intransitive sense. This fact has prompted someexegetes to follow Loisy in arguing that Pilate did not himself sit onthe judgement-seat but seated Jesus upon it, thereby implicitly ac-knowledging his authority. Much more probable, in my view,though it has received less attention, is Lightfoot’s suggestion of adeliberate ambiguity.53

Of greatest interest to the evangelist himself is the tradition thatJesus claimed to be the Son of God. Mark highlights this claim in hisversion of Jesus’ reply to the high priest’s question: ‘Are you theMessiah, the son of the Blessed?’—‘I am’ (14: 62). In the other twoSynoptic Gospels the reply is more guarded, but Matthew and Lukewere no less convinced than Mark that Jesus was truly the Son ofGod. Whatever the meaning of this title for the Synoptists, Johnundoubtedly understood it as a claim to divine status; as we have

53 Loisy’s suggestion is supported by Harnack, Bonsirven, Meeks, de la Potterie, andHaenchen; but as it stands can scarcely be right. The linguistic evidence is inconclu-sive, and the evangelist’s sense of story (not necessarily history) is strong enough toprevent him from bluntly asserting that Pilate deliberately placed the accused man onthe judge’s seat. Justin, writing some years later (in an apologia, not a Gospel!)recounts how the Roman soldiers seat Jesus upon a tribunal with the demand,‘Judge us!’ (Apol. 35: 6; cf. Gospel of Peter 5: 7), but this is no argument for attributingthe same idea to John. On what I call the story level of understanding the straightfor-ward reading ‘Pilate sat down’ is the natural one. Nevertheless, Lightfoot’s suggestionof an intentional ambiguity is attractive and may well be right, since, as I have shownin Ch. 8, the Fourth Evangelist regularly employs the device of two levels of under-standing. (C. K. Barrett is the only other commentator, to the best of my knowledge, tofavour this suggestion.) Whatever one may think of it, the general point—that anyjudgement upon Jesus is really a judgement upon the judge—is abundantly clear.Pilate himself, for all his obtuseness, refuses to alter the superscription upon the cross(‘What I have written, I have written’, 19: 22); so that Jesus’ title to kingship isvindicated after all.

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seen when discussing the debate in Chapter 1, he has no interest inrebutting this charge; on the contrary he devotes much of his Gospelto establishing its truth.

In Jesus on Trial, A. E. Harvey observes that ‘the underlying pattern[of the Fourth Gospel] is of two parties in dispute, Jesus and ‘‘theJews’’; and the dispute has to be presented in such a way that thereader is persuaded of the justice of Jesus’ case’.54 He backs thissuggestion up with arguments based upon the proceedings in Jewishcriminal trials, where, for instance, the function of witness is notdistinct from that of judge. There is no obvious support for this thesisin the first four chapters (where there is only one witness, John theBaptist, whose role is simply to point to Jesus from afar); but fromchapter 5 onwards, where the dispute with ‘the Jews’ really getsunder way, Harvey has a strong case. Jesus’ protracted farewell tohis disciples in chapters 13–17 interrupts the trial sequence.

Not surprisingly, judgement is by far the most important theo-logical motif in the trial sequence. But the evangelist weaves awhole series of other motifs into the story as well. Indeed the individ-ual episodes give him the opportunity of reinforcing his message byinserting at appropriate points many of the dualistic oppositions thatwe have been studying in this chapter. Taken together they provide apowerfully sustained argument for the divisive effect of Jesus’ revela-tion and the self-condemnation of his adversaries. Thus in the story ofthe cripple themain contrast is between life and death; in the debate inchapter 8 truth is set against falsehood and freedomagainst slavery; inthe healing of the blind man, as we should expect, light is opposed todarkness; whilst in the Roman trial Jesus’ rebuttal of the charge ofpretending to a worldly throne introduces the idea of an oppositionbetween the world above and the world below. Only in chapter 10 isthe debate left uncoloured by any of John’s symbolic contrasts; herethe point is made by the sheer violence of the Jews’ hostility to Jesus asthey first accuse him of blasphemy and then attempt to stone him.

6. division

‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth: I have notcome to bring peace but a sword’ (Matt. 10: 34). The divisiveness

54 Trial, 15.

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typical of the fourth evangelist was not invented by him: it is anintegral element of the gospel tradition. Matthew too knew that Jesushad come ‘to set a man against his father and a daughter against hermother’, and that a man’s enemies would be those of his ownhousehold (10: 35–6). Prophecy is divisive of its very nature; prophetscause dissension and Jesus was no exception: any religion with acutting edge starts by severing believers from unbelievers. It was tobe expected that Jesus’ followers should experience rejection just ashe did and project their own experience back on to his. In itself themotif is interesting but unsurprising. What is remarkable and dis-tinctive about the Fourth Gospel is the extent to which the presentand past experience of rejection is built into a narrative whoseconceptual content is reinforced by a wide variety of literary devices.

So far we have considered Johannine dualism in terms of content:polar opposites like light and darkness, life and death, truth andfalsehood, plus the dominant theme of judgement, with its narrativecounterpart, equally rooted in the tradition, of trial. But the dualismis also conveyed, sometimes almost subliminally, in many otherways. Form cannot be separated from content, and sometimes thetwo are so fused as to be scarcely distinguishable. Nevertheless thesubject is worth considering from a strictly formal point of view.

From a form-critical perspective the trial sequences are bestregarded as an extension of the controversy form. The nature ofthis is easily seen by looking at the series of controversies in Mark2: 1–3: 6. In each of these Jesus is taken to task by his adversaries, butends up by discomfiting them with a sharp rejoinder. One suchepisode, as we saw in Chapter 4, occurs in John 7, where Nicodemusdefends the uneducated populace against the sneers of the Phariseesin a way that highlights the superiority of Galilee over Judaea (7: 45–52). Earlier in the same chapter the divisive effect of Jesus’ message isencapsulated in two words: ªªªı���� (7: 12) and �����Æ (7: 43; cf.9: 16; 10: 19). The first of these words is traditional: it recalls the‘grumbling’ (en

˝l v) of the Israelites in the desert (e.g. Exod. 16: 7–12;

Num. 14: 27, RSV ‘murmurings’) and is a powerful reminder of thedivisiveness of revelation. John is the only evangelist to use the noun;the verb, ªªª���Ø (6: 41, 43, 61), is also found in Matt. 20: 11 andLuke 5: 30. It well conveys the uneasy opposition aroused by Jesus’message: ‘There was much grumbling about him among the people.While some said, ‘‘He is a good man’’, others said, ‘‘No, he is leadingthe people astray’’ ’ (7: 12). If, as is quite likely, John found this story

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in the tradition, he took its lesson to heart. One can hardly imagine asimpler or more effective summary of what he saw to be the generalimpact of Jesus’ message upon the people of Judaea. The secondword, �����Æ, was to have a fateful future in Christendom. It doesnot occur in the LXX but is used by Mark to mean a tear or rent(2: 21). John employs it to refer to dissension among the Jews (cf. 9: 16;10: 19), but when he speaks of them fighting among themselves in6: 52 it may well be Christian dissension that he has in mind.55

However that may be, the repeated allusions to squabbling, murmur-ing, and schisms all help to deepen the readers sense of the uncom-prehending hostility surrounding Jesus and his disciples.

Since the importance and significance of the riddle in the Gospelhas already received sufficient emphasis,56 it may be enough heresimply to reaffirm what an effective instrument it is for convincingJohn’s readers that, being ‘in the know’, they enjoy an essentialsuperiority over ‘the Jews’. More subtly, the hidden contrasts inchapters 3 and 4, between man and woman, night and day, insideand outside, ensure that the fundamental bipolarity of John’s visionof the world is conveyed to his readers with means of which they maynot always be aware.

Even the simple fact that the Gospel is divided into two halves hasits significance. In the first half, at any rate after the introductorysection that terminates with the wedding-feast of Cana, Jesus’ inter-locutors are for the most part either openly hostile or else puzzledsympathizers who do not yet belong to his circle of friends. But fromchapter 13 onwards he begins to address himself to the disciplesapart. He tells the high priest, ‘I have spoken openly (�Æææ���fi Æ)to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in thetemple, where all Jews come together; I have said nothing secretly(K Œæı��fiH)’ (18: 20); but we know that throughout the preceding fourchapters he was conversing with his disciples in private. Bultmannremarks that, whereas in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus is continuallyinstructing his disciples at every stage in his ministry, in John thisteaching ‘is transferred in its entirety to the last night. The result isthe radical division of the Gospel into two, illustrating a fundamentalJohannine idea; the work of Jesus is the division between light anddarkness.’ He adds that in the second part of the Gospel ‘the darkness,

55 See Excursus III for arguments in favour of Lindars’s hypothesis that chs. 6 and11, as well as part of ch. 12, did not belong to the first edition of the Gospel.

56 See Ch. 2.

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the Œ����, remains the background to the teaching of the disciples,and as such it is not to be forgotten. . . . It is of symbolic significancethat the scene takes place at night.’57

Less frequently observed is John’s constant use of short proverbial orproverbial-type expressions, usually couched as oppositions or con-trasts, which serve to enhance the reader’s sense of a divided world.Sometimes this is achieved by the use of one of the evangelist’s favour-ite contrasts, for instance the little proverb that introduces the story ofthe blindman: ‘Wemustwork theworks of himwho sentmewhile it isday: night comeswhennoone canwork’ (9: 4; cf. 11: 9–10; 12: 35–6). Atother times, if the context of a saying is relatively trivial, the sameeffectmay be achieved without any conscious advertence on the part of thereader. The significance, for instance, of the remark made to Jesus byhis brothers as they urge him to leave Galilee for Judaea does not fullyemerge until he addresses the high priest much later: ‘No man worksin secret (K Œæı��fiH) if he seeks to be known openly (K �Æææ���fi Æ)’ (7: 4;cf. 7: 10). Similarly the comment that follows Jesus’ exchange withNicodemus, though difficult to relate to what has just been said, isclearly central to the evangelist’s conception of his book: ‘If I have toldyou earthly things (�a K��ª�ØÆ) and you do not believe, how can youbelieve if I tell you heavenly things (�a K�ıæ ØÆ)?’ (3: 12). Occasion-ally the force of a fairly simple contrast comes from the recollection ofan earlier saying: ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses’(9: 28; cf. 1: 17; 5: 46). Elsewhere the contrasts are meaningful onlywithin the contexts in which they occur, e.g. 10: 1–2, 4–5, 10, 12; 15:5–6. John can also take over and adapt a well-known proverb andcombine it with a traditional saying: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls intothe earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit[cf. 1 Cor. 15: 36–7]. He who loves his life loses it’ (John 12: 24–5). Forfurther examples of pithy oppositions see 3: 19–20 (light/dark); 8: 23(above/below); 8: 35 (slave/son); 9: 39, 41 (sight/blindness); 16: 20–1(sorrow/joy); 17: 9, 15, 25. Even the most innocuous-soundingproverb such as ‘One sows and another reaps’ (4: 37) can makea small contribution to the general effect. Sometimes the intendedcontrast is left to be inferred: ‘They hated me without cause’ (15: 25).

Following the evangelist, I have left to the last the most significantsaying of all: ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’(20: 29).

57 Bultmann, p. 458.

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11

DEPARTURE AND RETURN

introduction

No one assembling an anthology of religious literature could reason-ably ignore the Gospel of John. The compiler’s choice might well fallupon the four chapters (14–17) comprising the Farewell Discourse,whose profound and mysterious beauty cannot but make a strongimpression on any responsive reader. Unfortunately its delicate col-ours and fine contours are easily submerged under the soft silt ofscholarship. Subjected to close critical analysis, its glowing mysteriesrapidly fade into puzzles. Puzzles there are, unquestionably. What,for example, is the origin of the strange term ‘Paraclete’, not found inthe New Testament outside the Johannine writings, and seldomenough elsewhere?1 What and where are the � Æ� (mansions,rooms, dwellings) which Jesus is to prepare for his followers? Howare we to explain the sudden, chilling allusion, at the end of chapter14, to ‘the prince of the world’? The many learned and interestinganswers that have been given to these and similar questions aremostly inconclusive. Some of the puzzles, to be sure, have beensatisfactorily resolved. The hypothesis of a second edition, adoptedin one form or another by many commentators, admirably accountsfor the curious doublets in chapter 14, on the one hand, and chapters15–16, on the other.2 The precise articulation of the terms ‘way’ and‘truth’, and ‘life’ in one of Jesus’ best-known utterances has beendetermined beyond reasonable doubt.3 The central message of thediscourse, as the community confronts the bleak prospect of Jesus’imminent departure, comes through strongly and clearly.

1 In my judgement the assessment of C. K. Barrett, made over 50 years ago, stillstands: ‘in spite of the labours of scholars the background of John’s thought about theParaclete Spirit has not yet been satisfactorily illuminated nor has the source of itslanguage been made clear’ (‘Holy Spirit’, 12).

2 See especially A. Dettwiler, Gegenwart, and J. Zumstein, ‘L’Adieu’.3 See I. de la Potterie, ‘ ‘‘Je suis la voie, la verite et la vie’’ ’.

The present chapter will touch upon many of these questions but,apart from the last, only incidentally. Its purpose is neither to offernew answers to the unresolved puzzles nor to expound old answersto the remainder. Instead I propose to take a fresh look at thediscourse as a whole, or rather at what most agree to be the firstversion of it.4 One is entitled to choose here, because the two versionsare in certain respects alternatives. In a loose sense my approach willbe form-critical, in that I shall be concerned with the forms of thediscourse; but only in a loose sense, because the forms in question areliterary ones, whose original life-situation is to be sought in a remotepast well beyond the purview of the evangelist. Genuine form criti-cism is form history (Formgeschichte) and its two key concepts, form(Gattung) and life-situation (Sitz-im-Leben), are mutually illuminatingcorrelatives. As soon as the forms have been incorporated into largerliterary structures their life-situations are no longer of any immedi-ate interest.5 A scholar who enquires after the Sitz-im-Leben of theFarewell Discourse is likely to be using this term too in a loose sense,detached from its own significance within form criticism and sug-gesting instead the situation within the life of the Johannine com-munity that can best account for the contents of these chapters andtheir peculiarly plangent tones. This interesting question will occupyus in the concluding section, where I shall argue that this discourse,without parallel in the Synoptic Gospels, except for a brief passage inLuke, was occasioned by a profound sense of loss, as the communitycontemplated a future without their leader and mentor, the Johan-nine prophet. In the main body of the chapter, however, prescindingfrom this more historical question, I shall attempt a more straight-forward exegesis. Prima facie the passage concerns the departure of

4 One of the earliest writers to put forward the theory that there were originally twoversions of the discourse was Friedrich Spitta (1893, 1910), who held that ch. 14represents the later of the two. He has had few followers in this view, one of thembeing H. Sasse (‘Paraklet’). The arguments are inconclusive. If it seems marginallymore likely that the complaint, ‘none of you asks me, ‘‘where are you going?’’ ’ (16: 5)should have been composed before rather than after a passage containing that veryquestion along with its answers (14: 4–7), then, on the other hand, the elaboratedialogue beginning, ‘A little while and you will see me no more’ (16: 16 ff.) looks likean exegesis and partial correction of the ‘you will see me’ in 14: 19.

5 ‘In its original meaning the terminus technicus ‘‘sociological setting’’ (Sitz-im-Leben) is completely opposed to the written nature of the form, so that it cannot betransferred a priori or without methodological reflection to a phenomenon within the‘‘literary’’ mode of the traditions’ (E. Guttgemanns, Candid Questions Concerning GospelForm Criticism (Pittsburgh, 1979), 239).

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Jesus. How is it to be read, I want to ask, on this first level ofunderstanding? My answer will be that the best approach is toexamine how the evangelist took over and adapted certain literaryforms.

The Farewell Discourse, it may be objected, has long been acknow-ledged to be one of the relatively rare instances in the New Testamentof the form that gives it its name, otherwise known as a testament.6

Every modern commentary alludes to this and some give long lists ofparallels. Can anything more be done than simply to dredge throughwhat I have called the soft silt of scholarship?

The answer to this objection is threefold. In the first place, it is nottrue that all the relevant materials have been scrutinized with anycare. No doubt both Ethelbert Stauffer and, following him, RaymondBrown have given extensive lists of resemblances between the Johan-nine discourse and other examples of the form;7 but such lists do littlemore than confirm what is obvious even to an untrained eye: intaking a formal farewell from his disciples before his death, Jesus ispreparing them for a future they will have to face without him.

In the second place, what is needed, as in all similar enquiries, is anappreciation not only of the continuity of the form but of what maybe called deviations from the norm. The points at which the form isbent or twisted out of its usual shape are those which give some clueto the particular pressures to which it has been subjected. And it iswith the particular that we are concerned.8

Finally, besides the testament form that is universally acknow-ledged to lie behind the Farewell Discourse there is another form,sometimes, but not always contiguous with it, that has escapednotice. This I call the commission form: it too requires investigation.

The exegesis that follows is quite untypical of this book, in that itis the only example of a sustained exegesis of a single, continuouspassage from the Gospel. Elsewhere the nature of the enquiry hasdemanded a more eclectic approach. In the second place, it affordsthe clearest possible illustration of the distinction that has con-trolled the division of this book into two main parts, one offering an

6 Cf. especially J. Munck, ‘Discours d’adieu’; E. Cortes, Discursos de adios; for a fullerbibliography see J. Becker, 440–1.

7 E. Stauffer, New Testament Theology, 344–7; Brown, pp. 598–600.8 The best known testaments in European literature, Le Lais and Le Testament of

Francois Villon, offer an illuminating comparison. Villon takes over an establishedform, a spectacularly dull one, and uses his special alchemy to transform it into greatpoetry.

420 Relevation

‘explanation from without’ (the main concern of Part I, but touchedbriefly in the concluding section of this chapter), the other attempt-ing to understand ‘from within’ the message addressed by the fourthevangelist to his readers. The bulk of the chapter, then, is a ratherold-fashioned explication de texte. Thirdly, the Farewell Discourseitself illustrates particularly well the fruitfulness of the principle oftwo levels of understanding outlined in the previous chapter. (JorgFrey rightly observes that ‘the paradoxal contiguity and intertwining(Neben- und Ineinander) of two temporal perspectives is not restrictedto individual verses but pervades the whole of the Farewell Dis-course’.9) Finally, because of its striking affinity with one particularpseudepigraphon, The Testament of Moses, I have chosen to includelong extracts from this document in an excursus that itself consti-tutes, I believe, a powerful vindication of my contention that con-temporary Jewish writings continue to provide many important aids,not yet fully recognized, to the interpretation of John.

My first task is to examine a series of different elements in thediscourse and to show how in each case, in spite of a clear debt totradition, the evangelist has gone his own way. It will be seen that it isin the divergences that the most distinctive message of the Gospel is tobe found. The inclusion of a section headed ‘Return’ marks, it may benoted immediately, the most startling of the evangelist’s deviationsfrom the norm. In a sense it destroys the whole raison d’etre of afarewell discourse, for this is not just a temporary goodbye but thelast words of a man facing death—a testament. Behind the notion ofreturn there lies, of course, the peculiarly Christian tradition of theparousia, the Second Coming. As the rightful heir to this traditionJohn could scarcely ignore it. But we shall see that he modifies it insuch a way that the weight of the discourse is placed after all upon theabsence; in this respect he is more faithful to the basic structure of thetestament form than may appear at first sight.

After a detailed consideration of the components of the form it willbe possible to undertake a brief study of the chapter as a whole, to seehow Jesus appears for the last time as the new Moses, taking his ownfarewell and responsible for a new commission.

Some may feel that it would be preferable to follow establishedexegetical practice by first determining the structure of the passage

9 Eschatologie, ii. 248. Also ibid. iii. 102–239 (especially 119–78, an extended exegesisof ch. 14); and C. Hoegen-Rohls, Der nachosterliche Johannes.

Departure and Return 421

and then organizing one’s remarks in a sequence suggested by thetext itself. But a glance at the commentaries will show that thereis little or no agreement about the structure of the passage; itends, unquestionably, with the words ‘Let us be off’, but that is all.Even the beginning is somewhat hazy. One obvious starting-point isafter the departure of Judas in 13: 30, as the evangelist sets the scenewith the simple but pregnant phrase, ‘it was night’. But the first wordof 13: 33, ��Œ �Æ, ‘little children’, looks like the opening of a longaddress; and so does 14: 1, which follows the interchange with Peterwith a word of warning and encouragement that is clearly intendedto establish the tone as well as at least one of the themes of what is tocome. Within the discourse the difficulties multiply: it is much easierto detect the presence of a number of different themes than to decideprecisely how they are articulated. One cannot, for instance, say thatafter developing the theme of departure the evangelist then moveson, naturally and logically, to the theme of return: this is actuallyheard as early as 14: 3.10 Nor can we be confident that we have to dowith a continuously composed discourse. Hans Windisch arguedlong ago that the Paraclete passages were taken from an originallyindependent source;11 although, as I shall show, they fit in remark-ably well into the overall plan, the discourse would be perfectlycoherent without them.12 One of the commentator’s tasks, then, is

10 Whether the same kind of return is envisaged in vv. 18 ff. as in v. 3 is anotherquestion, one which will engage our attention later in this chapter. M.-E. Boismarddraws attention to a shift in emphasis amounting to a contradiction between v. 3 andv. 4: ‘What need is there to know the way to the Father if Jesus is going to come andcollect us and accompany us on the way?’ (‘Evolution’, 519), and refers to a similarargument in F. Spitta (Johannes-Evangelium, 342–3). J. Becker, too, believes that vv. 2–3constitute a nugget of tradition that serves as a basic text, the body of the chapter beingwhat he calls a ‘polemical exegesis’ (‘Abschiedsreden’, 228) of its two main themes:departure (�æ���ÆØ, v. 2) and return (�ºØ �æ��ÆØ, v. 3). Accordingly, he divides thechapter into four sections: (1) introduction (vv. 1–3); (2) departure (vv. 4–17); (3) return(vv. 18–26); (4) conclusion (vv. 27–31). This analysis is largely accepted by D. BruceWoll (Johannine Christianity), except that he terminates the secondmain section at v. 24(before the reintroduction of the Paraclete), a division recognized by most earlycommentators. Fernando F. Segovia, on the other hand, extends the section to includev. 27 and adds a detailed structural breakdown of the two main sections, the first ofwhich he describes as ‘progressive’ (‘Structure’, 482), the second ‘cyclic in character’(485). In a more extended study than eitherWoll’s or Segovia’s, Johannes Beutler (Habtkeine Angst) divides the whole chapter into three sections: (1) vv. 1–14, which heregards in part as a midrash on Ps. 42/43; (2) vv. 15–24, Jesus’ triple promise; (3) vv.25–31, his eschatological gifts.

11 ‘Parakletspruche’.12 Cf. B. Lindars, ‘Persecution’, 63.

422 Relevation

to determine the nature and purpose of certain insertions that havehad the effect of modifying the meaning of an already existing text.But these do not have to be dealt with immediately.

1. departure

(a) Farewell: ‘Where I am going you cannot come’ (13: 33)

Why should a death be seen as a departure? Is it not odd that atestament, the definitive legacy of a man or woman who may well belooking forward to many years of life, should be equated with afarewell, the parting words of someone about to embark on ajourney—equated to the extent of furnishing alternative names fora single literary form? Most goodbyes, even most long goodbyes, aremade in the expectation of a return; perhaps most testaments aredrawn up with the thought that there will be other opportunities ofchanging one’s mind and altering one’s will. Here, though, we haveto do with a definitive testament and a final goodbye. No doubt manycultures interpret death itself as a journey (to ‘the undiscoveredcountry from whose bourn no traveller returns’); so it is not verysurprising to see a discourse delivered on the threshold of death takethe form of a farewell address. Nevertheless it is worth stressing thatthis deeply human response to the business of dying beautifullyillustrates the instinctive exercise of one of the most singular andleast regarded of human skills—the power to see life as a story, inother words the power to fabricate myths.13

Myth or metaphor? One of the earliest examples of the farewelldiscourse form in the Bible (dating from perhaps as early as the tenthcentury bc) may not actually prove the presence of myth, but it doesat least suggest it. The passage is a particularly important one, sinceit demonstrates very early on in the biblical tradition the associationof the farewell or testament and the commission forms: David is notjust saying goodbye to Solomon for the last time; he is entrusting himwith a specific task. That this task should turn out to be a vendettamay surprise, even disturb us; but from the disinterested perspectiveof the literary critic the conjunction of the two forms is establishedwith exemplary clarity:

13 On this see especially Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London, 1968).

Departure and Return 423

When David’s time to die drew near, he charged (fr¯

jf

¯

) Solomon, his son,saying, I am about to go the way of all the earth (yTa

˝e

˝ ¯lk LTdb LlE jk: Na

˝:

Kª� �N�Ø �æ���ÆØ K ›�fiH ���� �B� ªB�). Be strong and show yourself aman.14 . . . Moreover you know what Joab the son of Zeruiah did to me. . . .Act therefore (v

˝jU: p˝f) according to your wisdom and15 do not let his head go

down to Sheol in peace. . . . Now therefore hold him not guiltless, for you area wise man; you will know what you ought to do to him, and you shall bringhis head down with blood to Sheol. (1 Kings 2: 1–9)

Of the many points of interest in this passage the one that concernsus here is the idea of death as a departure. David does not need tospell out the nature of his journey, nor its goal; ‘the way of all theearth’ cannot but be in the direction of Sheol. The only differencebetween his own journey and the one he arranges for Joab lies in themanner of their departures. That of Joab is to be bloody (zd

˝b); his

own is to be peaceful (zLW

˝b). Their destination is the same.

The phrase ‘the way of all the earth’ is taken up occasionally later(cf. Josh. 23: 14; Jub. 36: 1; 2 Bar. 44: 2). But it must be said that in anyparticular context the notion of death as a departure may be no morethan a metaphor. Addressing Judas at the Last Supper, Jesus says tohim: ‘The Son of Man goes ( �ª�Ø) as it is written of him, but woe tohim by whom the Son of Man is betrayed’ (Mark 14: 21). When Johnselects the same term ( �ª�Ø ) he cleverly exploits its ambiguity. Theoutcome of the journey of the Son of Man in Mark’s Gospel is wellknown. He goes to his death—and consequently to Sheol, the grave,the realm of the �Œæ�—only to rise again on the third day.16 But it isdoubtful if the expression in Mark 14: 21 is intended to imply a return:the phrase ‘the Son ofMan goes’ is used simply to hint at his voluntarycompliance with the scriptures and possibly too his acceptance ofJudas’ treachery. For John, on the other hand, the term suggests anintentional and deliberate action on the part of Jesus, as he embarkson his journey with an open-eyed awareness of his destination.

We cannot say whether or not John borrowed the word �ª�Ø

from Mark; if he did, then he has transferred it from its original

14 The next two verses, 3–4, are commonly and rightly thought to have beeninserted by the deuteronomic redactor.

15 The ‘but’ of the RSV betrays a total misunderstanding of the link betweenSolomon’s ‘wisdom’ and the charge that is laid on him. This is clear from the ending(in the form of an inclusion: v. 9 is simply a differently worded version of v. 6; theparallel is even more evident in the Hebrew).

16 Cf. 1 Cor. 15. It is crucial for Paul that Christ be acknowledged to have risen KŒ �ŒæH , i.e. out of Sheol.

424 Relevation

context, Judas’ treachery, to the closely following story of Peter’sbrash assertion of loyalty. In Mark the two are separated by thewhole of the institution narrative, in John by three words: q �b F�,‘it was night’. This is not the first time, however, that John uses theterm to refer to Jesus’ approaching death. In 13: 33 Jesus reminds hisdisciples of an earlier prophecy: ‘Little children, yet a little while I amwith you. You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say toyou, ‘‘Where I am going ( �ªø) you cannot come.’’ ’ In fact there isan important difference between this and the earlier passage. WhatJesus said to ‘the Jews’ was this: ‘I shall be with you a little longer,and then I go ( �ªø) to him who sent me; you will seek me and youwill not find me; where I am (‹�ı �N��) you cannot come’ (7: 33–4; cf.8: 22). Thus in 7: 33 he states explicitly something that is merelyimplied in the later passage: that his journey has a goal—he is goingto the one who sent him.17

We may note that in both cases the saying provokes misunder-standing; but the confusion of ‘the Jews’ is perhaps more compre-hensible than that of Peter. He after all finds himself in a traditionalfarewell discourse situation for which the expression ‘I am going’ isfully appropriate. In chapter 7, on the contrary, ‘the Jews’, locked asthey are in argument, might well be confused: ‘Where does this manintend to go (�æ�ı��ŁÆØ) that we shall not find him? Does he intendto go (�æ�ı��ŁÆØ) to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach theGreeks? What does he mean by saying, ‘‘You will seek me and youwill not find me’’, and ‘‘Where I am you cannot come’’?’ (7: 35–6). Infact ‘the Jews’ alter Jesus’ words in two slight but significant ways:they replace the highly charged term �ª�Ø with the rather colour-less �æ�ı��ŁÆØ;18 furthermore, like Jesus himself in his report tothe disciples, they omit the crucial phrase �æe� �e ���łÆ � ��:‘to the one who sent me’. (Compare 16: 5, 10 with 16: 16–19, 28.)

17 In my view, stated in Excursus V (p. 237), the little dialogue in 7: 33–6 is out ofplace in its present context in ch. 7. But this is probably because it is a late, ratherawkward insertion rather than because it has dropped out of its proper position in theGospel.

18 According to E. A. Abbott, ‘John . . . seems to distinguish this mere going(�æ���ÆØ) from the ‘‘going home’’ of a child of God, begotten of God and returningto God’ (Johannine Vocabulary, 146). But there is no clear distinction in meaning in John13–14: the most one can say is that John does not employ �æ�ı��ŁÆØ in any contextthat provokes misunderstanding; in other words it does not belong to his Sonder-sprache. This observation may reinforce the suggestion of Boismard and Becker that14: 2 is a traditional Johannine saying, correctively reinterpreted in what follows.

Departure and Return 425

The next time Jesus uses the term the ensuing misunderstanding isquite crass: ‘Again he said to them: ‘‘I go away ( �ªø) and you willseek me and die in your sin; where I am going you cannot come’’ (cf.7: 33; 13: 33). Then said the Jews; ‘‘Will he kill himself, since he says,‘Where I am going you cannot come’?’’ ’ (8: 21–2) Nevertheless, inspite of the absurdity of the idea that Jesus is contemplating suicide,‘the Jews’ on this occasion have actually grasped an essential featureof John’s use of the term—its association with death.

To appreciate what is going on in these bitter little exchanges onehas to see that John has appropriated the term �ª�Ø as an elementin what Herbert Leroy calls his Sondersprache, the private language ofthe community that reinforces both its internal cohesiveness and itsgratifying sense of superiority to those outside.19 The two episodesprobably follow the period of direct confrontation between the Chris-tian group and the Jewish conservatives within the synagogue. But atthis point I simply want to underline the resourcefulness of the fourthevangelist as he weaves the simple metaphor of ‘death as departure’into the fabric of his distinctive portrait of the role and nature of Christ.

In the Fourth Gospel the idea of death as a final journey has beentransformed into that of the return from a mission. This is easily seenfrom the first occurrence of the term in its special meaning: ‘I amgoing to the one who sent me’ (7: 33). Simple as it may seem, this moveis of crucial significance for John’s christology: it takes us to the heartof his singular vision of Christ as a divine emissary who came intothe world fully aware that he would soon leave it and return to theFather. It is only to be expected that from time to time Jesus shouldexplicitly acknowledge that he was not at home in the world towhich he was sent; so one is not surprised to see the second of the �ª�Ø passages followed immediately by just such an admission:‘You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am notof this world’ (8: 23). Here is a good example of the harmonicreinforcement of the social and the ideological analysed by WayneMeeks (1972). The context of all these passages is one in whichthe incomprehension of Jesus’ hearers both reflects and enhancesthe sense of alienation experienced by the Johannine group in anenvironment that has become hostile and incomprehending.

19 There are 32 occurrences of the verb �ª�Ø in the Fourth Gospel. In 15 of theseit has the perfectly ordinary sense of ‘go away’. Elsewhere, apart from one instance(13: 3), in which it also bears the special sense conferred on it by the community, it isalmost always found in a context of misunderstanding. Cf. H. Leroy, Ratsel, 51–67.

426 Relevation

A point of especial importance here is the effect of this remarkableconception upon the farewell discourse itself, resulting as it does in acomplete transformation of the testament form. Death is now not justa departure but a journey, and a journey with a goal. The essentiallyJewish idea of death as a voyage down to Sheol has now beenreplaced by the essentially Christian idea of a voyage up to heaven.

Of possibly even greater significance is the fact that the journeyitself, as a path between two points, now takes on a thematic signifi-cance within the farewell discourse. The theme in question is thatof the way, developed in the little interchange between Jesus andThomas: ‘ ‘‘Where I am going—you know the way (‹�ı �ªø

Y�Æ�� �c ›�� ).’’ Thomas said to him, ‘‘Lord, we do not knowwhere you are going; how can we know the way?’’ ’ (14: 4–5). Theend of the journey is soon made plain, and by a further expansion ofthe form the departure, now a voyage with a particular goal in view,is transferred from speaker to hearers: ‘Where I am going you cannotfollow me now; but you shall follow afterwards’ (13: 36); ‘no onecomes to the Father, but by me’ (14: 6). The way is no longer ‘the wayof all the earth’ but is now a path to heaven, reserved for thefollowers of Jesus, since by a final startling shift he is the way: ‘I amthe way, the truth, and the life’ (14: 6).20

(b) Faith: ‘Let not your hearts be troubled: believe in God, believealso in me’ (14: 1)21

Chapter 14, as Dodd points out, ‘is clamped together by the repeateduses of the expression �c �ÆæÆ����Łø �H # ŒÆæ��Æ in verses 1 and27’.22 Among the other links (not mentioned by Dodd) between thebeginning and the end of the chapter, we may note here the reiter-ated insistence on the need for faith (14: 1, 29).

It may seem natural enough for a man to preface a parting addressto his family with some words of comfort and reassurance; so one

20 See above, p. 418, and my earlier reflections on the meaning of ‘the way’, pp.377–83.

21 This translation follows that of most commentators, from Westcott onwards.Sometimes the first �Ø������� is read as a statement (so Brown), occasionally as aquestion (so Bultmann). Beutler, who sees here a deliberate adaptation of LXX Ps. 41: 6,12; 42: 5 (�º�Ø� K�d �e Ł�� : hope in God), naturally prefers the double imperative(Habt keine Angst, 28–9); clearly this is also the rendering that fits in best with theinterpretation given below.

22 Tradition, 403.

Departure and Return 427

might expect to find this as a constitutive element in the testamentform. Stauffer, in a list of some twenty-six items he believes tobe integral to the category of ‘valedictions and farewell speeches’,includes one entitled ‘comfort and promise’.23 But on examination itturns out that only two of his references are pertinent. One is from theTestament ofMoses, though the importance of this text, as we shall see,lies elsewhere. The other is Jubilees 22: 23, where Abraham is address-ing Jacob; but the injunction ‘Have no fear and do not be dismayed’ istoo untypical to support Stauffer’s case. The truth is that the note ofreassurance and the summons to faith with which Jesus prefaces hisdiscourse in chapter 14 is not a regular element of the farewell form.24

The clue lies in the second half of the verse: ‘believe in God’. (Thesequel, ‘believe in me’, gives the saying a typically Johannine twist,which will be discussed later.) The demand for faith in God has a longhistory: its original Sitz-im-Leben is probably to be sought in whatGerhard von Rad has called ‘the Holy War’, where a war oracle(Kriegsorakel) was pronounced on the eve of battle,25 or perhapsmore generally in an oracle of salvation (Heilsorakel) sought at theoutset of any important undertaking. The very name of Yahwehwas revealed in the context of a promise of divine assistance (Exod.3: 6–12) and the ‘I am’ contained an implicit assurance of God’sactive support.26 The worst that could happen to Israel was thewithdrawal or cancellation of the divine revelation: ‘Call his name‘‘Not my people’’ since you are not my people and for you I am not’(Hosea 1: 9; cf. Num. 14: 43; Jos. 7: 12; 2 Chron. 25: 7–8).

Even a summary sketch of the Old Testament material would takeus too far afield. As before, a single example, this time from the bookof Deuteronomy, will suffice to demonstrate the extent both of John’sindebtedness to the tradition and of his deviation from it. Immedi-ately before his death Moses utters a song (ch. 32) and a blessing(ch. 33), both of which are fine examples of ancient Hebrew poetry.

23 Theology, 344–7. H.-J. Michel under the heading ‘Encouragement andConsolation’ lists Deut. 31: 6; 1 Sam. 12: 20; Jub. 22: 23; T. Zeb. 10: 1; T. Iss. 1: 8–12;2 Bar. 81: 1–82: 1 (Abschiedsrede, 50).

24 Karl Kundsin argues that the opening words of the chapter, though intended inthe first place to assuage the disciples’ sadness at their imminent loss, also contains animplicit promise of Jesus’ comfort and assistance in their own approachingmartyrdom:‘Die Wiederkunft Jesu’.

25 Der Heilige Krieg im alten Israel (Zurich, 1951).26 Cf. Gen. 26: 3, 24; 28: 15; 31: 3; Exod. 3: 12; Deut. 31: 23; 1 Kings 11: 38; Josh. 1: 9;

3: 7; 7: 12; Judg. 6: 12, 16; Isa. 41: 10; 43: 2, 5; Jer. 1: 8; 30: 11; 42: 11; Hag. 1: 13; Zech. 2: 11.

428 Relevation

But before this, in a chapter that belongs to a relatively recentstratum of the book, Moses recounts how he has been told by Godthat he himself will not be leading his people over the Jordan into thePromised Land; instead he is to commission Joshua to take his place.In the earliest form of the tradition, however, it is not Moses but Godwho commissions Joshua:

And the Lord said to Moses: ‘Behold the days approach when you must die;call Joshua, and present yourselves in the tent of meeting that I maycommission him (fnfr

¯

a

¯

´f

¯

).’ And Moses and Joshua went and presented them-selves in the tent of meeting, and the Lord appeared in the pillar of cloud; andthe pillar of cloud stood by the door of the tent. . . . And he commissioned(fr¯

jf

¯

) Joshua the son of Nun and said, ‘Be strong and of good courage (sg¯

h

ymc af ) for you shall bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore togive them: I will be with you (Lmp: ejea jk: Na

˝f).’ (Deut. 31: 14–15, 23; cf. 3: 28;

Josh. 1: 1–9)

There are a number of points to be made about this passage:

1. The Deuteronomic editor has taken these verses over (from JE?) andinserteda passage (vv. 16–22)which is in fact a comment on the song(cf. v. 22) that follows in the next chapter. In theHebrew text there isno indication of the shift of subject from Moses to Yahweh betweenverses 22 and 23. The awkward hiatus is glossed over in the RSV.

2. The form—an oracle of salvation—has its Sitz-im-Leben in thecult. The tent of meeting is what its name suggests: unlike theark it is a symbol not of God’s abiding presence but of his occa-sional interventions in the affairs of his people. But this is a specialkind of oracle of salvation. The concluding promise is character-istic of the form; the exhortation to ‘be strong’ and the technicaluse of the verb ‘to commission’ (Piel of efr) show that the oracle of

salvation and the commission (originally independent forms) havebeen combined: compare this episode with David’s commission ofSolomon, quoted earlier in this chapter.3. The passage clearly lends itself to adaptation as a testament.

If Moses himself, instructed by Yahweh, were to perform the com-missioning ceremony, then we would have a testament in theproper sense, since the time (Moses’ approaching death) is alsoright.And this is in factwhatwedohave inDeuteronomy 31: 7–8:27

27 But not in the midrash in Pseudo-Philo, Ant. Bib. 19–20, where it is God whocommissions Joshua after Moses’ death (as in the Book of Joshua itself). In Josephus’version (AJ 4. 315), Moses exhorts (�Æææ�A ) Joshua to lead a campaign against the

Departure and Return 429

Then Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel, ‘Bestrong and of good courage; for you shall go with this people into the landwhich the Lord has sworn to their fathers to give them; and you shall put theminpossessionof it. It is the Lordwhogoes before you;hewill bewithyou, hewillnot fail you or forsake you; do not fear or be dismayed (�c ��F ���b ��غ�Æ).’

What, it may be asked, has this to do with the Farewell Discoursein John? The answer lies in the nature of the exhortation. Theassurance of divine assistance is not an integral element either ofthe testament or of the commission form. It is not present in David’scommission of Solomon, nor in the equally gruesome commissionAbsalom lays on his followers in 2 Samuel 13: 28, although he doesurge them to ‘be courageous and be valiant’. But wherever thecharge is made by God himself or with his backing and approval,then his presence is always guaranteed. This guarantee both re-inforces and justifies the command to be strong or valiant. As oftenin the Bible, the essence of the form is given meditative expressions inone of the Psalms:

The Lord is my light and my salvation;whom shall I fear?The Lord is the stronghold of my life;of whom shall I be afraid (I�e �� � ��غØ�ø)?. . . . . . . . . . . . . .Wait for the Lord;be strong, and let your heart take courage (ŒæÆ�ÆØ��Łø # ŒÆæ��Æ �ı);yea, wait for the Lord.(LXX Ps. 26: 1, 14)

Now in the important charge Jesus is about to lay upon hisdisciples in John 14 we should naturally expect both an exhortationto be strong and an assurance of divine protection. The former isfound in the opening words: ‘Let not your hearts be troubled’ (�c�ÆæÆ����Łø �H # ŒÆæ��Æ, 14: 1) and in the conclusion: ‘neither letthem be afraid’ (�c �ÆæÆ����Łø �H # ŒÆæ��Æ ���b ��غØ�ø, 14: 27).28

The latter presents some difficulty. For Jesus does not merely act on

Canaanites. Josephus thus conflates Deut. 31: 7–8 with 1–6, another indirectcommission, this time addressed to all Israel. In this passage, the phrase tWa

¯

´ efrm:e¯zkva jv: jf�r: should be translated, ‘the charge which I laid upon you’ (contra RSV). This

is a commission not a commandment.28 For this use of the verb ��غØA , a hapax in the New Testament, compare Deut. 31: 8

and LXX Ps. 26: 1, quoted above; also Deut. 1: 21; 31: 6; Josh. 1: 9; 8: 1; 10: 25—alldeuteronomistic texts.

430 Relevation

behalf of God, as Moses does when he commissions Joshua: besidesspeaking with God’s authority (14: 10) he represents God in the fullestpossible sense (14: 9–10). It is as if the two forms of the commissioningof Joshua in Deuteronomy 31, one by Moses, the other by Yahweh,were to be fused. But for Jesus to say explicitly, ‘I am with you’ (as hedoes at the close of Matthew’s Gospel—an alternative version of thecommission form) would be too paradoxical in a discourse whosevery raison d’etre is his own imminent departure. What he can—anddoes—say is, ‘Believe in God,’ adding, ‘believe in me.’

The reader of the Gospel, accustomed to hearing Jesus’ demand forfaith in his own person, may all too easily miss the great import ofthis conjunction. In the context of a formal commission any demandfor faith can be justified only on the basis of an assurance that Godwill be of active assistance in the carrying out of the task. And if God,then Jesus also. It follows that if the disciples’ faith is to be securelygrounded, his departure must be succeeded by some kind of pres-ence-in-absence. This of course is what we do find: indeed it may besaid to be the subject of the discourse.

Needless to say, the profound insights of the farewell discourse,especially those contained in the exchange with Philip (14: 8 ff.), arenot to be explained simply as the logical working out of the implica-tions of the farewell and commission forms. Rather it is the case thatthe novel awareness that ‘he who has seen me has seen the father’impels a radical reworking of Old Testament models. These, as I haveendeavoured to show, are still recognizable, if barely. Neverthelessour appreciation of the magnitude of John’s literary achievement isgreatly enhanced by observing the extent of his indebtedness to thesemodels as well as his deviations from them.

(c) Commission: ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’(14: 15)29

The main reason why the testament and commission forms arereadily combined, and indeed often confused, is that an essential

29 The MSS are fairly evenly divided between the future (������) the aoristimperative (�����), and the aorist subjunctive (������). The future is probablyto be preferred; but if this verse, as I shall suggest, contains a deliberate allusion toDeuteronomy, this future could be a Semitism. In legal contexts the yiqtol form,frequently translated by a future, is often preferred. The Ten Commandments are acase in point.

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element in each of them is an exhortation or command addressed tothe hearer or hearers. In the commission form the command con-cerns some task of special urgency or importance, in the later, morestylized type of testament such as we find in The Testaments of theTwelve Patriarchs, the command usually focuses on a more general-ized kind of behaviour. This may be either a virtue, perhaps one thatthe dying man has himself exemplified during his lifetime, or a vicethat he is anxious to warn against, or possibly both.

The commission in this generalized sense is important enough tobe regarded as the central, indeed the constitutive element of theform. Accordingly, in Marinus de Jonge’s edition of the Testaments(1978) most of the subtitles point to the vice or virtue that thepatriarch in question is most concerned about, e.g. Judah, ‘Aboutcourage, and love of money and fornication’; Issachar, ‘About sim-plicity’; Zebulon, ‘About compassion and mercy’; Dan, ‘About angerand falsehood’.

Now it may be thought that the prominent place occupied in theFarewell Discourse by the new commandment—of fraternal love—proves that it fits quite easily into this pattern. Love, moreover,although not a dominant theme in the Twelve Testaments doesoccur from time to time.30 One may, like de Jonge, hold that theall-pervasiveness of Christian ingredients in this document makes itunsafe to appeal to it as evidence of pre-Christian influences upon theNew Testament, since the influence may well be the other wayround. But there is at least one indisputably early source in whichthe duty of fraternal love is strongly commended, the Book of Jubilees,where Isaac, having summoned Esau and Jacob to his death-bed,tells them in the course of a longish speech: ‘this command I lay uponyou, my sons, . . . love one another, my sons, as a man loves his ownsoul’ (30: 3–4; cf. 20: 2).

In spite of the close thematic resemblance between this text andthe Farewell Discourse in John, there are good reasons to reject anyeasy inference of influence or indebtedness, at any rate as regardschapter 14. For although at first sight the K �ºÆ� of chapter 14 look asif they hark back to the K �ºc ŒÆØ � of 13: 34, it is unlikely that theoriginal version of the discourse contained any hint of a newcommandment, or indeed of any additional obligation on the partof the disciples beyond their duty to remain faithful to the word of

30 Cf. Sim. 4: 7; Iss. 7: 6–7; Zeb. 8: 5; Gad. 4: 2; 6: 1; Jos. 17: 2–3.

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Jesus as this is invoked in the injunction to ‘Keep my word/words’(�e º�ª =�f� º�ªı� �ı ��æ�E ) in 14: 23, 24. The majority ofcommentators rightly regard this phrase and the ‘commandments’of 14: 15, 21 as alternative ways of referring to the demand for faiththat pervades the whole Gospel.31

In the text of the Gospel as we have it chapter 14 is bracketed by asummary statement of the new commandment in 13: 34, on the onehand, and a developed reflection in 15: 12–17, on the other. So it iseasy to conclude, as for instance Lindars does, that ‘there is probablyan intentional allusion [in 14: 15] to 13. 34 f. The plural command-ments thus refers to the manifold application of the one com-mandment to love one another.’ But apart from the difficulty of theshift from singular to plural (any moral or legal precept, whethercouched in the singular or not, necessarily has ‘manifold applica-tions’), this exegesis ignores the fact that the new commandment is alate and particularly glaring insertion into Jesus’ dialogue with Peterat the end of chapter 13. Peter’s question in 13: 36, ‘Lord, where areyou going?’ is obviously a response to Jesus’ assertion in 13: 33,‘Where I am going you cannot come’, as only those indissolublywedded to the principle of integral or synchronic exegesis couldrefuse to admit.32 In fact if one accepts, as Lindars does, that chapter15, originally a quite separate homily, has been tacked on to it later,perhaps by the evangelist himself, perhaps by a subsequent redactor,then it is easy to see that the love commandment in 13: 34 has thesame provenance as chapter 15 and belongs to the same level ofredaction.

Accordingly, it makes more sense to consider chapter 14, provi-sionally at any rate, on its own; but we are still not out of the wood.One can well understand why Jesus, on the eve of his death, shouldinsist upon the need to ‘keep my word’—to continue to respond infaith to his message. But why sum this injunction up as ‘my com-mandments’, surely an unnecessarily roundabout and even a clumsyand obscure way of emphasizing the need for faith?

There are two alternative, possibly complementary, answers tothis question. The first harks back once again to Deuteronomy. Thefirst half of the Gospel contains many allusions to Jesus as the newMoses: here too there may be a suggestion that the message of Jesus

31 e.g. Bultmann, Schnackenburg, Becker.32 Bultmann’s solution is to insert chs. 15–16 en bloc between 13: 35 and 13: 36. But

this conceals the problem instead of resolving it.

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has replaced the Mosaic Law considered not only as the quintessenceof divine revelation (º�ª�) but also as the definitive summation ofGod’s commands (K �ºÆ�) to his people. The easy correspondence inJohn 14 between the two terms K �ºÆ� and º�ª�=º�ªØ stronglyrecalls Deuteronomic usage.33 (See too especially Ps. 119.)

The other answer involves a form-critical approach, in this case tothe combination of the two forms, testament and commission. Ineach of these the commission or instruction is regularly expressed bya particular verb, the Piel of efr in Hebrew, K ��ºº��ŁÆØ in Greek, withtheir corresponding nouns vfrm and K �º�.34

Whether John and his readers regarded ‘the commandments’ ofJesus as a new law, a radical alternative to the commandmentsmediated by Moses, or simply as a commission, the final instructionsgiven to his disciples by their departing Lord, what he requires ofthem is fully in accord with the tenor of the whole Gospel. He asksonly that they should ‘keep his word’. To do this they must literallykeep a record of his words, which means in practice keeping a copy ofthe Gospel. The actual composition of the Gospel is part, and anessential part at that, of the carrying out of Jesus’ last commissionto his disciples. Thus the Farewell Discourse effectively reinforces, asit is surely intended to do, the authority of the evangelist and hisbook.

2. return

In the Farewell Discourse, as we have had occasion to observe, thetestament and commission forms are subjected to various stresses

33 This explanation helps to account for the otherwise puzzling use of the plural,K �ºÆ�, in 14: 15, 21. In Deuteronomy the singular efrm is commonly used to designatethe whole Law: 5: 31; 6: 25; 8: 1; 11: 8, 22; 15: 5; 17: 20; 19: 9; 27: 1; 30: 11. But with asingle exception (30: 11) the LXX translates all these by the plural, K �ºÆ�. Thesuggestion that K �ºÆ� in John 14 may be a deliberate allusion to the Law of Moses,thus implying that the word of Jesus has supplanted this, is reinforced by the fact thatboth the singular and the plural of tbd (word) are also used to refer to the whole Law(singular: Deut. 4: 2; 30: 14; 32: 47; plural: Deut. 4: 10, 13, 36; 5: 22(19); 10: 2, 4). The TenCommandments are also frequently called ‘the words’ of God or ‘the words’ of the Law.For a detailed discussion of the relevant material cf. S. Pancaro, Law, 403–51.

34 For the commission see Deut. 30: 8; 31: 5; 2 Sam. 13: 28; 1 Kings 2: 1; 1 Chron. 22: 6;2 Chron. 19: 9; also Jub. 7: 20, 38; 35: 1. For the testament, see Gen. 49: 33; 1 Kings 2: 1(?); T. Naphtali 1: 1, 2, 3, 5, 9; 7: 1 (Hebrew); T. Reub. 1: 1–5; 4: 5; 7: 1; T. Sim. 7: 3; 8: 1;T. Lev. 10: 1; 13: 1; 19: 4; T. Jud. 13: 1; T. Zeb. 10: 2; T. Naph. 9: 1, 3 (Greek); also Jub. 21: 1;36: 3, 5, 17. See too the discussion in Cortes, Discursos de Adios, 57–9.

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and strains. When he pictures Jesus summoning his disciples, warn-ing them of his approaching death and urging them to carry on hiswork after his departure, the evangelist is no doubt following arecognizable pattern. But by including in the farewell a promise toreturn he may seem to break the mould altogether. In one sense hedoes; the tradition of the Second Coming is irreconcilable with anyfinal goodbye. If this innovation fails to surprise us this is partlybecause, like John’s original audience, we are familiar with thetraditional expectation of the parousia, partly because the testamentform slides easily and naturally into a farewell, where there is noth-ing at all remarkable in a promise to return. Nevertheless the mode ofthe return—or one of its modes, for there are several—is itself a kindof commission. So the general pattern of the testament/commissionform remains precariously intact.

Perhaps the most difficult question posed by the Farewell Dis-course concerns the timing of Jesus’ promised return. The latterhalf of the first discourse appears to relate to the experience of thedisciples after the resurrection; and this is what we should expect.The whole Gospel, after all, is permeated by an awareness of what isavailable to the believer here and now. But such an awarenessnecessarily reduces the significance of any physical return, evenone expected in the proximate future. Hence the majority of moderncommentators, headed by Bultmann, ascribe to the fourth evangelistwhat is commonly called a ‘realized eschatology’, in which all futurehopes are anticipated in the present, although they give differingexplanations of the many passages in the Gospel that stubbornlyresist being categorized in this way. Undoubtedly one of the mostintriguing of these is the one to which we must now turn:

In my father’s house there are many rooms (� Æ�); if it were not so, wouldI have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go to preparea place for you, I will come again (�ºØ �æ��ÆØ) and will take you to myself,that where I am you may be also. (14: 2–3)

Bultmann, recognizing that this passage is couched in the languageof myth, understandably ascribes it to his hypothetical revelationsource. Dodd noticed here ‘the closest approach to the traditionallanguage of the Church’s eschatology’,35 particularly to 1 Thessa-lonians 4: 17; ‘we that are alive, who are left, shall be caught up . . . in

35 Interpretation, 404.

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the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall be with theLord’. Bultmann counters this by asserting that the eschatology thatlies at the base of the promise in 14: 3 ‘is the individualistic eschat-ology of the Gnostic myth’.36 Now it is true that the coming of Christwas thought of in terms of a public manifestation of power and glory,manifest to all left on earth. That is why Judas is puzzled enough toask, ‘Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not tothe world?’ (14: 22). But all Christian eschatology, including that ofPaul, is individualistic up to a point. Paul’s purpose in 1 Thessalon-ians is precisely to reassure those individuals in the community whoare concerned for the fate of their dead friends and relatives that theytoo will enjoy the benefits of the parousia. The idea that heaven is thehome or ‘house’ of God is widespread in Jewish sources; throughoutthe Bible God is conceived as occupying heaven as home. Qohelet, forinstance, after speaking of the Temple as the house of God, goes onnevertheless to warn his readers that ‘God is in heaven, and youupon earth’ (Qoh. 5: 1).37

If we reject Bultmann’s suggestion of a Gnostic source, yet con-tinue to read 14: 2 as it stands, without recourse to the reinterpre-tations that occur later (in chapters 14 and 16), then Dodd’sobservation may be given full weight. Jurgen Becker, after remarkinghow uneasily the conclusion of 14: 2 fits in the context, making thewhole sentence syntactically very difficult, suggests that this is a‘stylistically unsuccessful commentary of the evangelist upon anearlier tradition, intended to emphasize its consolatory tone’.38 Hepoints out how unusual the terminology is: ‘many mansions’, theFather’s ‘house’, ‘prepared’, ‘take you to myself’. In the latter half ofthe chapter Jesus does, it is true, promise to ‘come’ to his disciples,not however with the idea of transporting them back to heaven byhis side but rather in order to dwell with and in them on earth. Takenon its own the second half of chapter 14 can only refer to theexperience of the disciples ‘down below’; yet 14: 2–3 is set in heaven,and the real differences must be accepted and explained. Clearly the

36 Bultmann, p. 602 n. 1.37 For further evidence see Fischer, ‘Wohnungen’, 137–78, and Beutler, Habt keine

Angst, 33–41. James McCaffrey (House with Many Rooms) defends, with an array oflearned and ingenious arguments, the thesis that on the first level of understanding theNŒ�Æ in 14: 2 refers to the Jerusalem Temple. This suggestion is surely too far-fetched togain wide acceptance.

38 Becker, p. 466.

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evangelist himself cannot have regarded the two utterances as con-tradictory; otherwise he would hardly have left them side by side. ButSchnackenburg’s attempt to harmonize the two passages by claimingthat 14: 2–3 does not refer to the parousia39 results in an impover-ishment of this very rich text.

One scholar has set the ‘return’ theme of John 14 in an imagina-tively trinitarian mould.40 And it must be admitted that the fourth-century Fathers were able to extract from the Farewell Discourse as awhole most of the material they needed to give an authenticallybiblical flavour to their elaborate theological confections. There areindeed three distinct ways in which the disciples were promisedconsolation for the physical absence of their Lord, all dependingupon their obedience to his commandments. Yet these are unevenlybalanced, the promise of the Paraclete standing apart from the othertwo in exhibiting, as we shall see, an especially fruitful modificationof the commission form. Quite possibly too it represents an after-thought, inserted in an already composed text.41 The other two,which I propose to treat first, mutually reinforce one another, thecoming of the Son hardly separable from the indwelling of Father andSon that succeeds it.

(a) The coming of the Son

‘I will not leave you bereft (Oæ�Æ �), I will come to you’ (14: 18). Herethe �æ��ÆØ echoes the �ºØ �æ��ÆØ of v. 3, an echo of which theauthor himself must have been aware. Even the manner of thecoming, a kind of self-display, seems to point to the parousia. Theword K��Æ ���Ø , not found elsewhere in John, suggests a publicspectacle rather than a private appearance, and as I have remarkedpresents a problem to Judas (Jude): ‘Lord, how is it that you willmanifest yourself to us, and not to the world?’ (14: 22). The universalChristian expectation of the return of Jesus on the clouds of heaven toannounce the end of the present age is, it would seem, being con-sciously modified in its two dimensions, spatial as well as temporal,for this reappearance is to take place on earth. Yet the evangelist hasnot altogether abandoned the traditional expectation; otherwise, aswe have seen, he would not have included the explicit promise in

39 Schackenburg, iii. 62. 40 M.-E. Boismard, ‘Evolution’, 519.41 Cf. n. 9.

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14: 2–3, still less drawn attention to it by repeating the promise toreturn.42

The evocation of the theme of the Second Coming in this passage isstrong enough to have persuaded the Latin Fathers that it simplyrepeats and re-emphasizes the promise of 14: 2–3. Yet the passageundoubtedly operates on another level as well. Given the setting ofthe whole discourse, as Jesus prepares his disciples to face up to theirimminent loss, the promise that in ‘a little while’ his disciples will seehim again cannot but remind the Christian reader (and also of coursethe Johannine prophet’s original audience) of the appearances to thedisciples ‘on the first day of the week’ (20: 1) and again ‘eight dayslater’ (20: 26). Here too we are concerned with private rather thanpublic manifestations: unless those to whom Jesus appeared after hisdeath could respond with faith, the term ‘resurrection’ would haveno meaning and the Christian proclamation no content.

Ambiguity is perhaps too weak a word to convey the art withwhich the evangelist allows both these traditional themes to con-tinue to resonate in the inner ear whilst at the same time subjectingthem to a fresh and quite radical reworking. For the fleetingresurrection-appearances are now mere presages of a permanentpresence, while the indefinite hope of a Second Coming has beenboth realized and transformed—internalized into a manifestationthat can dispense with the need of a physical appearance and into avision that can exist without sight. Jesus’ followers continue to baskin the afterglow of the resurrection and to enjoy the new life that hehas passed on to them: ‘because I live, you will live also’ (14: 19).

The evangelist is fully aware of the ambiguity of the phrase ‘a littlewhile’; he actually underlines and spells it out in the first and, onemight say, the most authoritative exegesis of this passage that wehave:

‘A little while, and you will see me no more; again a little while, and you willsee me.’ Some of his disciples said to one another, ‘What is this that he says tous, ‘‘A little while, and you will not see me, and again a little while, and youwill see me’’; and, ‘‘because I go to the Father’’?’ They said, ‘What does hemean by ‘‘a little while’’? We do not know what he means.’ Jesus knew thatthey wanted to ask him; so he said to them, ‘Is this what you are askingyourselves, what I mean by saying, ‘‘A little while, and you will not see me,and again a little while and you will see me’’?’ (16: 16–19)

42 For an extended defence of the view that there is a reference to the parousia heresee J. Frey, Eschatologie, iii. 148–53.

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The paragraph continues with the famous image of the woman intravail and her subsequent joy at giving birth to a child. Similarly,says Jesus, ‘You have sorrow now, but I will see you again and yourhearts will rejoice’ (16: 22). ‘In that day’, he adds, ‘you will ask me noquestions’ (16: 23). But has he actually solved the original puzzle?Evidently not. When, a little further on, the disciples express theirsatisfaction (‘now we do not need to question you’—16: 30), they areresponding to the answer to a different question. Barrett is right hereto speak of ‘a studied ambiguity’; ‘The sayings about going andcoming can be interpreted throughout of the departure and returnof Jesus in his death and resurrection; but they can equally well beinterpreted of the departure to the Father at the ascension and hisreturn at the parousia.’43 All agree that there is a reference to theresurrection; but our attention is also directed to the signs of animminent end, partly by the image itself, the woman in travail, partlyby the use of the significant term Łº�łØ� (anguish, tribulation) in16: 21.44 So Barrett rightly dismisses Bultmann’s suggestion that‘Easter and the Parousia are interpreted as one and the sameevent.’45 The original question is evaded, the tension is left unre-solved, and we are entitled to ask why.

The best answer is in terms of the two levels of understanding. Onthe first, the story level, we must put ourselves in the position ofJesus’ disciples as they listen with dismay to the news of his imminentdeparture. To them the ‘little while’ is simply the interval betweenpassion and resurrection. However unusual the language, on thislevel the saying is a form of passion-and-resurrection prediction.What is said in 14: 29 also holds for the more elaborate version inchapter 16: ‘And now I have told you before it takes place, so thatwhen it does take place, you may believe.’

On the second or spiritual level of understanding we must adoptthe perspective of John’s hearers or the readers of his Gospel, whoknow that the resurrection has already happened. Heirs to the

43 Gospel2, 491.44 Two passages from Isaiah are regularly cited in this connection, but neither

stands up to close inspection. In Isa. 26: 18 the people turn out to have experienced aphantom pregnancy and in Isa. 66: 7 the birth is achieved without labour. 1 QH3: 8–12is closer, with a marvellous birth, perhaps messianic, following heavy pains. The termT�E �� (labour-pangs) is not in John but occurs elsewhere, notably Mark 13: 8, in aneschatological sense. (Cf. G. Bertram, TDNT ix, s.v. T�� ). Mark uses Łº�łØ� with anidentical reference (13: 19, 24); cf. Dan. 12: 1 (Theodotion); Zeph. 1: 15; Rom. 2: 9.

45 Bultmann, p. 586.

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promise, enjoying as they read or listen the life that Jesus came tobring, they have nevertheless retained (as many modern Christianshave) some belief in his eventual return. This may not be a literalbelief; it may be experienced, as David Aune has argued, as a culticanticipation of a distant dream. But the future hope, though drawnback somehow into the present, is not ipso facto utterly absorbed. Inselecting the term �øc ÆN� Ø� the evangelist guarantees, as we sawin the previous chapter, a reference to the future life. Here, however,he does more than this: in both versions of the Farewell Discourse heinvites his readers, even as they are concentrating upon their presentgood fortune, to maintain some awareness of the future.

(b) The Indwelling of Father and Son

In the section of the speech that provokes Judas’ interjection (‘how isit that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world?’—14: 22)the idea of the coming of Jesus is both echoed and transformed. Thiswe have just seen. In the reply to Judas the additional motif of theheavenly dwellings (14: 2) is taken up and turned inside out. Theword � � does not occur in the New Testament outside these twoverses (14: 2, 23). Whereas the original promise remained fully en-closed within the conventional expectation of the parousia, themovement is now in the other direction.46 The ascent to heaven inan indefinite future is overshadowed (though not replaced) by themovement down from heaven, not just of the Son but of the Fatheralso. Together they will make their home (� �) with the faithfuldisciple.

Earlier in the Gospel the Samaritan woman had been told: ‘Thehour is coming and now is, when true worshippers will worship theFather in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him’(4: 23). The interiorization of the cult implied in this saying is nowstated formally and explicitly. How else are we to interpret the asser-tion that Jesus and his Father would come and take up their abodewith the faithful Christian believer (�æe� ÆP�e Kº�ı����ŁÆ ŒÆd � c

�Ææ� ÆP�fiH �Ø�����ŁÆ, 14: 23)? Hoskyns comments: ‘The sanctuaryand home of God, which is in heaven, and was but incompletelyrevealed in the temple of Jerusalem, will descend upon each Christianbeliever’;47 and he suggests that this constitutes the fulfilment of

46 Cf. Bultmann, p. 624. 47 Hoskyns, p. 460.

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the Old Testament promise: ‘Let them make me a sanctuary, that Imay dwell in their midst’ (Exod. 25: 8; cf. Exod. 29: 45; Lev. 26: 11–12;Ezek. 37: 26–7; Zech. 2: 10; cf. Jub. 1: 17).48 This suggestion is plausibleand attractive. If Hoskyns is right, then the � Æ� (AV ‘mansions’) of14: 2, individual rooms or apartments in the house of God, arereinterpreted in 14: 23 as places on earth, localized in the community,where not only Jesus but God himself, coming in a cultic or mysticalmanner, can find a welcome. Aune goes so far as to propose that theterm NŒ�Æ (house) in 14: 2 (and also in 8: 35) probably ‘reflects theself-designation of the Johannine community’49 and this enables himto interpret � � in the singular in 14: 23 ‘as the individual believerwho is the locus for the pneumatic indwelling of the Father andthe Son’.50

However this may be, the coming in question is neither the resur-rection nor the parousia, nor is it to be confused with the mission ofthe Paraclete. It presages a mystical union of awesome intimacy, onethat indicates the profoundly contemplative character of the Johan-nine community. To baulk at the term ‘mysticism’, as many Protest-ant writers do, is to close one’s eyes to the obvious meaning of thepassage for the sake of what are ultimately more esoteric and lessplausible explanations.

(c) The Gift of the Spirit

In John 16 two clearly distinct Paraclete sayings (16: 7–11, 12–15) areplaced side by side; in John 14, where there are also two sayings(14: 16–17, 26–7), the distinction is emphasized by their being heldapart. From a literary point of view the two sayings serve quitedifferent functions; that the leading figure in both sayings should

48 For a full discussion of these and other texts see Beutler (Habt keine Angst), 73–7.Barrett (p. 457) points to the Neofiti targum of Exod. 33: 14; ‘The glory of my Shekinahwill pass among you and I will prepare you a resting-place.’ Note too that in Hebrewsthe rest (ŒÆ��Æı�Ø�) that Israel is to enjoy in Canaan (LXX Ps. 94: 11) is reinterpreted ofheaven (Heb. 4: 5). The word � � possibly reflects Hebrew wfpm, used in the OldTestament both for the Temple as the earthly dwelling of God (Ps. 26: 8; 2 Chron. 36: 15)and for God’s dwelling in heaven (Deut. 26: 15; 2 Chron. 30: 27). A similar usage is foundat Qumran, especially in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, as is pointed out by theeditor of the Songs, Carol Newsom, 39. 4 Ezra uses ‘habitationes’ in 7: 80 and ‘habitacu-lum/a’ in 7: 85, 101. For further parallels, especially in the Enoch tradition, see J. Frey,Eschatologie, iii. 141–2.

49 Cultic Setting, 130. 50 Ibid. 131.

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be the same is, formally speaking, one of John’s most remarkableinnovations. What I mean by this will emerge in due course.

For the present let us confine our attention to the first of thesayings:

And I will give you another Paraclete to be with you for ever, even the Spiritof truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him norknows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.(14: 16–17)

Though I have left it to the last, this is in fact the first of the threepromises of presence-in-absence made to the disciples by the depart-ing Jesus. It has obvious parallels with the second, for like Jesus (14: 20)the Paraclete is expected to come and stay—to be ‘in’ the disciples(14: 17). If we venture outside the framework of the Farewell Dis-course we find additional parallels: like Jesus (3: 16) the Paraclete willbe given by the Father (14: 16); the world which fails to recognize thelight (1: 10) cannot receive the Paraclete either (14: 17). The Jews donot receive the light (1: 11) nor know Jesus (8: 19); similarly the worlddoes not know the Paraclete (14: 17).51 It is clear then that althoughthis is ‘another’ Paraclete, not simply to be identified with Jesus, henevertheless represents Jesus and has no independent existence of hisown. His mode of being is different, that is all. As Hans Windischremarked,52 he is Jesus’ Doppelganger or double, his alter ego.

The differences (for we must not confine our attention to theresemblances) are brought out by the language John employs.What is particularly noticeable is that the disciples are nowheresaid to see the spirit, any more than they see the wind (for whichJohn employs the same word, � �F�Æ, in 3: 8). Though known to thedisciples (14: 17), he does not, unlike Jesus (14: 21) manifest himself tothem. As the light of the world Jesus is fully and properly visible; butit would be a sheer solecism to apply the language of vision to thespirit.

Provided that one acknowledges that the first Paraclete saying hasbeen set alongside the promise of the coming of Jesus for a purpose,then both the resemblances and the differences are easy to spot.Less obvious, but equally important, are the results yielded by

51 See the detailed analysis with which Brown follows up his summary comment:‘Virtually everything that has been said about the Paraclete has been said about Jesus’(p. 1140).

52 ‘Parakletspruche’ 129.

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a form-critical analysis. These emerge quite strikingly from a com-parison with one final example of the commission form, this timefrom the prophet Haggai:

Yet now take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; takecourage all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you,says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when youcame out of Egypt. My Spirit abides among you; fear not. (Hag. 2: 4–5)

Before proceeding any further it may be helpful here to point outthe three key elements in the commission form.53 The first two ofthese are (1) the encouragement, which regularly occurs as an injunc-tion, ‘Fear not’ or ‘Be strong’; and (2) the commission. The regularHebrew verb for ‘commission’ is, as we have seen, the Piel of efr.When, as in this example, the charge is conferred directly, it maytake the form of a particular command (e.g. ‘you shall bring thechildren of Israel into the land’ (Deut. 31: 23)) or be expressed, ashere, simply and unspecifically by the verb eUp (‘work’ or ‘act’);cf. 1 Kings 2: 6. The third element (3) is the promise of divine assistance.Although this is not an integral element of the form, since it ismissing from some examples (e.g. 2 Sam. 13: 28; 1 Kings 2: 1–9),nevertheless it always accompanies a commission that has divinebacking and approval. Sometimes it is put in the form of a prayer:‘The Lord be with you’ (1 Chron. 22: 16; cf. 2 Chron. 19: 11); moreoften as a statement or promise (Deut. 31: 23; Josh. 1: 9). The ultimateorigin of this convention is to be found, presumably, in the promise toMoses on the occasion of his call and commission. Accordingly, thepromise of divine assistance (Exod. 3: 12) was apparently associatedquite early with a commission (Exod. 3: 10–15).

The first two of the three elements have been discussed earlierunder the headings of ‘Faith’ and ‘Commission’. It remains to con-sider the third. In the passage from Haggai quoted above, the trad-itional formula ‘I am with you’ is, quite exceptionally, expanded andexplained by the promise of the enduring presence of the spirit. So atleast from post-exilic times the divine assistance could be envisagedunder a new mode. This was a natural development, rooted in aremarkable series of theological reflections that sprang up round thetheme of the new covenant. One of these is the prayer of theMiserere:

53 On this form see N. Lohfink, ‘Die deuteronomistische Darstellung des Ubergangsder Fuhrung Israels von Mose auf Josue’, Scholastik, 37 (1962), 32–44.

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‘Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spiritwithin me. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thyholy spirit from me’ (Ps. 51: 12–13). According to Jubilees, Mosesemploys this very prayer to intercede for his people, and God re-sponds positively in terms that recall other elements of the newcovenant as well (Jub. 1: 20–5).

Now it is neither possible nor necessary to demonstrate that theJohannine prophet had the Haggai text in mind as he formulated hisown message of encouragement. But the passage enables us to seehow easy it was for him to adapt the traditional formula, ‘I am withyou’. The circumstances of the Farewell Discourse preclude anydirect use of this formula, even though Jesus is speaking with God’sauthority and on his behalf. The promise of the abiding presence ofthe spirit is, however, a satisfactory equivalent. Here is a favouriteimage of divine action in the world. Moreover the fourth evangelist isconvinced that the spirit of God is actually released into the world bythe death of Jesus; indeed, until then, as he remarks in an editorialaside, ‘there was as yet no Spirit (h�ø ªaæ q � �F�Æ) because Jesuswas not yet glorified’ (7: 39). A later version of the promise of theSpirit faithfully reflects the same conviction: ‘It is to your advantagethat I go away, for if I do not go away the Paraclete will not come toyou’ (16: 7). After Jesus’ departure, however, the permanent abidingof the Spirit guarantees that his assistance will continue in a newmode, one in which his presence will be discernible, certainly, butirreducible to any crudely physical manifestation.

The situation of the Farewell Discourse, then, and the evangelist’sparticular conception of Jesus’ role, compel him to make changes inthe commission form. Like the other elements, the promise of divineassistance is distorted, though not beyond recognition. But the com-bination of the two forms, testament and commission, enables Johnto give the Paraclete not just one function, as a guarantor of theabiding presence of Jesus and therefore of the Father also, but two.For he does not only represent Jesus, he succeeds him. From theperspective we have adopted so far, the Paraclete is simply Jesushimself in another guise, unfettered by the spatial and temporallimitations that beset any individual human life. But from anotherperspective he has to carry on—and carry out—Jesus’ work ofteaching and instruction. Expressing this in form-critical terms,and confining ourselves to the commission form, we may say thatthe Paraclete figures not only in the third element, the promise of

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assistance, but in the second also, the actual commission. Viewed inthis light the form is not so much expanded as compressed, with anartistry that may be appreciated first of all on the sheerly literarylevel, but whose theological ramifications, as the history of Christiandoctrinal development would prove, are virtually endless. Even so,the distinction between the two elements of the form, and equallybetween the two roles John assigns to the spirit, remain visible in theotherwise puzzling bifurcation of the Paraclete sayings in this chap-ter. In the first saying (14: 16–17) the presence of the Spirit is both theproof of divine assistance and one of the three modes of Jesus’ abidingpresence. In the second (14: 25–6) he is not so much Jesus’ double,Christus praesens, as his successor, vicarius Christi—‘the vicar ofChrist’, as Tertullian calls him (De praescriptione haereticorum,28: 6);54 so it is perhaps wise to follow the evangelist in maintaininga real distinction between these.

The second of the two roles, exhibiting what Raymond Brownhas called the tandem relationship between Jesus and the Paraclete,cannot, however, be treated adequately without reinforcing theconcept of commission by that of testament. This is the subject ofthe following section.

3. a second moses

We have already seen how the ‘commandments’ in 14: 15 may be anintentional allusion to the moral exhortation characteristic of thedeveloped testament form. In some respects the disciples representthe ‘family’ of Jesus, his heirs and successors: they are to keep hiscommandments after his death and ‘He who believes inmewill also dothe works that I do, and greater works than these will he do, because Igo to the father’ (14: 12)—greater, presumably, in so far as they are nothampered, as Jesus was in his lifetime, by constrictions of space andtime.55 But the relation between the Farewell Discourse in Johnand the newer kind of testament as found, say, in the Testaments ofthe Twelve Patriarchs is in fact rather tenuous, as even E. Cortes

54 Having called the Spirit Jesus’ Doppelganger in one article (‘Die funf Paraklet-spruche’, 129), Windisch calls him his ‘caliph’ or ‘successor’ in another (‘Jesus und derGeist’, 311), thus neatly reinforcing the distinction between the two passages.

55 Bultmann makes the point about the removal of temporal limitations but deniesthe relevance of the great geographical expansion of early Christianity (p. 610).

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acknowledges. From the perspective of form criticism the true literaryantecedent of John 14 is the combined testament/commission formthat appeared in Hebrew literature as early as the tenth century (1Kings 2: 1–9) and was taken over by the deuteronomist (Deut. 31: 1–6,7–8, 14–15, 23; Josh. 1: 1–9). Some of these texts have occupied ourattention earlier in this chapter.

Now it is no coincidence that of the three paired figures whoserelationship, so it has been suggested by Bornkamm56 and Brown,57

may have influenced John’s conception of the Paraclete, by far themost impressive is the Moses/Joshua duo. Bornkamm’s proposal thatthe Paraclete may be modelled upon Jesus’ own relationship withJohn the Baptist founders on the simple fact that Jesus, thoughsucceeding the Baptist in time, precedes him in rank.58 As for Elisha,though he asks for a double share of Elijah’s spirit and inherits hismantle, he does not appear to have been commissioned by him or tohave taken over a task that Elijah left uncompleted. Joshua, on thecontrary, is specifically enjoined by God—or by Moses speaking onGod’s behalf—to carry out tasks that were originally to have beenperformed by Moses.

There are two main reasons for believing that John’s indebtednessto the deuteronomical tradition is not just amatter of background andthat we are justified in speaking of a real influence here.59 In the firstplace, the numerous references in the Gospel to Moses and to the‘prophet’ who was to succeed him show that Jesus was regarded bythe community as somehow supplanting Moses and taking hisplace.60 Secondly, an analysis of the testament and commission

56 ‘Paraklet’ (1949 and 1968). 57 Brown, pp. 1135–43.58 As Bornkamm himself recognizes (in Geschichte und Glaube, 87), without appar-

ently realizing the significance of the concession.59 Further reasons are given by A. Lacomara, ‘Farewell Discourse’. Among other

resemblances Lacomara notes the following: (a) the mediating authority of Jesus andMoses respectively is established in both writings by recalling their intimate knowledgeof the divine will; (b) they share an emphasis on the closeness, indeed the abidingpresence, of God among his people; (c) both see love as a commandment and the basis ofall obedience to God; (d) both express ‘the concern that the words and works of God beconserved and handed on to future generations that they may remain a living memoryand constant influence in the lives of the people’ (81). Like Beutler, Lacomara believesthat the theme of the new covenant is discernible throughout the farewell discourse.He goes beyond Beutler in concluding that ‘in the chapters of the farewell discourse wehave an extended commentary on the words in the institution of the Eucharist, ‘‘of thenew covenant’’ ’ (84).

60 See Meeks, Prophet-King, passim. Note that for Ben Sira (46: 1–6) Joshua was ‘thesuccessor of Moses in prophesying’.

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form, separately butmore particularly in conjunction, forces one backrepeatedly to a study of the concluding chapters of Deuteronomy. Athird reason, of less weight than the other two but still not to beignored, is the number of rewritings of parts of Deuteronomy withinthe Second Temple period: Jubilees 1, Pseudo-Philo (Ant. Bib. 19), theWords of Moses (1Q22), and above all the Testament or Assumption ofMoses.61

The book of Deuteronomy, itself in large measure the reworking ofolder traditions, is really one gigantic testament, with its naturaltime-sequence deliberately foreshortened to allow the whole actionto be encompassed within a single day. The day in question, specifiedin Deuteronomy 1: 3, is the first of the eleventh month in the fortiethyear after the Exodus. Towards the close of the book, on ‘that veryday’ (Deut. 32: 48), God summons Moses to ascend Mount Nebo (thetop of Pisgah) so as to gaze over the Jordan just once before his death:‘For you shall see the land before you; but you shall not go there, intothe land which I give to the people of Israel’ (Deut. 32: 52). Thiscareful inclusion, as Joseph Blenkinsopp observes, ‘redefines the bookas a valedictory rather than a law book’.62 Not only the retrospectiveview of the wanderings of Israel in the desert (chapters 1–4) but alsothe complex and detailed legislation of chapters 5–28 may be seen asthe official constitution of an emergent nation, which has yet to settlein its destined home. Israel’s exodus, like that of Jesus, was simply anoverture to yet greater works.

The concluding chapters, 31–4, are of particular importance, con-taining as they do Moses’ final dispositions on the eve of his death.Within them is found the fusion of the testament and commissionforms on which I have insisted. They are also the basis of what is forour purposes unquestionably the most significant of all deutero-nomic rewritings, the Testament of Moses.63 The best way of illustrat-ing this is to quote from it extensively, and so I have appended atranslation of lengthy excerpts (restricted, for practical purposes, tothe beginning and the end of the document), plus a number of notes.These will be found in Excursus IX. The remainder of this section willbe devoted to a consideration of three major topics that arise from acomparison of the Farewell Discourse with the Moses tradition.

61 See too Philo, Life of Moses; Josephus, AJ 4. 302–6.62 Prophecy and Covenant (Notre Dame, 1977), 83.63 See D. J. Harrington, ‘Interpreting Israel’s History’.

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The first concerns Moses himself—the man and the myth. The lifeof Moses furnishes an ample reservoir of legends from which Jewishwriters of all persuasions could draw when searching for freshmodels, symbols, or arguments to encourage and inspire their owncontemporaries. The narrative passages of the book of Deuteronomygive a fresh twist to various episodes in Numbers and Exodus; and asif anticipating the need for further adaptation the author foretells theadvent of yet another Moses-like figure who will exhibit all thequalities of a true prophet. Since the Exodus story is, among otherthings, a foundation myth, the frequency with which other writersturn to it should not surprise us. What may cause surprise is thevariety of guises in which Moses appears, not just as a leader andlegislator, but as an inventor and engineer (Artapanus), a prophet(Josephus), and a sage in an allegorical country where the wise manis king (Philo). For the author of the Testament of Moses, as forPseudo-Philo, he seems to have been above all the shepherd of hispeople, and it is possible that a similar tradition helped to shape thepicture of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Moses figures in Attic-styledrama (Ezekiel the Tragedian), allegory (Philo), and historicalromance (Artapanus), as well as in history (Josephus) and in thetestament genre that we have just been examining.

Other Jewish writers turned elsewhere for inspiration: Enoch to ashadowy figure from prehistory; Baruch to the amanuensis of a greatprophet; 4 Ezra, with singular irony in view of his subject, to thefounder of the Second Temple. Yet although they were proposingnew revelations they were not repudiating the old. Where the fourthevangelist differs from all of these, as well as from those who exploitedthe Moses tradition, is in his conscious substitution of this traditionby the story of Jesus: ‘You search the scriptures,’ Jesus tells ‘the Jews’,‘and I am the one to which they bear witness’ (5: 39). The deliberatereplacement of one founder-figure by another (the same step wouldbe taken six centuries later on behalf of Mohammed) is effectively theproclamation of a new religion.Wemay compare John with Matthewhere, for whom Jesus is a second Moses, refining and purifying thelaw, but not replacing it (5: 17). John, by contrast, puts the law aside,offering instead, in the name of Jesus Christ, ‘grace and truth’ (1: 17).Similarly the Temple, the second pillar of contemporary Judaism, wasfor Matthew a place where Jesus’ disciples continued to offer theirgifts; whereas for John the locus of Christian worship has shifted to aplace of ‘spirit and truth’ (4: 23).

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The many echoes of Deuteronomy in the Farewell Discourse sup-port the inference that here too John sees Jesus as having taken theplace of Moses in the new dispensation.

Next there is the question of the future, part of the raison d’etre ofall testaments. According to Deuteronomy, Moses was invited to goup to the top of Pisgah and cast his eyes ‘westward and northwardand southward and eastward’ (3: 27) whereupon God pointed out tohim in particular ‘the whole land of Judah as far as the Western Sea,the Negeb and the Plain’ (34: 1–4)—the Promised Land. Thus hestood on the very frontier, in time as well as in space, that marked thedivision between God’s promise and its fulfilment.

At the close of his life the seer Baruch was granted a more com-prehensive vision from the top of a mountain, one that embraced ‘allthe regions of the land and the figure of the inhabited world’ (2 Bar.76: 3); whilst the Enoch of the Animal Apocalypse was given a view ofthe course of history: everything that was to befall ‘these elephantsand camels and asses, and the stars, and all the bulls’ (1 Enoch 87: 4).

What is there in the Farewell Discourse to correspond to thistradition? Well, Jesus too stands on the frontier that marks theboundary between the past and the future. In his case, however,the past is his own past, his life on earth, and the future belongs tothe community that will have to manage without his bodily pres-ence. In one sense he will be unable to lead them beyond the limits ofhis own death. In a more important sense, however, he will comeand take up his abode (� �) with them, an abode which is a trueabiding (�� �Ø ).

Thirdly, we have already seen how successfully the Paracletetradition has been grafted on to a testament that might be consideredcomplete without it. The recipients of the commission to ‘keep mycommandments’ are Jesus’ disciples, who will carry out this com-mand simply by keeping his word, a charge that may have beenthought to have been partly fulfilled by their preservation of thevery Gospel which has been composed to promote faith in Jesus’words among its readers.

Certainly the idea of the preservation of the book, though notpresent explicitly in the text of Deuteronomy, reflects a real concernof the author of the Testament of Moses, which includes precise direc-tions about how the books Moses passes on to Joshua are to beanointed with cedar oil and deposited in earthen vessels in a placemadebyGod ‘from the beginningof theworld’ (1: 16–17, cf. 10: 11; 11: 1).

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There may even be a hint that the Testament is actually reproducingthe text of Deuteronomy.64 However this may be, the concern for thepreservation of the book or books is certainly shared by other contem-porary writers, notably 4 Ezra.65

The book of Deuteronomy has a variety of different expressions forthe words which it enshrines: like the Fourth Gospel it is very much abook of words, and of words capable of being indefinitely repeatedwithout losing their value. As time went on, however, these wordswould themselves require explanation, something that the Qumranauthor of the so-called ‘Words of Moses’ (1Q22) understood when inhis version of the testament he portrayed Moses as making provisionfor instructors ‘whose work it shall be to expound all these works ofthe law’.

In the Fourth Gospel, clearly, this is the job of the Paraclete. Alongwith Lindars66 I think it likely that the evangelist drew upon analready existing tradition at this point. If so, it was one which fittedremarkably well into the testament/commission form, allowing theParaclete to assume, as many scholars have noticed, the functionassigned to Joshua in the conclusion of Deuteronomy as Moses’ heirand successor.

The holy spirit in the Testament of Moses, like the JohannineParaclete, is a ‘lord of the word . . . the most consummate teacher inthe world’ (11: 16). But whereas in John the role of Joshua is taken

64 In 1: 5, a verse omitted by Charles, there is a reference to ‘the prophecy made byMoses in the book of Deuteronomy’. This can only be what Moses says in his finaltestament, and this in turn appears to refer to all that follows. Cf. E.-M. Laperrousaz,Testament, 114 n. 5.

65 Ulrich Muller (‘Parakletenvorstellung’) lays great weight on this theme. Besidesthe present passage, he detects it in Jub. 45: 16; 2 Enoch 33: 5 ff.; 36: 1; 47: 1–3; 54; 66: 7 (?);2 Bar. 77 ff.; 84–5; and above all in 4 Ezra 14, which he scrutinizes closely. Only in Test.Mos., however, is this important theme clearly integrated into the testament form.Ezra, for instance, is told by God to make public some of his writings and to entrustothers to the wise, but this is a divine instruction, not a testament. In fact Mulleradmits that he includes in his purview other texts besides formal farewell discourses—so that, he says, ‘the problematic of the farewell situation in John may be reflectedagainst the broadest possible background of similar situations’ (52). Thus at this crucialpoint he diverges from the strictly form-critical approach upon whose necessity he hadinsisted at the beginning of his article. Whilst in the present chapter I have notpermitted myself a similar liberty, I agree with Muller on the importance of thesetexts; in particular, as we have seen in Ch. 7, the distinction between public andesoteric writings bears directly upon the question of the gospel genre. But besidesthis the proposal that the Paraclete, like Joshua here, is in some sense ‘the guardian ofthe book’ deserves careful consideration.

66 Cf. nn. 9 and 10.

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over by the Paraclete, in the Testament of Moses the spirit is identifiedwith Moses and will be considered, at any rate by the kings of theAmorites, to have departed with him (11: 16).

Joshua’s office, of course, was not that of a teacher but of a leaderand guide, what the Testament of Moses calls the people’s ‘guide on theway’ (11: 10), a phrase that recalls the Paraclete’s task of guidingthe community into the truth (16: 13). We are now in a position tosee that what Jesus surveyed on the eve of his death was a domainwhich, in the eyes of the evangelist, held out more promise than theland of Canaan did to the Israelites: it was ‘the truth’, a territory whoseboundaries were already clearly defined as the revelation of Jesus,but the extent of whose riches had yet to be discovered—under theguidance of the Paraclete.

conclusion

In many parts of the Gospel, the passion narrative for instance,questions concerning the circumstances and immediate interests ofthe community would seem odd, even out of place. In others, such asthe episode of the healing of the blind man, only the acumen ofindividual scholars, in this case J. L. Martyn, has alerted us to thecomplex way in which the text is operating and suggested how itssignals must be read if its full message is to be understood. Butthere are other passages, above all the Farewell Discourse andprayer, in which the Gospel itself specifically enjoins its readers toattend to the circumstances of the Christian community after thedeath and departure of the one whose words and deeds it purports torecord. In such instances questions regarding the situation of thecommunity, far from seeming intrusive or imperceptive, are perfectlyappropriate.

We should expect, therefore, all commentators on these chapters,before as well as after the exegetical revolution that swung the beamof critical enquiry on to the situation of the earliest readers of theGospel, to have some comment to offer upon what has come to becalled the Johannine community. Similarly, a straightforward form-critical study of the Farewell Discourse of the kind I have attemptedhere might be expected to yield some direct insight into the immedi-ate preoccupations of the teacher of the community whom we havecalled the Johannine prophet.

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Very often questions directed towards these areas take the form ofan enquiry into the tasks or functions of the Paraclete. The name‘Paraclete’, in spite of dozens of energetic attempts to elucidate it,remains imperspicuous. Nevertheless—a point well made by Barna-bas Lindars—the evangelist gives his readers the necessary informa-tion. He ‘feels the need to add explanatory phrases each time he usesthe Paraclete material’.67 Since then he is so evidently identified byhis role he may be said to be identified with it. Answers to furtherquestions regarding his identity (e.g. the beloved disciple or ‘theteacher of the community’) are all wide of the mark. Besides, werehe to be identified in any crude or simplistic way with an individualhuman figure then this person too would eventually have to bereplaced on his departure by ‘another’ Paraclete, presumably witha role indistinguishable from his own.

The very absurdity of this supposition, however, prompts a furtherquestion. If the task of the Paraclete extends beyond the lifetime ofany individual, so that the work of the Johannine teacher or prophetdoes not cease with his death, then perhaps this very endurance,more than mere longevity, is part of what is being affirmed at thispoint. And indeed it is: the word for it—a verb rather than a noun—is �� �Ø . Part of the very essence of the Paraclete’s role is that heshould remain or abide.

Since this is so it is not just Jesus’ own disciples who are beingassured that he will not leave them bereft; subtly and indirectly themembers of the community are being told that the prophetic andteaching functions so vital for its survival will not cease abruptlyafter the death of its present leader. For this discourse to be fullyunderstood it must be read on two levels: what was true of Jesus isalso true of the Johannine prophet: his death is a departure but his‘spirit’ will live on.

Although this reading emerges naturally and without strain froma careful study of the text, it goes beyond the standard commentariesin its recognition that the interpretative principle I have called ‘thetwo levels of understanding’ is fully operational at this point. TheJesus of the Farewell Discourse is certainly the Jesus of the story butin and through his words may be heard the voice of the Johannineprophet. Hence the urgency of the message, the sense it conveys of agrief surmounted and accepted only with great difficulty. This is

67 ‘Persecution’, 63.

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more than a profound theological reflection upon the post-Eastersituation of the followers of Jesus; it is that, certainly, but it is alsothe final valedictory of the Johannine prophet, employing the trad-itional testament and commission form to console the community inadvance for their approaching loss and to assure them of the abidingpresence of ‘the spirit of truth’.68

68 Segovia distinguishes four types of interpretation of John 14. According to thethird of these, adopted by the majority of modern scholars, ‘the discourse addressesdirectly the fact of Jesus’ departure from the world and from his own’ (‘Structure’, 473);according to the fourth, accepted by Segovia himself, it is ‘primarily polemical in tone’(474). He thus joins the ranks of those who detect a polemical tone in ch. 14: theseinclude Becker and Woll. Such a claim is ill-founded: unlike the dialogues in the firsthalf of the Gospel, the Farewell Discourse is addressed specifically to the disciples and itstone is not polemical but consolatory. But Segovia’s main mistake lies in his failure torecognize the two levels of understanding. The view that the discourse is concernedwith Jesus’ departure does not have to be abandoned once it is seen that the evangelistis also thinking of his own situation and that of his hearers. The two readings arecomplementary—not mutually exclusive alternatives.

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Excursus IX: The Testament of Moses

The notes are confined (a) to points relevant to the preceding discus-sion; (b) to the elucidation of obscurities arising from the single,corrupt Latin manuscript containing a translation from a Greektext which according to some scholars was itself derived from aHebrew or Aramaic original. Any significant divergences from theLatin will be pointed out.

For the various editions and translations of this text, assessmentsconcerning its date and provenance, and accompanying Englishtranslation see now above all Johannes Tromp’s critical editionwith commentary of The Assumption of Moses (published in 1993),which is indispensable for any serious study of this pseudepigraphon.I have changed my own translation at certain points where I amconvinced that Tromp has a better rendering. For the first editionI consulted The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, i. 919–34 (J. Priest) andThe Apocryphal Old Testament, 601–16 (J. P. M. Sweet) as well as theearlier edition of R. H. Charles (London, 1897), published under thetitle of The Assumption of Moses, and Charles’s revised translation andnotes in APOT ii (Oxford, 1913), 414–24. The edition of E.-M. Laper-rousaz, Le Testament de Moıse, is particularly useful. Another nowindispensable study is Schalit’sUntersuchungen. This 208-page book isa detailed commentary, not just line but word by word, upon the firstchapter (18 verses) of the Testament—creeping exegesis indeed, butcreeping to some purpose, for its ultimate aim was to have been areconstruction both of the Greek translation and of the Hebrew (as itis argued) Vorlage. (The chapter and verse numberings of my owntranslation are those of Charles’s ‘Emended and Revised Text’.)

1 (6) . . . when Moses called to him Joshua,1 the son of Nun, a manwho had won the approval of the Lord, (7) to be [his] successor2 forthe people and for the Tent of Witness, with all its sacred objects;

1 Test. Mos. follows Deut. 31: 7–8, according to which Moses actually appoints hissuccessor. It should be remembered that the calling or summoning is a constitutiveelement of the later, developed testament form.

2 Here and in 10: 15 the Latin has successor. Charles argues that this is a mistrans-lation of �Ø�Œ� (¼ vtW

˝m), ‘minister’, which does indeed fit this context better.

also (8) to leadthepeople intothe landgiventotheir fathers, (9) thatit might be given to them in accordance with the covenant and theoath that he swore in the Tent that [God] would give it [the land]through Joshua. This is what he said to Joshua: (10) ‘Be strong andcourageous:3 do your best to fulfil what you have been commissionedto do4 in a way fully acceptable to God. (11) So says the Lord of theworld; (12) for he created the world on behalf of his people. (13)But he did not intend5 to disclose the plan of creation from the originof the world, in order that the Gentiles might be discredited and totheir own shame discredit one another by their disagreements.6 (14)That is why he thought me up and invented me: from the originof the world7 I have been prepared to be the mediator of his

In 10: 15, however, as Laperrousaz points out, successor is more appropriate, and in anycase the author certainly regarded Joshua as Moses’ successor. Schalit too retainssuccessor, surmising that it renders Œº�æ ��� or an equivalent term (¼ utfj). Heinsists that Joshua is Moses’ heir—but on behalf of his people: ‘the author’, he believes,‘wants to say that Joshua has been appointed by Moses not only as his successor butalso as the heir of his charisma’ (89). The purpose of his inheritance (Vererbung) is toensure ‘the continuity of the life of Israel’, not just for the sake of the people but for thesake of the sanctuary (90). Analogies with John 14 are easy to spot.

3 The Latin here has verbum hoc et promitte; but in 10: 15, where the context requiresthe same introduction, itaque tu jesu naue forma te. In both instances Charles suggestsconfortare et firma te, ‘Be strong and courageous’, corresponding to Deut. 31: 6, 7, 23;Josh. 1: 6, 7, 9, 18. Here Laperrousaz follows Charles. Priest renders promitte, somewhatoddly, by ‘Go forward’. Tromp has ‘Keep this word’ (supplying the missing Custodi),‘and promise to do impeccably everything that is commanded’; thus he takes the utfacias which follows directly upon quae mandata sunt to go with the preceding promitte.Since Test. Mos. is following Deuteronomy quite faithfully at both these points onewould expect a word of encouragement; and though Charles’s argument is veryspeculative, the forma te (surely firma te!) in 10: 15 gives it some solid basis. Accordingto Schalit, et promitte goes back to the Hebrew tmaf, a corruption, he suggests, of tmuf,i.e. ‘and observe’. This is equally speculative.

4 Quae mandate sunt ut facias. The Hebrew will have employed effr at this point, thestandard term, as we have seen, for the commissioning.

5 Noncoepit ¼ PŒXæ�Æ� ¼ ljafe al. Charles argues that the Greek translator chosethe wrong meaning of ljafe (undertake?) instead of the ordinary meaning (decide).

6 Compare the role assigned to the Paraclete in John 16: 8–11.7 ab initio orbis terrarum praeparatus sum. The Greek of this phrase has been pre-

served in the Acts of the Council of Nicaea (ad 325) in a citation from a documentreferred to there as The Assumption of Moses: ŒÆd �æ�Ł��Æ�� �� › ¨�e� �æe ŒÆ�Æ�ºB�Œ���ı �r Æ� �� �B� ØÆŁ�Œ�� ÆP�F ������ (Migne, PG ii. 18. 1265). Charles andLaperrousaz agree that the reference is to our Test. Mos. But the Greek is in the middlevoice, not the passive, and the verb (‘foresee’ rather than ‘prepare’) does not neces-sarily imply pre-existence. (Schalit thinks that the Greek here may have been��Ø�Æ��� � �N��, a genuine passive.) The Greek phrase �æe ŒÆ�Æ�ºB� Œ���ı exactlycorresponds to the one employed by Jesus in his prayer to the Father, when he asks tobe glorified ‘with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made’ (John 17:24); cf. also Mark 10: 6; 13: 19—I�� Iæ�B� Œ����ø�.

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covenant.8 (15) And now I reveal [the purpose of God’s creation] toyou because the span of my life has been completed and I am depart-ing in the presence of the whole people to the resting-place of myfathers.9 (16) As for you, take this writing and give thought how topreserve the books that I will pass on to you;10 (17) you are to putthem in order and anoint them with cedar oil and deposit them inearthen vessels in a place which he made from the beginning of theworld (18) so that his name might be invoked until the day ofrepentance; in the visitation with which the Lord will visit them11

at the time of the consummation of the end of the days.12

2 (1) . . . Through you they will enter into the land which hedecreed and promised to give to their fathers.13

10 (11) ‘As for you, Joshua, son of Nun, guard these words andthis book.’14 (12) For from my death, my being taken away,15 up tohis coming there will be 250 times. (13) And this is the course of

8 arbiter testament illius. Thus Test. Mos. refers explicitly to Moses’ role as mediatorof the covenant. Cf. Gal. 3: 19; Heb. 8: 6.

9 Transio in dormitionem patrum meorum. Moses does not actually say this inDeuteronomy, but is told by God: ‘Behold you are about to sleep with your fathers’(Deut. 31: 16). Transio might be a rendering of �æ�ı��ÆØ, or even of �ªø, but theGreek verb is more probably �ØÆ�Æ� �Ø ( ¼ btp).

10 ad recognoscendam tutationem librorum quos tibi tradam. Tutatio suggests ��æ�E rather than �ıº���Ø . In Deuteronomy Moses is not actually said to hand any booksover to Joshua, though he did ‘write the words of the law in a book’ (Deut. 31: 24), onethat in fact constitutes the bulk of Deuteronomy itself. There is no explicit mention of abook in John 14, but the idea of a written record is not far off (cf. John 20: 31; 21: 24–5).Schalit argues convincingly here that Moses wishes to protect his book from allpossible future falsifications. He shows that recognoscere is a technical term for ensuringthat a copy tallies perfectly with the original. His Greek retroversion of this passagereads: ŒÆd K Æ �� �Æ �e� �F ºÆF ���ı ���ÆØ�c ªæÆ�c �Æ��� �N� �c I��ºØ�Ø �B�I ƪ ���ø� �H �Ø�º�ø (173–8).

11 in respectu quo respicit illos Dominus. Tromp’s translation.12 A similar futuristic eschatology, absent from Deuteronomy, is implied in

John 14: 3, as we have seen, but reinterpreted in John 14: 18.13 At this point I move to the conclusion of the document, since the intervening

material (2: 2–10: 10) is not relevant to my argument. Note that the ending of Test. Mos.repeats many of the themes of the opening.

14 custodi verba haec et hunc librum. Custodire¼�ıº���Ø . Note that here we have‘book’ rather than ‘books’ as in 1: 16. In 1Q22 Moses instructs the Israelites to appointpeople whose ‘work it shall be to expound all the words of the law’. This badlymutilated text allows us to see that the author shares the concern of the author ofTest. Mos. but ensures continuity in a different way, by providing for teachers. Vermeshazards ‘wise men’ (Dead Sea Scrolls2, 226).

15 a morte receptione[m]. The first editor of Test. Mos., Ceriani, signalled his uncer-tainty about the m by printing it in italics. Charles reads a morte—receptione—m(ea).The original text, he believes, was a testament, and alluded simply to Moses’ death. Theword receptione will have been added by a later editor who combined this testament

456 Relevation

events that will come to pass, until they are completed. (14) As forme, I shall go to the resting-place of my fathers.16 (15) WhereforeJoshua, son of Nun, be strong and of good courage;17 for God haschosen you to be my successor18 in the same covenant.’

11 (1) And when Joshua heard the words of Moses as written inhis writing, all that they had foretold,19 he rent his garments and casthimself at Moses’ feet. (2) And Moses comforted20 him and weptwithhim. (3) And Joshua replied: (4) ‘Whydo you consoleme, lordMoses, and however shall I be consoled21 for the bitter word that hasproceeded from your mouth, a word full of tears and lamentation inthat you are leaving this people behind. (5) What place will receiveyou? (6) and what monument will mark your tomb, (7) and who,being human, will dare to move your body from one place to an-other? (8) For all who die of old age are buried in [their own] lands;but your burial-place extends from the East to theWest, and from theSouth to the extremeNorth:22 thewholeworld is your sepulchre. (9)Lord, you are departing:23 who will feed this people? (10) Who willhave compassion on them or be their leader on theway?24 (11)Who

with an assumption. But Laperrousaz points out that receptio does not necessarily implyan assumption into heaven; it could simply anticipate Joshua’s question, a little later,‘What place will receive you?’, Quis locus recipiet te? (11: 5) and be a reference to Moses’burial. This is accepted by Priest, though Sweet remains uncertain. Laperrousaz’ssuggestion throws into question the long-held belief that Test. Mos. is not a testamentbut a truncated assumption. He himself argues in favour of the testament hypothesis(29–62).

16 Ego autem ad dormitionem patrum meorum eram (for eram read eam).17 See n. 3 above. 18 successor. See n. 2 above.19 et cum audisset jesus verba moysi tam scripta in sua scriptura omnia quae praedix-

erant. Yet another jumble. Charles (1897) inserts quam before omnia and emendspraedixerant to praedixerat: ‘When Joshua had heard the words of Moses, both thosewritten down in his writing and all he had said previously.’ This makes little sense; inhis later version he retains the second emendation only: ‘that were so written in hiswriting all that he had before said’; similarly Priest.

20 hortatus est cum. Read eum (¼�Ææ�Œº��� ÆP�� ).21 Accepting Charles’s emendations: solaris for celares and solabor for celabor. Moses’

attempt at consolation is a natural human touch, much weaker, of course, than Jesus’PŒ I���ø �A� Oæ�Æ �� (‘I will not leave you bereft’) in John 14: 18.

22 These words are borrowed from Deut. 3: 27, where Moses is told to ascend Pisgahand lift up his eyes to the four points of the compass. Implicitly, therefore, Test. Mos.pictures Moses as surveying his burial-place—the whole earth.

23 domine ab his: read domine abis.24 quis est qui miserebitur illis et quis eis dux erit in via¼ ›��ªe� ½#ª��g � K �fi B ›�fiH. By

a nice irony Joshua speaks of tasks that he will have to perform himself: cf. 11: 11, utinducam illos in terram. The parallel with the Paraclete is evident: he will lead them(›��ª���Ø) into all truth (John 16: 13).

Excursus IX: The Testament of Moses 457

will pray for them, not omitting a single day,25 so that Imay lead theminto the land of their forefathers?26 (12) How can I be to this peoplelike a father to his only son or a wife to her virgin daughter who isbeing prepared to be handed over to her husband? (Shewill be anxiousfor her and shield her body from the sun and take care that her feet arenot unshod for running over the ground.) (13) And how shall Iprovide them with all the food and drink they desire? (14) For therewill be [6]00,000 of them: so greatly have their numbers increased inresponse to your prayers, lord Moses. (15) And what wisdom orunderstanding have I that I should administer justice or pronouncea verdict in the words of the Lord?27 (16) Moreover the kings of theAmorites, after they have heard (believing that they can defeat us)that ‘they have no longer among them the holy spirit, worthy beforethe Lord, versatile and inscrutable, the lord of the word, faithful inall things, the divine prophet for the entire world, the most consum-mate teacher on earth: so let us proceed against them.’28 (17) If theenemy ever again sin against God then theywill havenoadvocate29 tooffer prayers on their behalf to the Lord, as Moses, the great messen-ger,30 did, who remained kneeling on the ground every hour, day andnight, looking to the Almighty who governs the world in mercy andjustice, reminding him of the covenant with their fathers, and placat-ing the Lordwith his oath. (18) So theywill say: ‘He is no longerwiththem; so let us proceed against them and blot them off the face of theearth.’ (19) What will then become of this people, lord Moses?’

12 (1) When he had finished speaking Joshua threw himself oncemore at Moses’ feet. (2) But Moses took his hand and raised him onto the seat in front of him, and answered and said to him: (3)‘Joshua, do not underrate yourself, nor be anxious,31 but listen to

25 patiens. Charles thinks that the translator has picked the wrong meaning of�ÆæØ���: ‘permit’ instead of ‘omit’.

26 Tromp, following Ewald, emends so as to read Amorites. This may be right: seel. 16.

27 sapientia et intellectus. Cf. the regular conjunction of emkh with enjb or enfbv: Isa.29: 14; Job 28: 28; Prov. 3: 13, 19; 4: 5, 7, etc.

28 By a bold stroke Moses is identified with the Holy Spirit here. As in the FourthGospel, the spirit is closely associated with the word: he is to prophesy and teach—he iseven called ‘lord of the Word’. Perhaps John knew this tradition and was influenced byit to see the Spirit assuming the roles elsewhere assigned to Jesus.

29 defensor, not advocatus. Intercession is a regular prophetic function.30 nuntius¼ ¼ªª�º�¼xalm.31 praebe te securum: the characteristic reassurance of the commission form when

accompanied by a divine injunction; it is based on the conviction of divine providence.

458 Relevation

my words. (4) God has created all the nations on earth, just as hehas us; he foresaw them and us from the beginning of the creation ofthe earth up to the end of the world, and nothing, not the least thing,has been overlooked by him; but he has seen and known everythingbeforehand.32 (5) The Lord has foreseen everything that wouldoccur on earth; and this is how it happens . . . (6) The Lord hascommissioned me33 . . . for them and their sins . . . to (?) forthem, (7) not for any strength or weakness of mine; but out oflong-suffering his mercy and patience have befallen me. (8) For Itell you, Joshua: it is not on account of the piety of the people thatyou will exterminate the Gentiles. (9) All the foundations of theglobe have been made and approved by God and are under the signetring of his right hand. (10) Those who fully carry out the com-mandments of God will grow and prosper. (11) But those who sinand flout the commandments will be deprived of these promisedblessings and will suffer torments at the hands of the nations. (12)But it will prove impossible to exterminate and abandon them com-pletely. (13) For God will intervene, he who has foreseen all thingsfor all eternity, and his covenant has been established and theoath . . . ’ [Here the MS breaks off.]

32 Following Tromp in reading pronovit for MS provovit.33 Apparently me constituit (the text is corrupt), presumably reflecting Hebrew jn: f

¯

r: .

Excursus IX: The Testament of Moses 459

12

PASSION AND RESURRECTION

1. passion

The passion and resurrection of Christ lie at the heart of Christianity.They belong, and belong integrally, to the Gospels. In a famous phrase(which he himself regarded as ‘somewhat provocative’) MartinKahler suggested that the Gospels might be called ‘passion narrativeswith extended introductions’;1 however true of the other three, this iscertainly not true of the Fourth. No onewho had given thematter anythoughtwould claim that the first seventeen chapters of the Gospel, oreven the first ten, are nothing more than an introduction or over-ture to what follows. Where John is concerned the problem is theother way round: Ernst Kasemann has gone so far as to say that thepassion narrative was more an embarrassment to the evangelist thanthe natural conclusion of his work: it is an appendix or postscripttacked on to the body of the Gospel—less a coda properly so-calledthan a reverberation that continues to resound after the work itselfhas come to an end.2 We shall see that Kasemann’s arguments havea certain force; a similar case, to my mind even more persuasive,can be made for the superfluousness of the resurrection stories inchapter 20.

The problem of the passion in John is primarily an external one.The evangelist makes his meaning quite clear. The trouble is that hisreaders are expecting something very different and often inject theirpre-understanding into the Gospel text. The temptation to bring Johninto line with Paul, to harmonize, is very strong. Such resemblancesas there are, say, to the Philippians hymn (the triple movement of

1 Historical Jesus, 80 n. 11. The 1st German edition was published in 1892.2 ‘Fast mochte man sagen, sie klappe nach, weil Johannes sie unmoglich uberge-

hen, die uberlieferte Gestalt jedoch auch nicht organisch seinem Werk einfugenkonnte’ (Jesu Letzter Wille3, 23). The English trans. (‘a mere postscript’: p. 7) does notquite do justice to the original German, which hints at reverberations that continue toresound after the music has stopped.

descent, death, and exaltation) are superficial: for John the incarna-tion is not a self-emptying but a manifestation of divine glory, andthe cross itself an instrument of exaltation.

One might expect the Christian reader who comes to ‘the Passionaccording to St John’ with the other three accounts in mind to beperplexed and disturbed by the differences. But in fact such a reader islikely to see the four blending harmlessly together and so to miss thesingularity of John’s vision. No modern exegete has shown himselfmore keenly aware of this than Kasemann, and he has highlighted itmore than any other theologian.

Taking my cue from him I turn now to the passion narrative. Afterthe immensely impressive theology of revelation that has been elab-orated in the first half of the Gospel and confirmed in the next fourchapters, what does this add to John’s general message?

Conservative-minded Christians may well be taken aback, asKasemann clearly intends them to be, by his suggestion that it is amere postscript, part of an argument which brazenly concludes thatthe Church’s acceptance of the Fourth Gospel into its canon wasreally a mistake. Even the liberal-minded Gunther Bornkamm isoffended by it, as he shows in his extended review of Testament ofJesus. He adduces the numerous allusions to the ‘hour’ of Jesus, fromCana onwards (2: 4; 7: 30; 8: 20), culminating in 12: 23 ff. and 13: 1and the teaching of the Farewell Discourse (13: 31; 17: 1), the sayingsconcerning the ascent of the Son of Man (3: 12–15; 6: 61 ff.; 8: 28;12: 32–3), and much else besides.3 But how far does Bornkamm’srather perfunctory list constitute a convincing refutation of Kase-mann’s arguments? Kasemann himself is unimpressed:

Bornkamm’s statistics might seem rather to support me than to tell againstme. Obviously no Gospel can entirely ignore Jesus’ death. But the question isnot how often reference is made to it and its attendant circumstances. Ratherwe have to ask how it is interpreted. 7: 30 and 8: 20 [‘my hour is not yetcome’] testify primarily to the exaltation of the earthly Jesus, and also predicthis subsequent arrest. In 12: 1 ff., 23 ff., 32 and 13: 1 death is understood asthe path to glory. The same is true of 2: 19 ff. and 3: 14, which (like 10: 11)make use of traditional material. For the formula ‘give his life’ refers to theexternal act of love. None of this goes anywhere towards a theology of thecross. It simply shows that John uses previous ideas about Jesus’ death as astarting-point for his own interpretation. The only exceptions are 1: 26 [?], 29

3 See ‘Interpretation’, 79–96.

Passion and Resurrection 461

[‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’] and it is noaccident that these are put in the mouth of the Baptist and thereby markedout as traditional sayings of the community.4

Kasemann’s case is a strong one, andwe shall see that it can bemadeeven stronger. We may begin, however, by challenging it, observingin particular that, since the passion narrative is clearly the work ofthe same writer, occupied by the same concerns, his charge that it isa mere postscript cannot be sustained. Some of the connections arestraightforward, traditional, and relatively insignificant. The refer-ences to the denial of Peter (13: 38; 18: 17) and the treachery of Judas(13: 2; 18: 2) are of this order. John alone, however, speaks of theprophecy of Caiaphas (11: 51; 18: 14) and establishes a link betweenthe actual arrest of Jesus and earlier attempts to apprehend him inJerusalem: the same officials ( ��æ��ÆØ) under orders from the sameauthorities, the chief priests and Pharisees (7: 32; 18: 3). More inter-estingly, Jesus’ challenge to those come to arrest him, ‘Whom do youseek?’ (18: 4) recalls his earlier response to the same group: ‘You willseek me but you will not find me’ (7: 34). And his reply in the garden,‘I am [he]’, Kª� �N�� (18: 4, 8), may well be, as Catrin Williams hasargued, a deliberate assertion of his power and authority (whichwould explain the soldiers’ awestruck reaction). Yet we cannot besure that this reply is intended to carry all the connotations it hasaccumulated in the Book of Signs. Nor is it certain that Jesus’ addressto his mother, ‘Woman’ (19: 26) is a deliberate echo of the scene atCana (2: 4).

Some allusions, however, must have been planned. Jesus’ accept-ance of ‘the cup which the Father has given me’ (18: 11) reminds us ofhis refusal to plead to be saved ‘from this hour’ (12: 27); in the samebreath these sayings both recall and reject the Gethsemane tradition.Next there is the evangelist’s comment upon Jesus’ request to leavehis disciples free, which was ‘to fulfil the word which he had spoken‘‘Of those whom thou gavest me, I lost not one’’ ’ (18: 9). It may bedifficult to put one’s finger on the precise passage to which John isalluding here (suggestions include 6: 39; 10: 28; and 17: 12); but themain point stands: Jesus’ pastoral concern, stated earlier as a promiseand prediction, is exhibited from the very moment of his arrest.

Another comment of the evangelist concerns the assertion of ‘theJews’ that they have no legal right to impose or to carry out the death

4 Jesu Letzter Wille3, 96–7.

462 Revelation

penalty: ‘This was to fulfil the word which Jesus had spoken to showby what death he was to die’ (18: 32). The term ‘crucifixion’ has notbeen used up to this point: it does not figure in the saying to which18: 32 evidently alludes: ‘I, when I am lifted up (Ka łøŁH) from theearth, will draw all men to myself ’ (12: 32). The evangelist’s inter-jected explanation in 12: 33 is repeated virtually word for word in18: 32, a fact which has led some commentators, e.g. Schnackenburg,to suspect that a glossator has been at work. However that may be,the indirect allusion to crucifixion in both passages is characteristicof the evangelist’s style and is a strong indication of his desire toshow that the manner of Jesus’ death was divinely determined,fulfilling as it did not just the scripture (something which would bestressed later: 19: 24, 28, 29, 36, 37), but also Jesus’ own words.

We may appropriately conclude this argument with Jesus’ lastword on the cross. According to Matthew (27: 50) and Mark (15:37), Jesus expired with a wordless cry. Luke (23: 46) turns this into aprayer: ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’ John envisagesJesus as fully conscious of the significance of the occasion: �N�g� ›

� ���F� ‹�Ø X�� � �Æ ����º���ÆØ, ‘knowing that all was now accom-plished’ (19: 28), in his final utterance he gives voice to this know-ledge, not in a prayer or a wordless cry, but in the single word,����º���ÆØ: ‘it is accomplished’ (19: 30)—the goal, ��º� (cf. 13: 1,the only occurrence of this term in the Gospel), has been achieved.One could ask for no more conclusive proof of the evangelist’scommitment to his narrative; had he been less interested or involvedhe would have followed his source more faithfully. Had the passionnarrative been a mere postscript it would have ended differently.

There is abundant evidence, then, that John’s passion narrativehas been deliberately and skilfully integrated with the Book of Signs.But this is by no means a satisfactory refutation of Kasemann’s case.On the level of technical exegesis he is easy to fault. But the essence ofhis argument is not so much exegetical as theological.5 He is reallysuggesting that the evangelist’s presentation of Jesus is such as tomake a passion narrative superfluous if not altogether meaningless:‘In John the glory of Jesus determines his whole presentation sothoroughly from the very outset that the incorporation and positionof the passion narrative of necessity becomes problematical.’ When

5 We should not allow ourselves to be misled by Kasemann’s assertion (Testament, 3)that he is more interested in historical than in theological questions.

Passion and Resurrection 463

he denies that John was able to fit the passion ‘organically’ into hiswork, this amounts to an assertion that a true passion narrative,retaining the shock and the horror, would be out of place in a Gospelthat places so much emphasis on Jesus’ glory: ‘His solution was toimprint the features of the victory of Christ upon the passion story.’6

This point is worth stressing, for the extent to which John sup-presses the painful and especially the shameful elements of thepassion story is truly remarkable. Here a single example must suffice.Compare John’s laconic allusion to the scourging and the crown ofthorns with, say, Matthew 27: 29–31. John allows the soldiers tostrike Jesus but not to strip him or spit upon him, and their mockery,while perhaps suggested, is never explicitly stated:

His death, to be sure, takes place on the cross, as tradition demands. But thiscross is no longer the pillory, the tree of shame, on which hangs the one whohad become the companion of thieves. His death is rather the manifestationof divine self-giving love and his victorious return from the alien realm belowto the Father who had sent him.7

Of John’s omissions the most striking are the cry of desolation on thecross and the agony in the garden. We have just observed thesignificance to be attached to Jesus’ final ����º���ÆØ. But by replacingthe anguished appeal recorded by Mark and Matthew with a shout oftriumph John transforms the cross into a throne. As for Jesus’despairing plea to be rid of the chalice of suffering he sees ahead ofhim, John actually portrays Jesus in the act of considering whetherhe should make this prayer or not and then deciding not to (12: 27; cf.18: 11). The divine promise of glorification that follows ‘has comefor your sake’, Jesus tells the crowd, ‘not for mine’ (12: 30).‘As the Revealer does not need to express a petition in prayer,’comments Bultmann, ‘so he does not need a special divine word ofconsolation.’8

In the case of the Fourth Gospel ‘passion’ is a misnomer; Jesuscontrols and orchestrates the whole performance. From the momentof his calm greeting to the soldiers who have come to arrest him, whothen start back in fear, to the moment of his death he remains incommand. Even his ‘giving-up the ghost’ can be read as a peacefulhanding over of the Spirit. Confronted by Pilate it is he who is the realjudge; such power as Pilate has comes to him from on high, and in

6 Testament, 7. 7 Ibid. 10. 8 Bultmann, p. 430.

464 Revelation

acceding to the demand that Jesus be crucified he is unconsciouslycomplying with a divine decree, following the directions and speak-ing the words assigned to him in the text. Bultmann points out9 thatat the end of the Farewell Discourse (14: 31) what Jesus says is noto�ø� ��E ª� ��ŁÆØ (‘it is necessary that it should happen thus’), buto�ø� �ØH (‘I act thus’). If God is the author of this passion play,Jesus is the protagonist—but also the producer and director!

All in all, then, Kasemann has a powerful case; and it is not to becountered simply by totting up the numbers of references to the passionthat are found in the first dozen chapters, nor even by illustrating theevangelist’s deliberate attempts to integrate the Christ of the passionnarrativewith the Christ of the Book of Signs. It is true that this effort atcoherence proves that the evangelist himself did not regard the passionnarrative as a mere postscript or appendix. But that does nothing toanswer Kasemann’s theological objections. If, as he correctly maintainsagainst Bornkammand others, the fourth evangelist has no theology ofthe cross,what does Jesus’ passionmean tohim?What significance canit have beyond the triumph of divine folly over human wisdom and ofdivine weakness over human strength (1 Cor. 1)?

The answer lies in the evangelist’s vocabulary of death.10

2. death

For Kasemann, as is well known, Jesus’ death represents ‘his victori-ous return from the alien realm below to the Father who had senthim’. Yet in the very same sentence he also describes it as ‘themanifestation of divine self-giving love’.11 We shall see that theevangelist’s choice of words when speaking of Jesus’ death largelyvindicates Kasemann’s first phrase, the one upon which he laysthe most stress. But the issue is a complex one and, as so often,Kasemann skates over any evidence that points away from his ownconclusions. We should first enquire in what respects if any theGospel can be said to suggest what we may call a sacrificial inter-pretation of Jesus’ death.

What at first sight looks like the strongest evidence comes in theallegory of the Good Shepherd. In a gesture that would have little

9 Ibid. 633.10 See on this esp. Ulrich Muller, ‘Bedeutung’. 11 Testament, 10.

Passion and Resurrection 465

beneficial effect if the flock were really threatened by thieves orwolves, he lays down his life for his sheep: �c łı�c ÆP�F ��Ł��Ø

�bæ �H �æ��ø (10: 11; cf. 10: 15, 17, 18; 13: 37–8 (Peter); 15: 13;1 John 3: 16).12 Next there is Caiaphas’ prophecy, highlighted by theevangelist in one of his emphatic asides, ‘that it is expedient for youthat one man should die for the people and that the whole nationshould not perish’ (11: 50–2; cf. 18: 14). We should probably notattach too much significance to the title of Lamb of God. In thesigns source it is unlikely to have been associated with the passion;moreover, the explanatory phrase, ‘who takes away the sin of theworld’ (1: 29, 36) is quite possibly a redactional addition designed tobring the Gospel into line with the theology of the First Letter.13 The‘eucharistic’ passage, 6: 51c–58, may be similarly accounted for. Asfor the paschal lamb (19: 36), despite its appearance in 1 Cor. 5: 7, itspurpose was not sacrificial but apotropaic. More weight shouldperhaps be placed upon the saying concerning the grain of corn(12: 24–6), but this too is arguably an editorial insertion.14 Jesus’determination to consecrate himself on behalf of his disciples (17: 19),unquestionably an allusion to his approaching death, belongs to asecond edition of the Gospel. Lastly there is a washing of the feet,widely, and I think rightly, interpreted as a sacrificial gesture.15

Much of this evidence is open to the suspicion of having beenincluded in the Gospel at a fairly late stage, but this does not meanthat it should be ignored. Bultmann’s judgement that ‘the thought ofJesus’ death as atonement for sin has no place in John’16 is far toosweeping. But if it is going too far to speak of it as ‘a foreign element’in the Gospel (Bultmann again) it cannot be said to be in any waycentral. To get to the heart of the evangelist’s thinking we must turnto what I have called John’s vocabulary of death.

12 In 10: 11, Bultmann argues, the meaning must be ‘to stake one’s life, to risk it, tobe prepared to lay it down’ (370 n. 5), but elsewhere (except 13: 37–8) the moregenerally accepted ‘lay down one’s life’ must be the right rendering.

13 Cf. Becker, p. 92.14 Cf. Becker, p. 382. Becker also ascribes the Good Shepherd passage (10: 1–18) to

a redactor (311–12): it certainly interrupts the sequence, but there is no good reasonfor thinking that the insertion was not made by the evangelist himself. See Ashton,‘The Shepherd’.

15 In this scene one interpretation is overlaid by another. Here I follow JohannesBeutler (‘Heilsbedeutung’), who gives a concise summary of all the evidence andargues that what he calls the ‘christologisch-soteriologisch’ interpretation is the earlierof the two.

16 Theology, ii. 54.

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This may be divided into three groups, each marked out by adominant verb and each linked to one of the titles studied in threechapters of Part I: (a) the crucifixion of the Messiah, (b) the departureof the Son of God, (c) the exaltation of the Son of Man.

(a) The Crucifixion of the Messiah (��ÆıæF )

The traditional symbolic image of Jesus’ death, the crucifix, is avividly precise representation of what Paul regarded as the essenceof his Gospel, which he summed up as ‘Christ crucified’. The fact thatJohn does not use the word of Jesus’ death outside the passionnarrative is of no great significance, for nor do the other evangelists.But the fact that he does use it in the passion narrative is notsignificant either, since it would be impossible to tell the story ofJesus’ dying on the cross without it. This means that there could beno Gospel without it either, and in the concluding chapter I shall bereflecting on the importance of this truth. ‘Was crucified underPontius Pilate’ is arguably the only genuinely historical element inthe Christian creed, the remaining articles being dogmatic additionsbeyond the reach of the historian’s investigations. But just as thetitle ‘Messiah’, though received and accepted by John, does not seizehis theological imagination and is not invested by him with anyadditional meaning of his own, so he fails to exploit the notion ofcrucifixion in a Pauline or Marcan fashion, lighting instead, as weshall see, upon the one feature of this barbarous punishment thatallows it to be seen as a glory rather than a disgrace.

(b) The Departure of the Son of God ( �ª�Ø )17

The theme of departure, extensively explored in the preceding chap-ter, is the culmination of a theology of mission which, when com-bined with the concept of Jesus’ divine sonship, results in the twocharacteristically Johannine terms for God, Father and Sender. Jesusenters the world with a mission from the Father and leaves it whenhis mission is completed. By an extraordinary involution his missionis simply to reveal to mankind his origin and his destiny, his entryand his departure. From this perspective the true significance of his

17 Allied words are ���Æ�Æ� �Ø (13: 1); �æ�ı��ŁÆØ (14: 2 etc.); I��æ���ŁÆØ (16: 7);Kæ���ŁÆØ (17: 11, 13).

Passion and Resurrection 467

death has nothing to do with the manner of it. No doubt one couldsay of him that ‘nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it’,but this is only because it satisfactorily rounds off his mission,allowing him to say, for the first and only time: ‘It is accomplished.’

I have already thoroughly investigated the connotations of theterm �ª�Ø , part of the private vocabulary of the community.Whenever it is employed in this special sense, the notion of death isalways present; nevertheless the pain and the shame of Jesus’ actualdeath have been filtered out of the term itself—much as in theEnglish vulgarism ‘pass away’. Jesus has not gone ‘the way of allflesh’ in the traditional Jewish understanding of the term: there is notrace in the Fourth Gospel of any ‘descent into hell’.

(c) The Exaltation of the Son of Man ( łF�ŁÆØ)18

If the Son of God is sent into the world and departs from it, the Sonof Man descends and ascends. The theme of exaltation, implyingascent into heaven, is nowhere associated with the Son of God, justas the theme of mission is nowhere associated with the Son ofMan. Because the term łF figures prominently in what have theappearance of passion predictions, we may be tempted to see it as adeliberate evocation of the actual act of crucifixion; but as with �ª�Ø the evangelist has selected a term whose first meaning hasnothing to do with death. It means ‘to lift up’, ‘to raise’, ‘to exalt’ andwould be easier to understand of the resurrection than of the cruci-fixion. Consequently it is misleading, if not altogether wrong, tospeak of the sayings in which it occurs as passion predictions. Indiscussing these sayings in connection with the title ‘Son of Man’(Ch. 5), I stopped short at the point where exaltation modulates intoglorification.

In the first of the sayings that mentions the lifting up or exaltationof the Son of Man (3: 14) the nature of the elevation is suggested by acomparison with Moses’ bronze serpent, which he raised or set up ona pole in the desert. (In LXX Numbers 21: 9 the word used is ƒ�� ÆØ,‘to set up’, not łF .) In the second, which comes in a debateconcerning Jesus’ departure from the world, the subject of the verbis ‘the Jews’: ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will

18 Also I Æ�Æ� �Ø : 3: 13; 6: 62; cf. 1: 51. In 20: 17 there is no reference to the Son ofMan and the context indicates the use of an old ascension tradition.

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know . . . ’ (8: 28). The allusion to crucifixion, however indirect, canscarcely be missed, even though it was Romans, not Jews, whoactually lifted Jesus up on the cross. In the third saying the allusionis yet clearer, though here too the word ‘crucifixion’ is avoided(in fact, as we have seen, it is not used outside the passion narrativeitself): ‘ ‘‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all mento myself.’’ He said this to show by what death he was to die’(12: 32–3).19

(d) Glory and Glorification (����Ø )

The theology of the fourth evangelist is so singular and strange thatit is easy to miss the significance of his final reinterpretation of Jesus’death. One can see why he can think of it as a departure or anascension, but surely the word ‘glory’ is out of place? Yet at twopoints, one of them the passage in which the third prediction occurs,12: 20–36, ‘glory’, or rather the verb, ����Ø , is the term that isemployed to supplement and eventually supplant that of exaltation.The third prediction belongs to the narrative conclusion to the Bookof Signs, which perhaps replaces an earlier ending, 10: 42.20 (Theremainder of chapter 12, as Dodd points out, is an epilogue in twoparts, the second of which, to be discussed in the next chapter, is arevelation summary.) In what follows, 12: 24–6 will be left out ofconsideration. These verses interrupt the sequence of thought andare probably a late insertion, whether or not, as Dodd argues,21 theystem from old, authentic tradition.

In 12: 23 Jesus declares: ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man tobe glorified.’ The remainder of the passage tells the reader what thismeans and what it implies. In fact the word ����Ø has been used a

19 Schnackenburg regards the explanatory comment as a gloss. To excise it wouldbe to preserve the indirectness of the other sayings. I am inclined to favour this viewbut it is impossible to be sure.

20 From a form-critical point of view it resembles the opening of ch. 3, with which ithas much in common both materially and stylistically. Both are dialogueswith uncomprehending but not totally unsympathetic interlocutors, pronouncementstories but not controversies. Just as Nicodemus gives way to a larger, unspecifiedaudience, so ‘the Greeks’, having enlisted the assistance of Philip and Andrew(12: 21–2), yield to ‘the crowd standing by’ (12: 29, 34). It is significant that ‘the Jews’play no part here. The incomprehension of the crowd serves as an occasion for Jesus’final pronouncement on the need to ‘walk in the light’. Before disappearing from publicview he ends his preaching as he began it, with a demand for faith.

21 Tradition, 366–9, 338–43, 352–3.

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few verses earlier: ‘when Jesus was glorified . . . then they remem-bered’ (12: 16). This comment of the evangelist is close to 2: 22: ‘whenhe was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered’, and provesthat the first association of glorification is with resurrection. Theycannot of course even have begun to remember whilst Jesus was stillhanging on the cross. There is therefore an important sense in whichJesus was not yet glorified whilst on earth (cf. 7: 39).

In the comment on the agony tradition that follows (12: 27) itemerges that, as used here, the word ����Ø is associated with Jesus’approaching death. Jesus’ prayer to the Father, ‘glorify thy name’ ismet with the response: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again’(12: 28). There is only one feasible interpretation: the first act ofglorification of the Father’s name must be understood of Jesus’ lifeup to the present (one of service to the Father) and the second act (his‘hour’) of his passion and resurrection.22 Throughout his life thedivine emissary had sought the glory of the one who sent him (7: 18).But the ultimate revelation of that glory was yet to come.

Although the object of the glorification in 12: 28 is clearly intendedto be the Father’s name, the actual object is left unexpressed by thevoice from heaven: ŒÆd K���Æ�Æ ŒÆd �ºØ ���ø. From this omissionBultmann infers an intentional ambiguity: ‘The ���Æ of the Fatherand the ���Æ of the Son are bound to each other.’23 But is this right?It would certainly be pedantic to dissociate the two completely;nevertheless the glory that concerns the evangelist in this passage(also an epiphany, a moment of revelation) occurs at Easter, and issomething altogether special. A little further on Jesus is asked bythe crowd: ‘How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?’(12: 34). What Jesus had actually said was that the Son of Man was tobe glorified (12: 23).24 So ‘lifting up’ and ‘glorification’ are alternativeand complementary ways of speaking of the same event.25

22 There is really nothing to be said for the very different view held by W. Thusing,Erhohung, namely that the two stages of Jesus’ glorification are first his death andsecondly his exaltation. Cf. J. Blank, Krisis, 268 n. 11.

23 Bultmann, p. 429.24 Bultmann argues that in the verses immediately preceding 12: 34 ‘there is no

mention whatsoever of the Son of Man’ (p. 313) and concludes that 12: 34–6 should beplaced after 8: 29. This enables him to assert (p. 354) that 12: 34 picks up the saying in8: 28. But there is no justification for this displacement.

25 The two verbs occur together in the introduction to the Suffering Servantprophecy of Second Isaiah, where the LXX reads: N�f �ı ���Ø › �ÆE� �ı ŒÆd łøŁ����ÆØ ŒÆd ��Æ�Ł����ÆØ ����æÆ: ‘Behold my servant shall understand and shall

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Bultmann concludes his discussion of this passage by quotingKierkegaard: ‘Humiliation belongs to him just as essentially as exalt-ation.’ This helps us to understand his affirmation that ‘It is preciselyto humiliation that the divine �ø � [voice] gives the glory anddignity of the ���Æ, and in so doing it gives it eternity.’26 This is acurious reading, however, of a passage in which all the emphasis isupon exaltation and glorification, with not a whisper of humiliation.It is not, as Bultmann affirms, that the glory is to be found in thehumiliation, but rather that what the world sees as a defeat is really atriumph, and what the world sees as the end of Jesus’ hopes andaspirations is really the beginning of his ascent into glory. TheJohannine paradox, remarks Blank, is not that ‘the hour of the��Æ�ŁB ÆØ is the hour of the passion, but the reverse: the hour ofthe passion is already the hour of the ��Æ�ŁB ÆØ’.27 But even thisinterpretation gives the passion a greater prominence than the evi-dence warrants. The Christian believer is not expected to see thecrucifixion as a kind of exaltation or glorification but to see past thephysical reality of Jesus’ death to its true significance: the reascent ofthe Son of Man to his true home in heaven.28

So much for what I have called the narrative conclusion to theBook of Signs. In the following chapter, which introduces what Doddcalls the Book of Glory, the passion is imminent: ‘Now has the Son ofMan been endowed with glory and God has revealed his glory in him;if God has revealed his glory in him God will also endow him with hisown glory, and at once’ (13: 31–2).29 The term łF has dropped out;such allusions to Jesus’ death as it ever carried have been transferredto ����Ø . It is as if the evangelist is gradually eliminating all the

be raised up and exceedingly glorified’ (Isa. 52: 13). Both of these verbs are applied tothe Son of Man in the Fourth Gospel, always in contexts where there is a clear allusionto the crucifixion, and it is tempting to conclude that the evangelist must have had thispassage in mind, especially because he actually quotes another verse from the samepoem (Isa. 53: 1) a little further on (12: 38). But since he never uses the two verbsconjointly it is inadvisable to speak too confidently about the direct influence of aparticular text. (The LXX use of �ı Ø� ÆØ in Isa. 52: 13 represents a wrong choice fromtwo alternative meanings of the Hebrew ljk� Uj

¯

: ‘understood’ and ‘prospered’.)26 Bultmann, p. 433. 27 Krisis, 269 n. 12.28 Cf. U. B. Muller, ‘Bedeutung’, 61.29 For this trans. cf. G. B. Caird, ‘Glory of God’. Caird interprets the Son of Man along

the lines adumbrated by Dodd, as a figure representing and almost containing inhimself the whole people of God. Though this is certainly true of the figure in Daniel,I do not find it a plausible view of the Son of Man in the Fourth Gospel. Unfortunately,Caird offers no trans. of 13: 32, which presents us with the problem of the meaning ofthe second (or possibly third) K ÆP�fiH.

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more painful and shameful associations of the death of Jesus. Thegrandeur of this solemn introduction to the Farewell Discourse is notto be diminished by any suggestion of sorrow or humiliation. Whatpain and shame there is in the chapters that follow is reserved for thedisciples. Jesus’ farewell and departure are tranquil and assured.

When the theme of glorification is resumed, at the beginningof Jesus’ great prayer to the Father, it is with a direct reference to13: 31–2: ‘Father, the hour has come; endow thy Son with glory thathe may reveal thy glory’ (17: 1). As this passage stands it must beregarded as a citation that brackets out the preceding discourse andfurnishes an alternative introduction to the passion narrative. Muchmore than the Farewell Discourse itself (a testament and commis-sion, as we have seen), it marks the conclusion of Jesus’ mission. AsWayne Meeks puts it: ‘Chapter 17 as a whole is only intelligiblewithin the descent/ascent framework, for it is the summary ‘‘de-briefing’’ of the messenger who . . . has accomplished his work inthe lower regions.’30 ‘I glorified thee on earth, having accomplishedthe work which thou gavest me to do’ (17: 4); ‘And now I am nomorein the world . . . and I am coming to thee’ (17: 11; cf. v. 13). Used as itwas earlier (12: 23, 28) in close connection with łF , the verb����Ø may continue to suggest, however obliquely, the deaththat Jesus is to die. But by now the suggestion is at best very tenuousand all the emphasis is laid upon the bright, epiphanic conclusion toJesus’ mission: ‘Father, the hour has come; endow thy Son with glorythat he may reveal thy glory, since thou hast given him power(K�ı��Æ) over all flesh; to give eternal life to those whom thou hastgiven him’ (17: 1–2).

(e) Revelation

At this point we are close to the heart of the message of the Gospeland it is necessary to anticipate some of the conclusions of the finalchapter. John’s theology of glory is first and foremost a theology ofrevelation. Brown remarks concerning the term ���Æ in his firstappendix that glory in the Fourth Gospel involves a visible manifest-ation of God’s majesty in acts of power, and this is right. But theEnglish word that springs most insistently to mind in connectionwith John’s theology of glory is ‘revelation’. In the Old Testament the

30 ‘Man from Heaven’, 159.

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concepts of glory and revelation are very close, and dFbk is frequentlyfound associated with descriptions of a theophany. The glory of Godis not something he possesses in himself independently of the worldhe created and from which he receives praise. The word expresses theimpression he makes on humankind when he manifests his power tothem; his glory, like his justice, may be said to imply a relationship; inthis case the relationship with those to whom he reveals himself.

When Kasemann takes from John 17 the fundamental orientation(Basis und Richtung31) of his study of the Gospel, he is not entirelymisguided. No doubt this chapter is scarcely the epitome of Johanninetheology that he takes it to be (it was probably quite a late addition),but it undoubtedly represents the culmination of the evangelist’sreflections upon the significance of Jesus’ death. But if this is primarilya revelatory event, initiated and implemented by God himself, whatdoes it reveal?

Barnabas Lindars points to an important difference between Jesus’earlier works and his subsequent passion. The former, he says,

were works of divine power, so that they not only revealed God, and Jesus’own position in relation to God, through the quality of obedience to theFather’s will which was inherent in them, but also had the quality ofrevelatory acts through the sheer display of divine power. . . . But in thecase of the passion there is no display of divine power at all. It is a revelatoryact only because it is an expression of the perfect moral union between Jesusand the Father.32

He adds that it is ‘distinctive, not only as the ultimate test, but also asthe one act in which there is no way of discovering its true meaningexcept by discernment of its moral quality’.33 The essential unionbetween Jesus and the Father (‘he who has seen me has seen theFather’) is, for John, displayed above all at the moment of his death.But in the most profound and original thought of the evangelist themoment of death is not distinguished from the moment of exalt-ation, and he insists that in what we may call, taking its two aspectstogether, the Easter event, Jesus is truly seen as what he is, God’sglory being finally and definitively revealed: ‘and now, Father, glorifythou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with theebefore the world was made’ (17: 5).

31 Jesu Letzter Wille3, 14; ET: ‘John 17 serves as the basis and guidepost of mylectures’ (Testament, 3).

32 ‘Passion’, 80. 33 Ibid. 85 n. 24.

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Yet the glorified Christ is the same Christ, paradoxically a Christwhose glory had already shone out during his lifetime. In particularJohn sees Jesus’ departure from the world as the mirror image of hisentry. Incarnation and Easter are in certain respects the same mys-tery, taking place between the whence and the whither. Not thateither, properly speaking, is an event. Like Easter, which in John’smature thinking is resumed in discourse, the incarnation cannot beseen. If told as a story, as it is by Matthew and Luke, the story is—canonly be—myth. Accordingly, the affirmation of the Prologue that theLogos became flesh belongs in a confession of faith. It is in the nextclause that the full paradox is displayed: ‘we have seen his glory’.Kasemann was not totally wrong to emphasize this half of the verse(1: 14): even if the evangelist cannot be credited with its compositionit certainly expresses an important part of his message. If the secondpole of the glory motif is a way of insisting upon the centrality of theresurrection the first pole emphasizes the other face of the Gospelparadox—that the earthly Jesus is the Risen Lord.34

The motif is taken up again in the conclusion to the marriage-feastof Cana, the first of the Gospel’s signs, where Jesus ‘manifested hisglory (ŒÆd K�Æ �æø�� �c ���Æ ÆP�ı) and his disciples believed inhim’ (2: 11). So Jesus performs a miracle—more than a miracle, asign—and it is in this miracle, symbolically foreshadowing some-thing strange, new, and marvellous, that Jesus’ glory is seen for thefirst time. Had it not been seen there would have been no glory; ���Æis a relationship word—it implies revelation. This revelation comesnot by hearing (one reason why we cannot say, with Kasemann, thatthe term ���Æ is an adequate summary of the message of the wholeGospel), but by sight. Moreover it comes through the performance ofa sign—the first of what the Jesus of this Gospel calls �æªÆ, ‘works’.After the Prologue, the first occurrence of �Ø�����Ø (‘believe’) is inJesus’ sardonic question to Nathanael, ‘Because I said to you, ‘‘I sawyou under the fig-tree,’’ do you believe?’ (1: 50). The next is at Cana.In the first instance faith follows an enigmatic saying, in the secondan open manifestation of power. This is the kind of faith that interestsKasemann and which he regards, wrongly I think, as paradigmaticof Johannine theology. Nevertheless no serious commentator onthe Gospel should evade the question which Kasemann has made

34 Kasemann fails to distinguish properly between the twin poles of the glory motif,Incarnation and Easter.

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peculiarly his own: how is it that a human being can be the vehicle ofdivine glory? This question throbs insistently through The Testamentof Jesus, but Kasemann’s own answer is too impatient and perfunc-tory to be satisfactory, dominated as it is by the charge of docetism.Bornkamm is surely right to detect a real anachronism here. This iswhy no direct answer can be anything but misleading. (It is also whythose who attempt to carve the Gospel up into docetic bits and anti-docetic bits get themselves into a hopeless tangle.) The Prologue,starting in heaven, affirms that God’s revelatory plan for the world,called the Logos, was embodied in a particular man, Jesus Christ. Theremainder of the Gospel, taking its starting-point on earth, claimsthat a particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, was, in a quite specialsense, the Son of God, so intimately associated with God as torepresent God to those fortunate enough to have seen him. Extraor-dinary as these claims are, they do not involve any intentional denialof humanity. On the contrary, the tradition of Jesus’ human life ispresupposed and assumed throughout. But it is not what the Gospel isabout. Kasemann is right in what he affirms but wrong in what hedenies.

Above all he fails to appreciate the evangelist’s dilemma. Glory, inits incarnational mode, is one way in which the evangelist’s ownfaith, his belief that Jesus is Lord, comes to expression. Mark, con-fronted by the same dilemma, tackled it in a variety of different ways,bundled together by Wrede in a bag labelled ‘The Messianic Secret’.John’s solution (or one of them, for he has many), though actually nomore paradoxical than Mark’s, is more obviously so. The Jesus of hisGospel is already the Risen Lord!

Even here John’s innovation is perhaps smaller than is widelyassumed. There is one scene, common to the other three Gospels,in which what John calls Jesus’ glory is manifested to a chosen fewdisciples in his lifetime. This is the scene on the mountain whereJesus ‘was transfigured before them, and his garments became glis-tening intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them’(Mark 9: 2–3). The Fourth Gospel, of course, has no room for a trans-figuration, for the Johannine Jesus is transfigured, so to speak, fromthe outset. Perhaps there is an echo of the tradition in the scene inwhich Jesus acknowledges before God the purpose of his mission:‘ ‘‘for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thyname.’’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘‘I have glorified it andI will glorify it again.’’ ’ (12: 27–8). Bultmann, who mentions this,

Passion and Resurrection 475

adds as a further possibility ‘that the evangelist knew of the story ofthe Transfiguration in its original sense as a resurrection narra-tive’.35 One can see the attractiveness of this suggestion. The trans-figuration, logically and theologically, seems out of place in themiddle of Jesus’ public life. Its presence in Mark is not only inconsist-ent with his general picture of Jesus but it exposes him—and theother Synoptists—to the same kind of objection that Kasemannlevels against John. The transfigured Jesus is a heavenly being andit is hard for the modern mind to accept that he can be both heavenlyand human at the same time.

Be that as it may, there is no room for a transfiguration scene in theFourth Gospel. The Johannine Jesus carries his glory with him and hisgarments are always ‘glistening intensely white’. If, however, theSynoptists have imported the lesson of the resurrection, however fleet-ingly, into their accounts of the earthly life of Jesus, they have in sodoing exhibited the essential Gospel paradox in a typically Johann-ine way.

Kasemann himself once argued against Bultmann that John ismore than a theologian: he is an evangelist.36 He will not be properlyunderstood unless he is seen to be wrestling with the problems andparadoxes inherent in his chosen genre.

3. resurrection

When we turn to the resurrection narratives the problems multiply.In composing his passion narrative the evangelist was following along-established tradition and working, as all are agreed, from asource in which most of the episodes were already present, themain lines of the story having been already laid down. In theirresurrection narratives John’s three predecessors went their ownway. Mark’s sketchy and enigmatic account did not satisfy theother two, and each of them elaborated upon it in his own distinctivefashion. John too had his sources, certainly for the first half ofchapter 20 and probably for the second half as well. Even so wehave to ask ourselves why he felt it necessary to conclude his workas he did.

35 Bultmann, p. 428 n. 1; contra C. H. Dodd, ‘Appearances of the Risen Christ’.36 ‘Blind Alleys’, 40–1. See the conclusion of Ch. 13.

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It was evidently not in order to highlight Jesus’ glory. This may bepart of Matthew’s intention, but John has no need to do this, just ashe has no need of a transfiguration story. Jesus’ glory was visiblefrom the outset (1: 14). To Kasemann, for whom Jesus is in any case‘a god striding over the earth’, the resurrection stories presentlittle theoretical difficulty; his problem is with the passion narrativeand a Risen Jesus who is able to appear and vanish at will couldneither shock nor surprise him. He might find these stories superflu-ous, but they are not inconsistent with what he regards as theevangelist’s personal perspective. What troubles him, as we havejust seen, is the passion narrative; for whatever else gods may dothey do not die.

Bultmann, on the other hand, for whom the passion is relativelyunproblematic, finds the resurrection stories hard to swallow. Hegets round the difficulty partly by assigning some of the most intract-able material (e.g. the commission in 20: 23–4) to the evangelist’ssource, partly by detecting in the evangelist the same critical attitudetowards the stories that he is inclined to adopt himself. Commenting,for instance, upon Jesus’ rebuke to Mary, he cuts across the grain ofthe text by declaring that the ‘not yet’ of ‘I have not yet ascended’(20: 17) refers first and foremost to Mary and not to Jesus: ‘She cannotyet enter into fellowship with him until she has recognised him as theLord who is with the Father, and so removed from earthly condi-tions.’37 Whatever the evangelist’s view on this matter, there is noroom in Bultmann’s conception of the incarnation for manifestationsof Jesus’ glory after his earthly life is over: the glory is contained inhis humanity; the resurrection is not another event that transformshis nature, but a form of thinking that permits Christian faith to findexpression. Accordingly, ‘there is something peculiarly ambiguousand contradictory attaching to the Easter narratives. For in truth, ifcontact with physical hands is denied, how can seeing with physicaleyes be permitted? Is not the latter also a worldly mode of perception,and on this basis can the Risen Jesus be thought other than an objectof perception within the mundane sphere?’38 This observation issurely not without force.

Nowhere, it has to be said, does the evangelist move further fromhistory than in these four episodes. They are not accounts of whatactually happened, but moral tales that allow John to drive home a

37 Bultmann, p. 687, my italics. 38 Ibid. 688.

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series of important lessons. But is Bultmann right to maintain that‘the Evangelist assumes a critical attitude to the Easter stories’?39

This is far from obvious.Confronted by such an intractable puzzle one is tempted to take a

leaf out of the bible of deconstruction. When seemingly contradictorypassages of the Gospel are allowed to collide the result is an implo-sion. Why not let the readers of the Gospel pick their way throughthe resulting debris and draw their own conclusions? There areindeed serious conceptual ambiguities here. But the evangelist isapparently unworried by the likelihood of quite crude misreadingsof his resurrection stories. Before asking why this is so I propose totake a brief look at the stories themselves with a view to ascertainingthe particular lessons that are to be derived from each.

The four stories are all very different. The first two cleverly adaptexisting traditions. The third also may partly derive from a source.The fourth (Doubting Thomas), which is used to underline thecentral message of the Gospel, is peculiar to John; it clearly presup-poses the preceding scene (the appearance to the disciples) andpartially corrects it. But each of the other three has to be consideredindependently. To attempt to make sense of 20: 1–23 as a continu-ous narrative as, for instance, Dodd does, is to enter an Alice-in-Wonderland world where one event succeeds another with the crazylogic of a dream. In such a world one is not surprised to find MaryMagdalene, last seen running off in search of the disciples, standingonce again by the tomb. Had she seen the two disciples enter thetomb? We are not told. But when she does enter she finds, not theburial clothes, but ‘two angels sitting where the body of Jesus hadlain, one at the head and one at the foot’ (20: 12). Had they justarrived or had they been hiding quietly in a corner until Mary’sarrival, their business being with her and not with Peter and ‘theother disciple’? These, it may be said, are not very sensible questionsto ask. Indeed not; their unanswerability is a very good reason fortaking each of the two stories independently.

We embroil ourselves in similar absurdities if we try to read thethird episode, the appearance to the disciples, as if it followed uponthe second. After informing Mary that he was about to ascend to theFather, did Jesus go up and spend an hour or two in heaven, only toredescend that very same evening for a visit to the disciples? And

39 Bultmann, p. 688 n. 3.

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why, if Mary had informed them of what Jesus had said to her (20: 18),do they betray no knowledge of this?

What then of the last transition, between the third and the fourthepisodes? There is not so much as a hint in the third story that one ofthe disciples was missing. The final scene was certainly composed inthe light of the third, but how are we to link it with the second? Whatstrange transformation has Jesus undergone in heaven which madeit legitimate for Thomas to place his hands in his side when only aweek earlier Mary had been rebuked for touching (or clinging to)him?

This last series of questions, then, is no better focused than thefirst two. It would not be difficult to lengthen the list of questions soas to induce in the reader the kind of nervous bewilderment nor-mally associated with nightmares. The incoherence that ensues assoon as these four episodes are read in a continuous narrative isperhaps the strongest argument for treating them apart. Such anapproach neatly sidesteps the artificial problems that cramp theunderstanding whenever inappropriate questions are addressed tothe text. What is more, it enables us to appreciate a feature of thesefour episodes which has not been noticed by the commentators: eachof them, taken on its own, constitutes an effective ending to the Gospel.I hesitate to suggest that they were composed as alternative end-ings, and there is no reason to suppose that they figured in succes-sive editions. But they all round off the gospel story and round it offdifferently.

There are broadly speaking four types of Easter traditions. Two ofthese (recognition and mission scenes) involve the presence of theRisen Jesus. The other two (empty-tomb and angelic-message stories)require his absence. Mark confines himself to the latter pair; Matthewadds a mission scene; both the other evangelists have them all. In thewording of John’s stories there are a number of intriguing resem-blances, variously explained, to the Synoptic accounts. These will notbe discussed here, but it may be remarked that there are also manyawkwardnesses in John’s own stories, which go to prove that tradi-tions close to, if not identical with, those underlying the Synopticaccounts have at some stage been carved and reshaped to presentalternative readings. My concern here is with these new readings,which may be construed as comments upon, or interpretations of,already existing conclusions to the gospel story.

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(a) Faith (20: 1–10)

In the Synoptic Gospels the empty-tomb and the angelic-messagetraditions are found together. John prises them apart. In this firstepisode he substitutes for the angelic message a source he appears tohave shared with Luke and uses this as a basis for a story of his own.This is Luke’s version (missing from the Western family of manu-scripts): ‘But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in,he saw the linen-cloths (OŁ� ØÆ) by themselves; he went home won-dering what had happened’ (Luke 24: 12). John, having reduced theholy women to the solitary figure of Mary Magdalene, now adds anextra actor, ‘the other disciple’, who ‘outran Peter and reached thetomb first’. What most interests John is the act of faith of this otherdisciple, identified (v. 2) as ‘the one whom Jesus loved’, who, havingentered the tomb after Peter, ‘saw and believed’.

The part of this story that has attracted most attention is the oneconcerning the burial-clothes (OŁ� ØÆ), with the napkin or head-cloth(�ı�æØ ) being rolled or wrapped (K ���ıºØª�� ) on its own (20: 7).Not surprisingly this intriguingly precise description has provokedwidely differing readings, some interpreters seeking a symbolic mean-ing, others taking the account literally and looking for a scientificexplanation. E. G. Auer, Brown tells us,40

devotes a whole book, illustrated by sketches, to propound the thesis that thebindings, impregnated with the aromatic oil of 19: 40, had remained stifflyerect after the body had passed through them, almost as if one were to slide acorpse out of its mummy wrappings and have the wrappings preserve theform. Moreover the soudarion (¼ sindon), a large cloth that had been aroundthe whole body inside the bindings, was now carefully folded in the corner onthe left-hand side of the tomb.

Brown is clearly amusedbywhathe regards asAuer’swasted labours41

and points out that his approach, and others like it, depends for itsvalidity upon the literal acceptance of the power of the risen Jesus topass through solid objects (cf. 20: 19).

The meaning of this episode, as of so many others, lies in the story.The precise significance of the grave-clothes, the way they are folded,

40 Brown, p. 1008.41 Has he the right to be, I wonder, when he himself believes ‘that John was no

more sophisticated than the other evangelists who accepted the tangibility of the risenChrist’ (p. 1081)? The speculative problems involved here will be discussed briefly in theconclusion to this chapter.

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and their position inside the tomb, may elude us. But something maybe said. John is the only evangelist to write an empty-tomb storywithout adding an explanation. This tradition is widely thought tohave originated as a Christian reply to charges that the resurrectionnever happened. But at least according to the Synoptic accountsbelief in the resurrection is a response not to the sight of an emptytomb but to the message of the angel. They all agree too on thecontent of the message: ‘he is not here; he has risen’ (Mª�æŁ�)—orpossibly ‘he has been raised’. Now angels (a category which may beallowed to cover Luke’s two men (24: 4) and Mark’s ‘youngish youngman’ ( �Æ ��Œ�, 16: 5)) are divine messengers, whose veracity andreliability may be taken for granted. There is no room here for faith inthe full sense, an act of personal commitment to an unverifiabletruth.

By leaving the angels out of this story John opens the door to faith.He is able to record the response the beloved disciple makes, not tothe voice of an intermediary, but to a vision of emptiness. The head-band and the grave-clothes are themselves signs of absence, mutewitnesses to the truth of one half of the angelic witness: he is nothere. The other half has to be supplied by the disciples themselves.Peter, it seems, failed to make the necessary leap of faith42 (this issupplied in the appendix, 21: 7); the other disciple ‘saw and believed’.

The tomb, however, was not quite empty: it contained remindersof Jesus’ presence, or rather of the presence of his dead body. So insome sense faith here is still dependent upon sight: the head-clothand the burial-clothes may be read as signs. Perhaps this accounts forthe apparent reservation of the following verse: ‘for as yet they didnot understand [literally know: P���ø ªaæfi X��Ø�Æ ] the scripture, thathe must rise from the dead’ (20: 9). If they had done, we are presum-ably meant to infer, this understanding alone would have sufficed toprompt an act of faith without the assistance of the pathetic rem-nants they had just observed. Whatever the explanation of thisdifficult verse,43 the general thrust of the story is reasonably clear.One essential element in Christian belief is faith in the resurrection,something which cannot, obviously, be narratedwithin an account of

42 Bultmann argues that Peter did believe. This is unlikely.43 Bultmann attributes it to the ecclesiastical redactor. This may be right. Lindars’s

attempt to reconcile the verse with what precedes is unconvincing, and I am not surethat my own explanation is any better.

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the words Jesus spoke and the deeds he performed during his lifetime.By including an empty-tomb story and modifying the tradition as hedid, the evangelist is able to offer his own considered reflectionsconcerning the significance of the tradition and at the same timean alternative ending to the whole gospel story, one less challengingand disturbing than that of Mark, but equally impressive in its quietreticence: ‘Then the disciples went back to their homes’ (20: 10).

(b) Recognition (20: 1, 11–18)

Although, as we have just seen, John omits the angelic-messagetradition from his account of the empty tomb, he does not abandonthe angels altogether: he simply transports them from the first episodeto the second. Yet even here they play only aminor role, being rapidlyand effectively upstaged by Jesus himself. In John’s account they haveno portentous message to deliver; the single line assigned to them is aquestion: ‘Why are you weeping?’ The very same question is repeatedin the next verse by Jesus, who at this point assumes the central role.In spite of the mysterious promise of 1: 51 this evangelist has no roomfor any heavenly intermediaries except the Son of Man.

Of John’s four resurrection stories this is by far the most problem-atic. Dodd is unable to categorize it; Bultmann employs a particularlytortuous exegesis in order to make it palatable. As so often, heperceives the difficulty more acutely than any other commentator:

If the wording [of v. 17] were pressed, it would follow that when he had goneto the Father he would have subsequently presented himself to his followersfor fellowship and for physical contact. . . . But that can hardly be right. . . .First and foremost h�ø refers to Mary rather than to Jesus; she cannot yetenter into fellowship with him until she has recognised him as the Lord whois with the Father, and so moved from earthly conditions.44

Since, however, this is not what John says it seems improbable that itis what he meant! But what other interpretation can be offered?

John does two things here. First he offers his own version, anespecially abbreviated one, of the traditional recognition scene; sec-ondly he appends a dialogue of his own composition with obviousaffinities to the ascension story in Acts. Now this procedure meanscombining two ideas of resurrection that are conceptually very

44 Bultmann, p. 687.

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difficult to reconcile, one temporal (before/after) the other spatial(below/above). The first of these informs all the recognition scenes.Normally (Matt. 28: 9 is an exception) recognition follows an initialperiod of some perplexity on the part of the disciples: Jesus hasaltered; he is not immediately recognizable. Then by a word or agesture he causes the scales to fall from their eyes and they acknow-ledge that the man whom they know to have died and been buried isstanding before them. (In the Emmaus story recognition is delayed,but the principle is the same.) I have argued in Chapter 8 that this‘identity-in-difference’ encapsulates the very essence of the Gospelgenre. That the fourth evangelist should have incorporated a scenewhich so admirably illustrates one of his own central ideas shouldperhaps not surprise us.

Resurrection, however, is only one of the two traditional ways ofenvisaging Jesus’ change of status. The other is exaltation.45 Theidea of Jesus’ ascent into heaven, generally associated in this Gospelwith the figure of the Son of Man, is familiar to John’s readers as atheme in discourse. ‘Ascend’ (I Æ�Æ� �Ø ), as we saw in the precedingsection (‘Death’), is one of the four terms, the others being ‘exalt’( łF ), ‘depart’ ( �ª�Ø ), and ‘glorify’ (����Ø ), employed by Johnto signify the climax of the Easter happening. But by introducing thisidea into a narrative that forces his readers to see resurrection andascension in a temporal sequence, John presents them with concep-tual puzzles that are impossible to resolve. Even if we detach thisepisode from what follows and thus relieve ourselves of the need toimagine Jesus redescending after his ascent before once more goingup into heaven, the crucial difficulty remains.

To appreciate the gravity of the problem we have only to comparethis storywith themuch fuller accountof theAscension inActs,whichshows us Jesus being hoisted up into the clouds before the astonishedgaze of the apostles. This lively description certainly accentuates thedifficulty: how far did he ascend, where did he stop, in what part ofthe physical universe is he now residing? But John’s shorter andsoberer version poses exactly the same theoretical problem. The idea

45 See E. Schweizer, ‘Two New Testament Creeds’. The creeds in question are 1 Cor.15: 3–5, which speaks of resurrection, and 1 Tim. 3: 16, which speaks of assumption(I ƺÆ�� �Ø ). Schweizer points out that the first involves temporal categories (before/after), the second spatial (below/above). The difference lies not in the object of belief butin the expression of it. To treat the two as if they referred to distinct events, as Luke doesin his account of the ascension, is to plunge into insoluble paradoxes.

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of exaltation, acceptable enough in a confession or a creed, cannot beput into story form without assuming the contours of a myth. I shallreturn to this difficulty in the conclusion to this chapter.

Here we must be satisfied with a straightforward exegesis of this,the second ending of the gospel story. The fourth evangelist, wrest-ling throughout his work with the paradox of the genre, has re-nounced the solution widely attributed to Mark and known as theMessianic Secret. The Christ of the early part of his narrative hasbeen given from the outset the lineaments of divinity. This meansthat John, unlike Mark, is unable to hint at any reservations on thepart of Jesus himself: the before/after is continually stressed, but itsJohannine application, the two levels of understanding, concerns notJesus himself but Jesus’ contemporaries on the one hand, includingthe disciples, and the readers of the Gospel on the other. There is nosplit or uncertainty in Jesus’ own consciousness. A divine nimbussurrounds him even while he is still on earth, and at his death hesimply passes to another mode of glorification. The transformationthis entails is of the subtlest and easy to miss. In a sense, then, John—unlike Mark—may be thought to require a recognition scene in orderto establish the identity-in-difference between the earthly and therisen Jesus. That he should choose to underline the change of statusthis implies by Jesus’ admonition to Mary may perhaps be taken as aconfirmation of this reading: the Christian’s true communion is notwith the earthly Jesus but with the Risen Lord.

This episode, however, is not quite over yet. It ends with a sum-mary statement of one of the most regular features of the resurrec-tion narratives: the mission tradition. This is implicit in the messageMary is given to pass on to Jesus’ ‘brothers’ and in her fulfilment ofthis commission: ‘she went and said to the disciples, ‘‘I have seen theLord’’; and she told them that he had said these things to her’ (20: 18).Here we have the quintessence of the early Christian mission: aproclamation, by a witness, that Jesus is risen. Nothing further isrequired: John could have ended his Gospel here.

(c) Mission (20: 19–23)

The third episode has no connection with the second. The disciplesgathered together behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’ show noknowledge of what they have supposedly just been told, or indeed ofthe empty tomb. Nor is there any link with the final story. Taken by

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itself the story of the appearance to the disciples betrays no aware-ness of the absence of one of their number.46 In this episode, evenmore obviously self-sufficient than the first two, we have a thirdpossible ending to the Gospel.

In the preceding episode the main emphasis is upon recognition.The mission theme is handled with such compression that it couldeasily pass unnoticed. In this story the emphasis is reversed. Theidentity between the one who hung on the cross and the Risen Lordis established by Jesus himself when he shows his followers his handsand his side.47 Recognition is assumed but not stated. The realinterest lies elsewhere, in the fulfilment of promise and in the finalmission.

Certain of the elements which go to make up this story haveparallels elsewhere: Jesus’ actual appearance and salutation (v. 19;cf. Luke 24: 36), the self-display (v. 20; cf. Luke 24: 40), the mission(v. 21; cf. Matt. 28: 19), the bestowal of the Spirit (v. 22; cf. Luke 24: 49;also Acts 1: 4: ‘the promise of my Father’), forgiveness of sins (v. 23;cf. Luke 24: 47; Matt. 28: 19(?)). Nevertheless the most interesting andimportant allusions here are those that relate this episode to variouspromises in the Farewell Discourse.

There are many of these: peace, joy, mission, the bestowal of theSpirit. Read in conjunction with the Farewell Discourse the episodemay be clearly seen as the articulation, in narrative form, of themesthat had hitherto been reserved for discourse.48 Just as in the body ofthe Gospel the great confrontational scenes between Jesus and hisadversaries are the narrative version of the judgement motif, so here,towards the end of his book, the evangelist recapitulates the chiefelements of the promise of return that is the main burden of theFarewell Discourse. Here is prophecy fulfilled.

46 Cf. Becker, p. 620. 47 Cf. Bultmann, p. 691.48 This may not, however, have been the order in which the two were composed.

The second version of the Farewell Discourse (chs. 15–16) and the final prayer (ch. 17)belong in all likelihood to a later stage of the Gospel and so will have been composedafter ch. 20. This might conceivably be true of ch. 14 also. If so, then the Johannineprophet’s understanding of Jesus’ promise to return may have been inspired by thisscene. In that case a simple greeting (‘Peace be with you’) was seen to be the fulfilmentof a promise of peace, an abiding state of well-being (shalom). Similarly the joyousreaction of the disciples to Jesus’ appearance in their midst was seen as the properattitude of Christians secure in the knowledge of Christ’s permanent presence amongthem. The boldest stroke of all is the idea that the breath of the Risen Jesus was to beidentified with the Spirit of God.

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Central among these elements of promise is mission: ‘As thou didstsend me into the world, so I have sent them into the world’ (17: 18).This remarkable projection, at the heart of Jesus’ final prayer, iscarried through almost to the letter in the scene we are considering.The implications are momentous. The role of the community isplainly the same as that of Jesus himself. Here, if only we can see it,is all the justification we need for following Martyn’s insight that theexperience of Jesus recorded in the Gospel embodies lessons for theimmediate present of its readers.

Recognition and mission are the two sides of a door that opens outfrom the closed world of the Gospel to that of Christian believers.Janus-like, the first side looks back to the earthly life of Jesus, thesecond side forward to the life of the community. In the body of theGospel the evangelist presents a stereoscopic view. In the resurrec-tion stories he allows the twin elements of the Gospel paradox,earthly Jesus and risen Lord, to be seen to succeed one another in atemporal progression. Yet in doing so he is quick to underline thecorrectness of his earlier perspective. The Crucified One is rightlyrecognized as the Risen Lord; in pursuing its mission the communityre-enacts the experience of Jesus himself.

conclusion

In returning to the problem posed for the interpreter by the resur-rection stories, we must first of all be clear about what kind ofproblem we are dealing with. It is not a matter of sifting fact fromfantasy or of piercing through the allegorical overlay to get at thebedrock of historical truth beneath. Neither the resurrection itselfnor the stories told to illustrate its significance are historical in anymeaningful sense of the word. Anyone who disagrees with thisstatement has a lot of puzzles to wrestle with, puzzles for which,I am convinced, no solutions are available.

One may of course ask whether the evangelist himself believedthese stories to be factually true. The answer to this question is noteasy either, and may be beyond the reach of exegesis. Some particu-larly fastidious commentators, afraid of falling prey to the intentionalfallacy, may regard this question as illegitimate and so refrain fromasking it. It is nonetheless an interesting question, and I shall returnto it, but it cannot be answered straight away.

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The central question is surely not historical but literary, andconcerns the evangelist’s sensibility. Only a reader whose own im-aginative responses have been blunted by familiarity or credulity willbe left undisturbed by the shift from the elegance and finesse of, say,the Farewell Discourses to the fairy-tale atmosphere of the resurrec-tion stories. It is like finding Hans Christian Andersen hand in handwith Søren Kierkegaard. Even if, as I have suggested, we considereach of these stories independently and so avoid the wildest excessesof Wonderland, there are still some very odd images left: a corpsethat, apparently unaided, slips out of its burial-wrappings, angelswho ask a single question and disappear without waiting for ananswer, a man whomMary now knows to be Jesus rejecting physicalcontact because he is about to ascend into heaven. And so on.

If the evangelist had contented himself with taking over his tradi-tions more or less as he received them, then it might be argued thathe did so half-heartedly, par acquit de conscience, his real interest andcommitment lying elsewhere, in the subtle and sophisticated the-ology of glorification that precedes. This after all is roughly howhe operates in the body of the Gospel when he takes over storieslike the healing of the cripple or the blind man and the feeding ofthe five thousand. He does not repudiate these, certainly, but theway he exploits them for his own purposes leaves the reader in nodoubt where his interests lie. It might be said that the resurrectionstories too are made to serve theological ends. True, but the difficultypersists that some of the most troubling features of these storiesappear to have been the work of the evangelist himself. The laststory of all, which I have omitted from this discussion, is a goodexample. When Jesus invites Thomas, however ironically, to feel forhimself the tangible proof of his real presence, the lesson that is thendrawn only partially justifies the crudity of the images that have beenevoked.

Two radically contrasting possibilities immediately present them-selves. The first is that John is being extraordinarily subtle, implicitlyinviting his readers to demythologize these stories for themselves.This is the kind of solution that one expects from Bultmann, and infact he comments disapprovingly on the views of exegetes such asDodd, who ‘doubt or contest the idea that the evangelist assumes acritical attitude to these stories’.49 Dodd does indeed say that ‘The

49 Bultmann, p. 688 n. 3.

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resurrection is prima facie a reality on the spiritual plane, and theevangelist is concerned to show that it is also an event on thetemporal, historical plane.’50 But even he baulks at the suggestionthat Jesus went up bodily into heaven: ‘It is at all events clear that forJohn the I �Æ�Ø� is not a movement in space [why not, if theresurrection is an event in time?], but a change in the conditionsunder which Christ is apprehended as the glorified and exaltedLord.’51 How difficult it is not to see John as the kind of thinker onewould like him to be!

But what is the alternative? Must we then conclude that John isnot after all the profound religious genius that we have up to thispoint taken him to be, but a relatively unsophisticated Christianbeliever, no more philosophically acute or theologically aware thanthe vast majority of his contemporaries?

If neither of these alternatives commends itself, three other pos-sible courses are open to us. The first, well-tried and familiar, is toabsolve John the evangelist from all responsibility for the distastefulelements in his work, either by assigning the bulk of these stories,even where they diverge from tradition, to a pre-Johannine writerfrom within the community,52 or by once again hauling in thatuncomplaining old scapegoat, the ecclesiastical redactor, who hasalready been saddled with most of the passages in the Gospel that forone reason or another modern interpreters find theologically repre-hensible, and is about to be asked to assume the biggest burden of all,the long appendix of chapter 21.

Now I have nothing in principle against this solution. It is possible,and indeed not uncommon, for biblical exegetes to employ the hy-pothesis of several levels of redaction as a way of evading difficultiesinstead of answering them. But this is not to say that it should neverbe employed at all. The trouble is that here as elsewhere (e.g. thediffering ‘eschatologies’ in chapters 5 and 11) it is virtually impossibleto isolate one level from another without arbitrariness. The argu-ments are simply too weak.

The second course is that of the deconstructionalists. They assumethat what we have to interpret is not an author but a text. TheFourth Gospel, so full of paradoxes and puzzles, is especially vulner-able to their ingenious tricks and diabolical devices and one can

50 Interpretation, 442. 51 Ibid. 443 n. 3.52 This is Jurgen Becker’s solution.

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easily imagine them causing it to self-destruct (another word fordeconstruct) by exposing its inner contradictions.

This course too, however tempting, is to be avoided. Even moreobviously than the first it is a non-solution, an evasion rather thanan answer. Why after all should the exegete abdicate his honourablethrone in favour of a court jester?

Nevertheless the deconstructionalists may have something toteach us after all. Their readiness to recognize and manipulate con-tradictions in the text is not entirely to be deplored. But what if wetransfer this idea from text to author? The suggestion that theevangelist believed two contradictory things at the same time is infact quite a simple one. The modern mind finds it difficult to acceptonly because it cannot rest content with simple stories carryingsimple meanings but insists upon probing into the inner recesses ofsuch stories with impertinent and inappropriate questions. Take forexample the episode of the appearance before the disciples. Bultmanngrasps the main point quite easily: ‘The Risen Jesus authenticateshimself and proves his identity with the man crucified two daysearlier.’53 So far so good. The lesson is that of identity-in-difference,and there is no need to push behind it. In the following scene theevangelist actually spells the lesson out for us: ‘be not faithless, butbelieving’. Jesus’ invitation to Thomas is a rebuke, a way of drivingthe same point home. Go one step further and we plunge into amorass: ‘According to the Jewish idea of bodily resurrection presup-posed by John, Jesus is touchable, and perfectly able to invite Thomasto handle him.’54 If John invented this story, as there is every reasonto believe, it was not, surely, to stimulate his readers to reflect uponthe tangibility of risen bodies, but to impress upon them the need forfaith.

Did John then believe these stories to be factually true? It is hardto be sure. One could invoke Plato here, for the sublime ease withwhich he temporarily abandons his abstruse philosophizing in orderto encapsulate the essence of his argument in a myth. But then Platosurely did not believe in the factual truth of his myths. Whether Johndid I do not know, though I suspect that he may well have done.Children, after all, who are not without intelligence, believe thattheir Christmas presents come from Santa Claus even though they

53 Bultmann, p. 691. 54 Lindars, p. 607.

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know perfectly well that they are given by their parents.55 Onlywhen they start uneasily picking at the myth (how does he squeezeinto the chimney?) are they forced to acknowledge the contradic-tions and settle for the less colourful world of commonplace fact.The commentator’s first task is to get at the meaning of the text. Thecentral lessons of the chapter under discussion, faith, recognition,mission, are plain enough to anyone prepared to search primarily forwhat Origen calls the ‘spiritual’ meaning and Browning calls stars.Grubbing around the Gospel in a hunt for corporeal points can onlylead to confusion.

55 Cf. P. Veyne, Les Grecs. The other example he gives in his preface to this book isthat of the Ethiopian tribe of the Dorze who, knowing that the leopard is a Christiananimal, believe that, like all good Christians, he fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays.Despite this belief they are just as anxious to protect their herds from his maraudingson these as on other days.

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13

THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

introduction

Nobody has ever undertaken a comprehensive study of the conceptof revelation in the Fourth Gospel,1 unless one counts Bultmann’sgreat commentary or the long section on John in his Theology of theNew Testament. Why is that, given that revelation is unquestionablythe dominant theme of the Gospel? The first reason is that, despiteJames Barr’s devastating criticisms (in ch. 8 of his Semantics of BiblicalLanguage) of the principles underlying Kittel’s famous Worterbuch,most scholars, both budding and full-blown, still find it easier to studya word than a concept.2 Neither the verb I�ŒÆº����Ø nor the nounI�ŒºıłØ� occurs in the Gospel, and the nearest synonyms,�Æ �æF ,3 ª øæ���Ø ; K��ª��ŁÆØ; K��Æ ���Ø , perhaps I ƪª�ºº�Ø , arenot sufficiently prominent and do not carry sufficient weight to meritan extended treatment. To include the various symbolic equivalentsof revelation would make the task very much more difficult.

The second reason why the concept has never been thoroughlystudied is its sheer ubiquity. Every major motif in the Gospel is directly

1 Edward Malatesta’s cumulative and classified bibliography (1920–65) of books andperiodical literature on the Fourth Gospel (Rome, 1967) does in fact include threeentries (out of 3,120) under ‘revelation’: two articles and a relatively short doctoralthesis of 150 pages. Gilbert van Belle’s compilation, Johannine Bibliography 1966–1985:A Cumulative and Classified Bibliography on the Fourth Gospel (Leiden, 1987) has sevenentries under ‘revelation’ out of a total of 6,300, and one of these relates to theJohannine Apocalypse. Gail O’Day’s Revelation in the Fourth Gospel, which will bediscussed later in the chapter, contains some useful insights, but is uneven and one-sided. The gap remains.

2 A particularly clear example of the difference between words and concepts is to befound in an article by Quentin Skinner in The State of the Language, ed. L. Michaels andC. Ricks (London, 1980), 562–78. Skinner points out that, although Milton never usedthe word ‘originality’ (it had not yet entered the language), the concept meant a greatdeal to him.

3 There are nine occurrences of the word �Æ �æF in the Gospel (three of them inch. 21) and eight in 1 John. Like K��Æ ���Ø (14: 21, 22), it suggests vision rather thanhearing.

linked to the concept of revelation. To start with, there are at leastthree terms which could often (not always) be translated ‘revelation’without serious distortion: ¸�ª� (the Word), ���Æ (glory), Iº�Ł�ØÆ(truth); others refer to the vehicle of revelation: º�ª� (word), º�ªØand Þ��Æ�Æ (words), ����EÆ (signs), �Ææ�ıæ�Æ (witness); still othersindicate the revealing act itself: K��ª��ŁÆØ (tell about), �Ææ�ıæ�E

(testify), ºÆº�E (speak), º�ª�Ø (say), Œæ��Ø (proclaim), �Ø��Œ�Ø

(teach), ��Ø� ��Œ�Ø (remind), I ƪª�ºº�Ø (expound). The key word�Ø�����Ø (believe) suggests the proper response to revelation, as doesIŒ��Ø (listen, hear), and occasionally the words meaning ‘know’(�N�� ÆØ; ªØ ��Œ�Ø ) do so too. The central symbol of the Gospel, life,sums up what the evangelist sees as the reward and consequence offaith; while the three most important of the subsidiary symbols, light,water, bread, all suggest particular facets of the same concept. Thedisciples of Jesus are those who believe; those who do not believe (‘theJews’, the world) bring judgement or condemnation (Œæ��Ø�) uponthemselves. Moreover, this is just a list of words, and an incompleteone at that. No doubt each or all of them can provide a useful entry intothe conceptual world of the Fourth Gospel, as many excellent studieshave shown. But they cannot take us the whole way. At the very leastwe should have to add the threemain titles of Jesus in the Gospel; two ofthese are specifically said to be the object of faith (20: 31), while the third(‘Son of Man’) is the very personification of revelation.

The third reason for the reluctance of scholars to embark upon afull study is the extraordinary difficulty, despite the apparent frank-ness with which the evangelist states his purpose at the conclusion ofthe Gospel, of seizing upon the content of revelation. Bultmann’sanswer is well known. The Jesus of John’s Gospel has but a singletruth to reveal, the simple fact that he is the revealer. There is nowhat, only a that: ein bloßes Daß, a naked ‘that’. Bultmann is perfectlywell aware that the Gospel itself states the object of faith in propos-itional form: ‘these things are written’ (20: 31; cf. Martha’s confessionin 11: 27). But he pays no attention to this in his commentary: for theevangelist, he says, ‘the faith of ‘‘Christians’’ is not a conviction thatis present once for all, but it must perpetually make sure of itselfanew, and therefore must continually hear the word anew’.4 Simplyto underline what the Gospel itself appears to state will not do: Johnhimself is at pains to expose the inadequacy of the title ‘Messiah’,5

4 Bultmann, pp. 698–9. 5 See M. de Jonge, ‘Jesus as Prophet, 50–1.

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and the special relationship with the Father implied by the title ‘Sonof God’, once divested of its mythological trappings, is slender andinsubstantial. One may seek to counter Bultmann’s arguments byinjecting some content into his empty ‘that’. What Jesus reveals, itmight be said, is his origin (��Ł� ) and his destiny (�F), the fact thathe has been sent by God and that God is his Father. By the end of theGospel these ideas have been assumed into the originally messianictitle, ‘Son of God’, and now form part of its meaning. And it is true toothat patristic commentators have succeeded in weaving the materialof the Gospel into elaborate christological and trinitarian patterns.But in its untreated form the material is flimsy stuff. By coarseningJohn’s delicate suggestions into dogmas one can preserve a superfi-cial fidelity at the price of a deeper betrayal. However suspicious onemay be of Bultmann’s existential interpretation of John, he showsconsiderably more insight than most of his critics. John is not adogmatist but an evangelist; what he writes is not doctrine butgospel.

In Chapters 7 and 8 some answers have been given to fundamentalquestions concerning the form of the Gospel by showing its affinitywith apocalyptic. It has also been explained how the mode of revela-tion is conditioned by the paradoxical nature of the credal affirm-ation which it expands and justifies. This chapter focuses upon thecontent of revelation, allowing from the outset that it may not bepossible to separate this from the very special way in which it isconveyed. The shadow of Bultmann looms throughout this book,and in discussing the content of revelation I am very much aware ofhis uncompromising opposition. His own view is nowhere more fullyexpressed than in his Theology of the New Testament:

Jesus as the Revealer of God reveals nothing but that he is the Revealer. Andthat amounts to saying that it is he for whom the world is waiting, he whobrings in his own person that for which all the longing of man yearns; lifeand truth as the reality out of which man can exist, light as the completetransparence of existence in which questions and riddles are at an end. Buthow is he that and how does he bring it? In no other way than that he saysthat he is it and says that he brings it—he a man with his human word,which, without legitimation, demands faith, John, that is, in his Gospelpresents only the fact (das Daß) of the Revelation without describing itscontent (ihr Was).6

6 Theology, 66.

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1. words and concepts

This is the first of two main parts in this chapter. It treats of a numberof key words. Though the ideas suggested by these words are differ-ent, they are all related to the concept of revelation and may be saidto indicate various facets of it. It is convenient to treat these separ-ately, but they are so intimately and intricately related to one an-other that some overlap is unavoidable. The second main part is anexegesis of a number of important passages in the Gospel that exem-plify what I call ‘the revelation form’. One passage that has someclaim to be treated under this heading is the Prologue, but I havechosen to discuss it instead in the first part, under ‘Logos’.

(a) Signs and Works

Beneath the imperative demands for faith that crowd the pages of theFourth Gospel run a number of powerful and at times conflictingcurrents of tradition. The first is the all-seeing and all-encompassingprovidence of God, who through his Wisdom/Word (¸�ª�) directsthe course of human history: � �Æ �Ø� ÆP�F Kª� �� (1: 3).7 Thisuniversal mastery is exhibited in a special way summed up as life: K ÆP�fiH �øc q (1: 4). The life is also a light that shines in the world andoffers mankind the chance to accept God in his creative and revealingwork.8 The bold identification of the Word and the Light conceals apuzzle which, far from being resolved, is emphasized and expanded inthe body of the Gospel: a light is seen; a word is heard; how can theybe held together?

Various currents of tradition go to make up the revelation motifin Judaism. Of these the most important is undoubtedly the gift ofthe Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. One element in this story is theassertion that what is not given is the vision of God.9 The essence of

7 � �Æ is usually trans. (wrongly) as if it referred to the created universe. But theterm for this, in both the LXX and the New Testament, is �a � �Æ. See my long note in‘Transformation’, 20 n. 37.

8 No one has given a better explanation of the important distinction between‘through him’ and ‘in him’ in this passage than Paul Lamarche (‘The Prologue’, 47–8).

9 This, of course, is the official, establishment line. There is so much evidence to thecontrary—records of visions by patriarchs and prophets—that we may be surprised atthe success of the deuteronomists in maintaining it. ‘The later apocalypses’, remarksMargaret Barker, ‘have their deepest roots in the early cult exemplified in the the-ophany [of Exod. 24: 9–11] which later writers sought to contradict, e.g. Deut. 4: 12’ (TheOlder Testament, 123 n. 18; cf. 146 ff.).

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this revelation lies in words, some inscribed on tablets of stone,others, according to a later tradition, spoken privately to Moses: thewritten Torah and the oral Torah.

Embedded in the written Torah, which is far more than a seriesof law codes, is the story of God’s active intervention in historyon behalf of his own people, from Abraham through to Moses.These interventions often involve demonstrations of power, fromthe conception of a child by a very old woman to the parting of thewaters of the sea. Because events like these are not immediatelyintelligible they were accompanied by explanations: in the case ofthe sea-crossing a story (Exod. 14) and a song (Exod. 15). God madeit clear to Moses and the Patriarchs what he was doing and whyhe was doing it, the action and the intention being part of thesame revelation.

The idea that God both acts and explains his actions is fundamen-tal to both Judaism and Christianity and may indeed be a necessaryfeature of any religion that sees God as intervening directly in humanhistory.10 Conversely, a false god—an idol—is one that can neitheract nor speak: ‘if someone cries to it, it does not answer or save himfrom his trouble’ (Isa. 46: 7).

The Pentateuch may be regarded as the story of the birth of thepeople of Israel. God continued to speak to his people through theprophets, who were conceived as messengers (angels?) sent fromheaven. We have seen in Chapter 6 how the notion of the divineemissary occupies a central place in John’s conception of Jesus andhis role: one of Jesus’ two names for God is › ���łÆ� ��: he who sentme. The existence of prophets proves the ease of communicationsbetween heaven and earth. The prophet speaks with the voice of God:‘Thus says the Lord’. The words of some of the prophets wererecorded, and these came to be part of the written record of God’sdealings with his people. Joshua and Judges, Samuel and Kings, arenumbered among the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, so we have theLaw and the Prophets. By this time the pattern of revelation wasclearly established: God had acted and he had spoken.

Such were the marvels that God had wrought on behalf of hispeople during the Exodus that they might have been expected torespondwith enthusiasm and total commitment.We know, however,

10 It must not be assumed that the idea is exclusive to Judaism and Christianity: cf.B. Albrektson, History and the Gods (Lund, 1967).

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that they did not. Their lack of faith is always portrayed as disobedi-ence—a failure in hearing. What God required of them above all elsewas to listen: ‘Hear, O Israel’. Yet the very people who are urged tohear are also said to have seen: ‘Your eyes have seen’ (Deut. 4: 3, 9; 10:21; 11: 7). Included in what they saw were the signs and greatprodigies (�a ����EÆ ŒÆd �a ��æÆ�Æ �a ��ªºÆ) ‘that the Lord yourGod did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt’ (Deut. 7: 18–19; cf. Exod. 7: 3;John 4: 48: ����EÆ ŒÆd ��æÆ�Æ). It is possible, however, to witness suchprodigies without really seeing: more important than the eyes of thebody are the eyes of the soul: ‘You have seen all that the Lord didbefore your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all hisservants and to all his land, the great trials which your [Hebrewsingular] eyes saw, the signs and those great wonders; but to this daythe Lord has not given you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, orears to hear’ (Deut. 29: 2–4; Hebrew, 1–3).

Although the Fourth Gospel preserves the traditional connectionbetween seeing and hearing—so well, in fact, that faith is oftendescribed in terms of vision—there is nevertheless a perceptibletension between the two, a tension that comes to full expression inthe concluding beatitude. In spite of this, John regards his Gospel as arecord of some of the signs that Jesus performed in the sight of hisdisciples (K ��Ø �H �ÆŁ��H )—and the purpose of this record was‘that you may believe’ (20: 30–1). The faith of all subsequent gener-ations of Christian believers depends upon the signs witnessed byJesus’ first disciples. Yet it is hard not to see in this conclusion one lastspark of the familiar Johannine irony, as the reader reflects howmuch more the fourth evangelist offers than a plain account ofJesus’ deeds and how little such an account would do to elicit thekind of faith that interests him.

Filtered through the evangelist’s special understanding and pro-cessed, as it were, by his faith, the story of Jesus’ life emerges as aGospel. The word he uses here (20: 30) is ‘signs’—signs which,properly regarded, can be seen to point the way to a true faith andare therefore revelatory in the full sense. If, as is probable, he hastaken over the word from the signs source, he will certainly haveinfused it with a new, deeper meaning. Whatever its origins he hasmade it his own. John’s readers, as he knows, cannot see the signs:they can only read what he has written about them. ‘Unless you seesigns and wonders,’ Jesus had said, ‘you will not believe’ (4: 48),employing the plural form of address whilst ostensibly speaking to

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the official from Capernaumwhose son was on the point of death. Butto read about signs is one thing; to see them, and perhaps be dazzledby the prodigy whilst failing to grasp its import, is quite another.

A sign is a miracle, a marvellous happening with a special signifi-cance. But in the dialogues and discourses of the Gospel Jesus neveruses the word ����E in this sense. In the two instances where itoccurs on his lips (4: 48; 6: 26) it has a negative ring. His own term forwhat he does is �æªÆ, ‘deeds’ or ‘works’. The question arises, then, arethese words coterminous? Do they have the same reference? Andsince, obviously, they do not have the same sense, what is thedifference between them? One possible interpretation would be this:�æªÆ signifies the works as Jesus alone can see them, that is to say astasks given to him by the Father to be performed in the sight ofmen; whereas ����EÆ signifies Jesus’ miracles as they are seenby men; viewed rightly they are signs of Jesus’ relationship to theFather, whose emissary he is and whose revelation he embodies—signs, in other words, of his glory. If part of the notion of a sign is thatit is intended somehow to lead to faith, it would clearly be inappro-priate for Jesus to think or speak of his ownworks as signs for himself.Broadly speaking, this distinction is correct.11 But it leaves a lot ofquestions unanswered, especially the crucial question of the relation-ship between Jesus’ words and his works, a question which brings usback to the sight/hearing antithesis with which we began.

Unlike ����EÆ; �æªÆ can be qualified: ‘the works of the world’ (7: 7);‘the works of God’ (9: 4); ‘the works of my Father’ (10: 37). Works arecharacterized, then, by their origin or source. ‘The works of theworld’ is a phrase which sums up all worldly transactions—whichare evil; ‘the works of God’ similarly sums up the dealings of God withmankind. But since, for John, it is Jesus who is commissioned toperform these works on God’s behalf, acting as his agent, it is onlya small step to concluding that in the Fourth Gospel the term refers toGod’s self-revelation in Jesus. In one passage, 6: 29, we are told thatthe work of God is faith in Jesus, the one whom God has sent.Bultmann contends that

the ‘works which Jesus does at his Father’s behest’ (5: 20, 36; 9: 4; 10: 25, 32,37; 14: 12; 15: 24) are ultimately one single work. At the beginning of his

11 In 7: 21 and 10: 33 the singular, �æª , is simply one work out of many. Elsewhere,4: 34, 17: 4, and perhaps 6: 29, it embraces the whole of Jesus’ mission, as does the pluralin 5: 36. Cf. A. Vanhoye, ‘L’Œuvre du Christ’.

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ministry we read: ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and toaccomplish his work’ (4: 34) and in retrospect we are told a very similar thingat the end of it: ‘I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the workwhich thou gavest me to do’ (17: 4).12

What Bultmann is anxious to establish is that Jesus’ single work isthat of revelation; if that is right, all works can be reduced to words.He finds the evidence he is looking for in 14: 10–11: ‘The words thatI say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Fatherwho dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in theFather and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake ofthe works themselves.’ These two verses, says Bultmann, if takentogether,

indicate that the ‘works’ of v. 11 are neither more nor less than the ‘words’ ofv. 10. When Jesus thus points away from himself to his working, that canonly mean that he is rejecting an authoritarian faith which will meeklyaccept what is said about Jesus. In its place, he is demanding a faith thatunderstands Jesus’ words as personal address aimed at the believer—i.e. asJesus ‘working’ upon him. This is the sense in which Jesus refuses thedemand of ‘the Jews’ that he openly says whether or not he is the Messiah(10: 24 f.). The answer to that they ought to gather from his works—orworkings—which bear witness to him.13

But this is Bultmann, not John, for whom Jesus’ works, as manyother passages show, are often also thought of as signs.

If we resist the temptation to allow our understanding of theGospel to be determined by one or two of our favourite verses, wecan see that John succeeds in preserving the balance—as well asthe tension—between words and works. For those who receive themessage of Jesus’ disciples, as for the readers of the Gospel, the workshave been transformed into words, spoken in the one case, written inthe other. With Jesus’ passing the chance of witnessing his signshas gone forever. This is not a matter of regret: ‘It is good for you thatI go.’ There is no longer any risk of wrongly assessing the functionof signs, of following Thomas in confusing sight with faith. Butwhatever our final verdict upon the truth of the story told in theGospel it cannot be preserved if the events of that story are swallowedup and cancelled by a proclamation that has no room for them.

12 Theology, ii. 52. 13 Ibid. ii. 60–1.

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(b) Witness

Signs are not the evangelist’s favourite way of communicatingrevealed truth—or perhaps it would be better to say that they arenot his way. They are part of the story, certainly, but once he hascompiled a selection of signs and transcribed them for posterity theirimpact is necessarily indirect: they are now contained in a book. Anda book is not a sign but a testimony: right at the end of the Gospelsomeone other than the evangelist asserts of the person ‘who haswritten these things’ that ‘we know that his testimony is true’(21: 24). So the evangelist is a witness, the last of the witnesses ofwhich his Gospel speaks.

A witness is someone who has seen and/or heard something andthen testifies to this to others in order to persuade them of its truth.When the testimony is a confession of faith in difficult circumstances,the witness may also be a martyr. There is a natural link between thetwo concepts and in Greek the same word (�æ�ı�) does service forboth.14

In his article on �æ�ı� and its cognates in Kittel’s dictionary,H. Strathmann singles out for special attention two passages fromSecond Isaiah: 43: 9–13 and 44: 7–11. This prophet is especiallyconcerned with Israel’s testimony to the pagan nations regardingthe supremacy of Yahweh. Having experienced Yahweh’s savingpower, Israel alone, of all the nations of the world, is able to testifyon his behalf—testify that he is God and that there is no other. Thistruth, we may infer, is not accessible to those who have not experi-enced it for themselves except through a testimony that Israel aloneis qualified to give.

There are many witnesses in the Fourth Gospel but the truth towhich they testify is always the same: the person of Jesus. This, afterall, is the only truth with which the Gospel is concerned. There is oneapparent exception to this: ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, we speak ofwhat we know, and bear witness to what we have seen; but you donot receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and youdo not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?’(3: 11–12). I have already remarked (in Chapter 9) upon the excep-tional difficulty of giving any satisfactory account of what thesethings (�a K��ª�Øa and �a K�ıæ ØÆ) may be. Odeberg has plausiblysuggested that lying behind this claim of Jesus is a tradition of Jesus’

14 Cf. Bultmann, p. 50 n. 5.

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ascent into heaven to be the recipient of heavenly secrets. But inthe present context these secrets cannot be anything other than thesignificance, concealed not only from Nathanael but also from everyother actor in the story, of Jesus’ earthly career. The real irony is thatthe heavenly truths are to be found—as John’s readers will know—inthe earthly reality of Jesus’ presence. In this case �a K��ª�ØÆ and �a

K�ıæ ØÆ are the same. What looks like an exception turns out toconform to the general pattern of the Johannine �Ææ�ıæ�Æ.

In an earlier chapter (2) it was argued that the characteristicallyJohannine understanding of witness was hammered out in confron-tation with the Pharisees as they challenged the new Christian groupto produce evidence that Jesus was what they claimed him to be. Itwas then that they were forced to reflect on their own faith andeventually to discard the simple idea of direct testimony that theyhad inherited in the signs source. Whether or not I am right insupposing that this began with the words now found in the Prologue:‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John’ (1: 6), thefirst three statements about John are all concerned to emphasize hisrole as witness: 1: 6–8, 15, 19. Having seen the Spirit descend uponJesus in the form of a dove, he is able to assert: ‘I have seen and haveborne witness that this is the Son of God’ (1: 34). And the Gospelrecords that on two occasions he pointed to Jesus and said to thosewho were with him, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God’ (1: 29, 36). Much of histestimony is indirect: by disowning the titles put to him by a delega-tion of priests and Levites he prepares the way for them to beconferred on Jesus.15

When the first challenge comes to Jesus’ authority, in chapter 5, heis still prepared to appeal to the testimony of John: ‘You sent to Johnand he has borne witness to the truth’ (5: 33). But John’s testimony isdiscounted in favour of a greater:

For the works which the Father has granted me to accomplish, these veryworks which I am doing, bear me witness that the Father has sent me. Andthe Father who sent me has himself borne witness to me . . . You search thescriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; but theyactually bear witness to me. (5: 36–9)16

15 A. E. Harvey (Jesus on Trial) has a good section on John the Baptist in a chapterentitled, ‘The Witnesses in the Case’. But ‘the other witnesses’ turn out to be not thosenamed by the evangelist, but the disciples, notably Nathanael and Peter. Harveyignores the theological aspects of Jesus’ trial.

16 The context is polemical. According to Deut. 4: 12 the Israelites at Sinai heard thevoice of God but did not see his form. Nevertheless according to some traditions they

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These three, the works, the Father, and the scriptures, are not likethree independent witnesses who have all seen the same event andwhen questioned separately corroborate one another’s stories. Theworks are those that the Father has sent Jesus to perform, and it isthe Father’s voice that is heard in the scriptures.

Bultmann says of the works:

Even if an allusion to the ����EÆmay be in view [because the occasion of thisdiscourse is the healing of the cripple] it is clear from 5: 19 ff. that the real�æªÆ are the Œæ� �Ø and the �ø�Ø�E [ Jesus’ exercise of his God-given powerto judge and to bestow life]. To be more precise, Jesus’ words and deeds are�Ææ�ıæ�Æ, in that they are the �Ææ�ıæ�Æ and �ø�Ø�E ; i.e. they are not�Ææ�ıæ�Æ as visible demonstrative acts, but only taken together with whatthey effect.17

This is partly right: it is obvious too that there is no effective testi-mony in the scriptures except for those who are attuned to the voiceof God. But Bultmann is too anxious to remove Jesus’ miracles(which are what the term �æªÆ generally refers to) from the sphereof his revelation.

The next main passage, 8: 13–20, opens with the Pharisees’ chal-lenge to the validity of Jesus’ self-testimony. Had he been concernedsimply to meet this challenge by appealing to people who wouldvouch for him he might well have produced John the Baptist here,or even some of his own disciples who had spoken of him to oneanother before his ministry had begun. But this would serve no pur-pose. John claims to have seen quite a lot; but he has seen nothing ofthe truth which Jesus now wishes to convey. There are now only twocredible witnesses: himself and the Father. Ultimately, as I argued inChapter 2, all truth is self-authenticating. There is nothing outsideJesus’ revelation which he can call upon for support.

There is one passage which, as we shall see, represents the evan-gelist’s final thoughts on the subject of revelation: 3: 31–6. Of him‘who comes from above’ John writes: ‘he bears witness to what he

also saw his form: this is the conclusion drawn by theMekilta from Exod. 19: 11 (‘on thethird day the Lord will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of the people’)—‘thisteaches that at that moment they saw what Ezekiel and Isaiah never saw.’ Addressing‘the Jews’, Jesus dismisses both stories: ‘his voice you have never heard and his formyou have never seen’ (John 5: 37). ‘The meaning is’, comments Nils Dahl, ‘that theJews, refusing to believe in Jesus, prove that they have no share in the revelation givento Israel at Mount Sinai’ (‘Johannine Church’, 130).

17 Bultmann, pp. 265–6.

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has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony: he whoreceives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true’. Theapparent contradiction is characteristic: reception of Jesus’ messageis the exception rather than the rule. Josef Blank remarks percep-tively on this passage that its difficulty ‘lies in the fact that thecontent of this testimony is not something that can be expressed orgrasped above and beyond the actual act of giving witness. Thismeans that the testimony receives its entire material and formalsignificance from the person who gives it. The witness and histestimony belong indissolubly together.’18 Bultmann too recognizesthe peculiar force of the passage:

Since the �Ææ�ıæ�Æ of the Revealer is identical with what it attests, and notcomplementary to it, it finds confirmation paradoxically not by appealingfrom the word which bears witness to the truth of that to which it bearswitness, but in its acceptance by faith. It is only in faith in the word of witnessthat man can see what it is to which the word is bearing witness, andconsequently can recognize the legitimacy of the witness himself.

Moreover:

God himself speaks in the words of the God-sent Revealer. Now we can seemore clearly why the word of witness and that to which the word bearswitness are identical, for what God says, simply because it is said by God, canbe nothing else than God’s action. Inasmuch as he reveals himself, he is theº�ª�. If in Jesus the º�ª� became flesh, then God’s action is carried out inJesus’ words.19

Observations of this kind help one to understand why Bultmann iswidely regarded as the greatest of all commentators on the FourthGospel.

One final passage must be taken into consideration:

When the Paraclete comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, eventhe Spirit of truth, he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses,because you have been with me from the beginning. (15: 26–7)

The witness of the Paraclete and the disciples is placed firmly on thesecond level—the spiritual level—of understanding. But how does itrelate to Jesus’ own witness, and that of the Father? Bultmann

18 Krisis, 68. Blank refers to E. Petersen, ‘Zeuge der Wahrheit’, Theologische Traktate(Munich, 1951), 165–224.

19 Bultmann, p. 163.

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reckons that in this passage the word �Ææ�ıæ�E ‘retains its forensicsignificance, because . . . this proclamation has its place within thegreat lawsuit between God and the world’.20 But it is as ‘the Spirit oftruth’ that the Paraclete gives witness, and the object of his testi-mony is once again the person of Jesus. We are surely meant tounderstand that the testimony of the disciples is Spirit-inspired, justas that of Jesus himself is God-given. Furthermore, John insists thatthe task of bearing witness is entrusted in the first place to those whohave been with Jesus ‘from the beginning’, i.e. from the commence-ment of his ministry (cf. Luke 1: 2; Acts 1: 21–2). The continuityappears to be important to him.

(c) Logos21

‘In the beginning was the Word’: nothing before—and nothing after.The Prologue offers a vision of eternity, stretching back to before thecreation of the world and forward until after its end. The mysteriousand decidedly feminine figure whom Jewish tradition calls Wisdom,God’s ‘darling and delight’ (Prov. 8: 30, NEB), who assists him at thecreation of the world, ‘playing in his presence continually’, appearsin the opening of John’s Gospel as the masculine Logos, equallymysterious but more severe. The way to this transformation hadbeen prepared in another remarkable hymn to Wisdom by the writerknown as Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), highly regarded in Judaism eventhough his work was never placed in the Hebrew canon. By anamazing leap of theological imagination he had identified Wisdom,who had ‘come forth from the mouth of the Most High and coveredthe earth like a mist’ (Sir. 24: 3)22 with ‘the book of the covenant ofthe Most High God, the law which Moses commanded us’ (24: 23).Earlier in the hymn it is Wisdom herself who speaks, as she describeshow she roamed all over the earth, through every people and nation:‘Among all these I sought a resting place (I Æ�Æ��Ø�); I sought inwhose territory I might lodge’ (24: 7). ‘Then’, she continues, ‘the onewho created me assigned a place for my tent. And he said ‘‘Makeyour dwelling in Jacob and in Israel receive your inheritance’’:

20 Ibid. 553 n. 5. 21 See Ashton, ‘Transformation’.22 Kªg I�e ����Æ�� ł���ı K�BºŁ ŒÆd ‰� ›���º� ŒÆ��ŒºıłÆ ªB ; the NEB trans-

lates the first clause as ‘I am the word which was spoken by the Most High’; onewonders if the translators had the Prologue in mind.

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› Œ���Æ� �� ŒÆ���Æı�� �c �Œ� � �ı ŒÆd �r�� K �ÆŒø�

ŒÆ�Æ�Œ� ø� ŒÆd K ��æÆ�º ŒÆ�ÆŒº�æ ��Ł��Ø’ (24: 8). In the eyesof the author of the Prologue, of course, Wisdom is identified not withthe Law but with the Logos, who fails to find a home in Israel (‘hisown received him not’) and is eventually lodged ‘among us’(K �Œ� ø�� K #�E )—the members of the writer’s own community.The Wisdom of Solomon envisages Wisdom as remote and timeless,seated by God’s throne (9: 4). When she enters the world as the Law,God’s special gift to Israel, she acquires a history, but as the Bible tellsit this story is largely one of incomprehension and rejection. Ben Siraputs the conclusion of his hymn, like the beginning, into the mouthof Wisdom: ‘I will again pour out teaching like prophecy’ (24: 33),and Luke records another of her sayings: ‘I will send them prophetsand apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute’ (11: 49; cf.Matt. 23: 34). The story of the Logos (now his story, not hers) is thesame, but the home he finds is different. The end of the Prologue putshim back in heaven: the story that is about to be told is already over.

Once aware of the true background of the Prologue, one can seewhy it is a mistake to regard it simply as a hymn about creation,culminating in incarnation. Creation is indeed one of its themes, but itwould be closer to the mark to say that it is a hymn about revelationthat culminates in incarnation—the incarnation of the revealingLogos. The two motifs combine in the concept of the all-controllingprovidence of God, directing the affairs of men (the Œ����) frombeginning to end, or rather right up to the triumphant moment inwhich his design (the¸�ª�) comes to fruition by descending to earthin human form and finding a home in the small community whichwas all there was to welcome him. His work has two aspects, life andlight, and these correspond to the two facets of God’s work: creationand revelation. They are both resumed in a single lapidary phrase:‘the life was light’. The evangelist is interested in both; he expands onthe former in chapters 5 and 11, on the latter especially in chapter 9.But his primary concern, like that of the author of the hymn onwhichhemodelled his Prologue, is revelation. The light continues to shine inthe darkness (�Æ� �Ø, v. 5), which never succeeds in extinguishing it.The human beings for whom this light is intended, mankind ingeneral and Israel in particular, who has a special place in the divineplan, have continually turned their eyes away from it, doing their bestto frustrate God’s intentions. The most marvellous insight of thisextraordinary passage is that divine revelation, hitherto manifested

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intermittently in the lives of God’s messengers, the prophets, and in aLaw that has not been kept, has now actually taken flesh and dweltamong men—indeed in a community of which the writer is himself amember: ‘we have seen his glory’, glory being yet another term forrevelation. The general mood of the Prologue is sombre, for theincarnation of God’s design was ill received; but a subsidiary insighthas found a place in the text: ‘to those who did receive him he gave thepower to become children of God’ (1: 12). Finally, in a movement ofascent that fleetingly mirrors the downward path traced in the open-ing, the Prologue concludes with a picture of the Logos nestling in theFather’s lap (�N� �e Œ�º� �F �Æ�æ��). The very last word emphasizesyet again the revelatory role of the Logos: K��ª��Æ�. It is the wordwhich gives us ‘exegesis’: the only authentic account or ‘exegesis’ ofGod, the only valid ‘theology’ (º�ª� �F Ł�F) is to be found in theGospel that follows—which may be why the orthodox tradition ac-cords this evangelist, alone among the four, the title of Theologian.

(d) Truth

Of the many revelation-linked words in the Fourth Gospel the onethat gets closest to the heart of the matter is Iº�Ł�ØÆ, ‘truth’. This isso, whatever view we may take of the Gospel’s origins, for the truthwith which it deals is evidently not any old truth but a divine truthoffered to mankind for the first time by the one who proclaims it inthis book. This is what Bultmann says:

In Hellenism Iº�Ł�ØÆ received over and above the formal meaning of truth,reality (and truthfulness) the meaning of ‘divine reality’, with the connota-tion that this divine reality reveals itself. Johannine usage is based on this.23

In the subsequent opposition between truth and falsehood he detectsGnostic influences, and in his discussion of 8: 30–40 he asserts that:

the question regarding Iº�Ł�ØÆ is oriented on the question regarding the �ø�

[life] as the authentic being of the man who is concerned about his life, towhom this question is proposed because he is a creature. God’s Iº�Ł�ØÆ isthus God’s reality, which alone is reality because it is life and gives life,whereas the seeming reality which belongs to the world is ł�F�� [falsehood],because it is a reality contrived in opposition to God, and as such is futile and

23 Bultmann, p. 74 n. 2.

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brings death. The promise of knowledge of the Iº�Ł�ØÆ therefore is actuallyidentical with the promise of �ø�.24

Dodd will have no truck with Gnosticism and appeals instead toPlatonism. He concludes that Iº�Ł�ØÆ ‘means the eternal reality asrevealed to men—either the reality itself or the revelation of it’.25

This is nearly right: Dodd does not veer away from his sources, asBultmann does, into speculation about man’s authentic being. Butwe gain a much greater insight into Johannine usage by turning toJewish traditions, as has been conclusively and exhaustively demon-strated by Ignace de la Potterie in his two-volume study, La Veritedans Saint Jean. The ethical dualism that Bultmann attributes to theinfluence of Gnosticism is already present in the Book of Wisdom,which restricts the understanding of truth to those who trust in God(3: 9), and de la Potterie26 suggests that this truth is identical withGod’s plan for the wise (Wisd. 4: 17).

The idea of a divine plan comes out much more strongly in certainpassages in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the knowledge of the truth isseen to depend upon the revelation of divine mysteries:

I [thank thee, O Lord] for thou has enlightened me through thy truth. In thymarvellous mysteries, and in thy lovingkindness to a man [of vanity, and] inthe greatness of Thy mercy to a perverse heart Thou hast granted meknowledge. (1QH15 [7]: 26–7)27

‘At Qumran’, concludes de la Potterie, ‘[the term ‘‘truth’’] comes todenote the ensemble of the religious ideas of the sons of the Coven-ant.’28 The covenanters saw this truth as a privileged possessionbestowed on them by God (1QM13: 12), something not lightly to bedivulged to others, recommending instead ‘faithful concealment ofthe mysteries of truth’ (1QS4: 6), a well-known passage that pits thespirit of light against the spirit of darkness and falsehood andclaims for the community the title of ‘sons of truth in this world’(cf. 1QS2: 24, ‘the community of truth’).

The truth of the Gospel may appear less exclusive than the jeal-ously guarded secrets of the Qumran community. Jesus, after all, is‘the light of the world’ and his message is available to all prepared tolisten. But the esoteric side of Johannine Christianity should not belost sight of either. ‘Truth’ is such a generous, open-sounding word

24 Bultmann, p. 434. 25 Interpretation, 177. 26 Verite, 135.27 Vermes, Dead Sea Scrolls3, 186. 28 ‘The Truth in St. John’, 55.

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that all commentators without exception have failed to recognizethat like the alternative terms for revelation ‘living water’ and ‘breadof life’ it too belongs to what Herbert Leroy calls John’s Sonder-sprache—his private language. ‘He who is of the truth hears myvoice’ (18: 37). But what of those who are not of the truth, such asPilate, to whom these words are spoken, and ‘the Jews’, who reactwith angry incomprehension when told that the truth will set themfree (8: 32)? The only question in the Gospel that actually takes theform of a riddle is Pilate’s ‘What is truth?’ And, as we know, he wouldnot stay for an answer.

2. the revelation form

Of the five passages that I have selected for discussion under thisheading the first four can be treated for practical purposes as twogroups: (a) 3: 16–21, 31–6; (b) 7: 33–6; 8: 21–7. The fifth is what,following Dodd, I call the Epilogue: 12: 44–50.

(a) 3: 16–21, 31–6

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believesin him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son intothe world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be savedthrough him. He who believes in him is not condemned: he who does notbelieve is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of theonly Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into theworld, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds wereevil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to thelight, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comesto the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought inGod. (3: 16–21)

The first of these two remarkable passages is also the first of a series ofextended reflections that crop up sporadically in the Book of Signs.Coming where it does it is particularly surprising to anyone operat-ing simply on the story level of understanding. Nicodemus, Jesus’interlocutor in the early part of the chapter, has thus far shown littleaptitude for profound theological discussion. From v. 12 on, ofcourse, Jesus has begun to address his audience in the plural. Butthis hardly removes the difficulty.

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What is there in the early part of the Gospel that could haveprepared John’s first readers for what confronts them in 3: 16–21?The immediate transition comes in the preceding verse: ¥ Æ �A� ›

�Ø����ø K ÆP�fiH ��fi � �øc ÆN� Ø —‘so that everyone believing inhim may have the life of the new age’. Life is a prominent theme inthe Prologue, and looking back at this we may wish to equate the lifeof the new age with the K�ı��Æ ��Œ Æ Ł�F ª� ��ŁÆØ, the power, orright, to become children of God (1: 12). Coming as it does hard on theheels of a discussion on the conditions of being born from on high,understood by Nicodemus as rebirth, but by Jesus as birth from theSprit (KŒ �F � ���Æ��: 3: 5, 6, 8), we may surmise that the evangelisttoo has made this connection. This is strongly argued by Dodd,29

who points out that KŒ �F � ���Æ�� ª� A�ŁÆØ echoes the expressionK� Ł�F ª� A�ŁÆØ which is found in 1: 13. Yet reading chapter 3 withthe Prologue in mind, one cannot but be struck by the differences.The idea that someone who believes in Jesus should enjoy the life ofthe new age may fit in well enough with 1: 12–13, but in the Prologuethe world is inimical, threatening, possibly evil, and certainly incap-able of recognizing the presence of the enlightening Logos. So whatcan be meant by the saying that ‘God loved the world’? Those whohave already read on will know of the evangelist’s rather ambivalentattitude to the world; in this passage the tone is entirely positive; inv. 19 it is mankind, ƒ ¼ Łæø�Ø, not the world, that rejects the light.Here is something new.

Jesus has already spoken of himself in this chapter as ‘the Son ofMan’, so the detached tone of what follows is less startling. Yet onlysomebody already familiar with the Gospel and its message will readwhat is said about the giving and sending of the only-begotten Sonwithout surprise. In making Jesus allude to himself in the thirdperson as ‘the Son of Man’, John is conforming to a conventioncommon to all the Gospels. When Jesus speaks at a distance, so tospeak, of God’s salvific plan and of the part his Son is to play in it, weare left unpuzzled only because we unconsciously import into ourreading of the Gospel a broad acquaintance with developed Christiandoctrine. No doubt it makes little difference whether we see whatfollows after 3: 15 as spoken by Jesus or as interjected by the evan-gelist. For if the latter is putting his own thoughts into the mouth ofJesus he is not thereby investing them with any additional authority.

29 Interpretation, 305.

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The difficulty, if it is felt to be such, is even more acute in the secondpassage, 3: 31–6, for this, on the face of it, is uttered by John theBaptist. But what may cause some uneasiness to a modern readerposed no problem to the evangelist.

This passage has another feature which marks it off from anythingthat has gone before. Although the opposition of ‘the Jews’ to Jesus’teaching is foreshadowed in the temple episode in chapter 2, theopposition between believers and unbelievers is couched here inmuch more general terms. The man ‘who does evil’ (3: 20) is con-trasted with the man ‘who does the truth’ (3: 21): it is much later inthe gospel story that the typical evil-doer, who ‘hates the light anddoes not come to the light’ is replaced by ‘the Jews’ as the symbol ofwilful human blindness. The great trial sequence does not begin untilchapter 5; the evangelist does not choose to tell his readers the realreference of �a Y�ØÆ, ‘his own [country]’ and ƒ Y�ØØ, ‘his own[people]’ until he uses the word again in the proverbial saying, ‘aprophet has no honour in his own country (K �fi B N��fi Æ �Æ�æ��Ø)’(4: 44)—a saying which barely hints at the extraordinary explosionof hostility that is about to erupt in the next chapter.

More important is the observation that in the descent of the Son ofMan and the mission of the Son of God two originally distinctchristological developments stand side by side. Some suggestionshave already been offered about each of these; they are mentionedhere simply to reinforce the observation that the teaching of 3: 16–21presupposes a considerable amount of theological reflection. Thispassage is probably inserted at this point because it follows on soeasily from the preceding verse: ‘that whoever believes in him mayhave the life of the new age’ (3: 15). Either that, or else 3: 15 is addedexpressly in order to smooth the way for this very comprehensivestatement of Johannine theology. It may well be that the evangelistwished to place this as early as possible in his narrative.

We now turn to the content of 3: 16–21. Most of its motifs arediscussed at length elsewhere in this book. The only serious difficultycomes in the last couple of verses (20–1). These seem to propound adoctrine of divine predestination, which is hard to reconcile with theplain statement, much more characteristic of Johannine theology,that precedes: ‘He who believes in him is not condemned; he whodoes not believe is condemned already, because he has not believedin the name of the only Son of God’ (3: 18). The problem posed by3: 19–20 is real (‘men loved darkness rather than the light because

The Medium and the Message 509

their deeds were evil’): if we were to read these verses in isolation,knowing nothing of the rest of the Gospel, we should undoubtedlyconclude that what determines how any individual will receive theSon on his entry into the world is his or her previous moral behav-iour. Such an interpretation, if correct, would rob John’s very so-phisticated concept of judgement of all its force.30

We must acknowledge, then, that this passage is both surprisinglyplaced and surprisingly rich in typically Johannine motifs. Many ofthese (not all) are also to be found in the Prologue, but they arearticulated much more clearly here. (How many doctrinal proposi-tions could be or have been derived from these half-dozen verses?)Yet we should be wrong to attempt to evade the Bultmannianchallenge: does what is revealed here go beyond a that? For theevangelist, says Bultmann, ‘judgement is nothing more or less thanthe fact that the ‘‘light’’, the Revealer, has come to the world’.31

Perhaps we may go as far as to assert of the Revealer that he hascome into the world, given or ‘sent’ by God. But if so we can go nofurther. We are back with Bultmann’s naked ‘that’, and the elabor-ate ramifications of Christian theology are precariously suspendedfrom the metaphors (gift, mission) employed to establish this singleaffirmation.

I now turn to the second of the two passages under consideration:

He who comes from above is above all; he who is of the earth belongs to theearth, and of the earth he speaks; he who comes from heaven is above all. Hebears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testi-mony; he who receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. ForhewhomGod has sent utters the words of God, for it is not bymeasure that hegives the Spirit; the Father loves the Son and has given all things into hishand. He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey theSon shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him. (3: 31–6)

This passage is so closely connected with the first that some commen-tators have reorganized thewhole of chapter 3 in order to permit themto lie side by side.32We should not conclude too hastily, however, that

30 Not all commentators recognize this difficulty. Those that do extricate themselvesin various ways. Here it is enough to remark that we should not expect of theevangelist the philosophical subtlety required to unravel a particularly knotty theo-logical puzzle, one that was to engage the attention of Christian theologians manytimes in subsequent centuries. Augustine, Calvin, Molina, Jansenius are some of thenames that spring to mind.

31 Bultmann, p. 157. 32 Cf. Lindars, pp. 146–8.

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all the problematic features of the chapter can be satisfactorilyresolved simply by redistributing the material in what looks to uslike a more logical sequence. Wayne Meeks has argued that thesection concerning John the Baptist is given extra point and purposeby being bracketed between two revelatory discourses. ‘Rearrange-ment hypotheses’, he says, ‘result from failure to perceive one of themost striking characteristics of the evangelist’s literary procedure:the elucidation of themes by progressive repetition.’33 And this obser-vation is followed by some interesting reflections on 3: 31–6.

The opening of the passage is clearly designed to establish linkswith the first part of the chapter (vv. 1–15). Emphasis was laid thereon the need to be born from above in order to be able to enter thekingdom of God. But now ‘the one coming from above’ (› ¼ øŁ�

Kæ���� �) is Jesus himself—nobody else. Two themes that wereoriginally distinct, new birth and the heavenly man, have beenwelded together; and the term @ øŁ� , sloughing off its riddle, nowmeans, quite unambiguously, ‘from above’. Building upon the pro-verbial saying in 3: 12,34 the evangelist has now introduced a newbut quite characteristic distinction: from v. 31 it appears that Jesus’heavenly origin precludes him from saying anything at all about‘things of earth’ (�a K��ª�ØÆ): it is only › J KŒ �B� ªB� (a purelyabstract earthly being, introduced here simply to furnish a contrastwith › ¼ øŁ� Kæ���� � who speaks KŒ �B� ªB�.

In the next verse (32) the term �Ææ�ıæ�E , previously associatedwith John the Baptist, is taken over from 3: 11, where it is used for thefirst time in a properly juristic sense to mean testifying to somethingwhich one knows from personal experience. Not surprisingly, Bult-mann finds confirmation in this text for his own views on revelation:‘Everything remains shrouded in mystery; for the word of God whichhe speaks is nothing more nor less than the witness that he is theRevealer, that he speaks God’s word!’35 And indeed if we ask justwhat it is that ‘the one coming from above’ can reveal about ‘whathe has seen and heard’ it is impossible to add to what has alreadybeen said about Jesus’ entry into the world, his mission and itsdivisive effect.

In the opening of this passage, then, the evangelist is clearlyreflecting and commenting upon 3: 1–21, tightening links in what

33 ‘Man from Heaven’, 150. 34 For abundant parallels, ibid. 148 and nn. 36–7.35 Bultmann, pp. 160–1.

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was originally a rather loose, because adventitious, sequence ofideas. What follows next, concerning the Spirit, looks more like acorrection than a comment, redirecting the reader’s thinking on theSpirit along more favoured and familiar lines than those suggested inthe beginning of the chapter. Of the Spirit’s two roles, in creation andin revelation, the evangelist is much more interested in the latter. Inthe conversation with Nicodemus the theme was rebirth; here it isthe mission of the Son.

The ending comes as something of a shock: ‘He who believes in theSonhas eternal life; hewho does not obey the Son shall not see life, butthe wrath of God rests upon him’ (3: 36). The present possession of lifeis still assured to the believer, and in this context disobedience may beinterpreted as the withholding of belief; but the wrath of God smacksof the old, traditional, futuristic eschatology. Jurgen Becker36 is prob-ably right to see 3: 35–6 as an old community saying (Gemeindespruch)that allows a glimpse into an early stage of Johannine theology; hethinks that it was taken over by the ecclesiastical redactor, but it ismuch more likely that the evangelist was his own redactor at thispoint. As Bultmann recognizes, the futuristic language does not affectthe general thrust of the whole passage, in which ‘the full weight ofthe eschatological event is found in Jesus’ coming’.37

A last point of interest in this passage is its unobtrusive combin-ation of twomotifs that have different origins and are generally foundapart. These are first the ascent/descent motif associated with the SonofMan and secondly themissionmotif associatedwith the Son of God.There could be no clearer indication of the redactional character ofthis passage than its readiness to hold these two motifs together andthe ease with which it does so.

How, to conclude, do these two passages fit into the whole context?In spite of many close and obviously intended resemblances theyfunction very differently. The first is a free-floating prophetic sayingloosely attached to what precedes. Its purpose is to establish orconfirm the community’s sense of privilege in being the chosenrecipients of revelation: this revelation is essentially divisive andthey are on the right side of the divide. Nowhere in the Gospel doesJohn’s language get so close to the bigoted sectarianism of 1 Enoch,The Psalms of Solomon, or the War Scroll. There is no longer any needto specify the community’s adversaries: anyone who does not belong

36 Becker, pp. 157–8. 37 Bultmann, p. 167.

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is a villain, › �ÆFºÆ �æ��ø ; anyone who does belong is a hero, ›�ØH �c Iº�Ł�ØÆ . Whatever is meant by ‘doing the truth’, it is clearthat ‘the truth’ belongs to the members of the community and tothem alone.

The second passage is quite different, the work not of a prophet butof a writer; it is secondary and reflective. Its purpose is to tie up someloose ends, which it does subtly and effectively, but without thesuccinct urgency that distinguishes the earlier passage.

(b) 7: 33–6; 8: 21–7

Jesus then said, ‘I shall be with you a little longer, and then I go to him whosent me; you will seek me and you will not find me; where I am you cannotcome.’ The Jews said to one another, ‘Where does this man intend to go thatwe shall not find him? Does he intend to go to the Diaspora among the Greeksand teach the Greeks? What does he mean by saying, ‘‘you will seek me andyou will not find me’’, and, ‘‘Where I am you cannot come’’?’ (7: 33–6).Again he said to them, ‘I go away, and you will seek me and die in your

sin; where I am going, you cannot come.’ Then said the Jews, ‘Will he killhimself, since he says ‘‘Where I am going, you cannot come’’?’ He said tothem, ‘You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am notof this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die inyour sins unless you believe that I am he.’ They said to him, ‘Who are you?’Jesus said to them, ‘Even what I have told you from the beginning. I havemuch to say about you and much to judge; but he who sent me is true, andI declare to the world what I have heard from him.’ They did not understandthat he spoke to them of the Father. (8: 21–7)

So close are the parallels between these two passages that it is best totreat them together. I have argued (Excursus V) that the first is out ofplace in its present context, where it interrupts the story of theattempted arrest of Jesus by the temple police (7: 32, 45–52). Althoughthese are the people to whom Jesus appears to address the words,‘where I am going you cannot come’ (7: 34), it is ‘the Jews’ whoquestion this assertion, as they do in 8: 22. Moreover, when Jesusalludes to it in the introduction to the Farewell Discourse (13: 33), hesays that it was spoken to ‘the Jews’. The temple police do notreappear until 7: 45.38

38 They play no further part in this little story. Suggesting as it does that the commu-nity has virtually abandonedhope ofmaking further converts fromwithin the synagogueand is on the point of turning to ‘the Greeks’, the episode was presumably inserted during

The Medium and the Message 513

One might expect an utterance of such high christological importto be greeted with the same indignant fury that is aroused by theclaims to divine status I discussed in Chapter 1 (5: 17–18; 8: 58–9;10: 34–6). It is not. When Jesus states, a little further on, ‘you will diein your sins unless you believe that I am [he], ‹�Ø Kª� KØ�� ’ (8: 24) heprovokes perplexity rather than hostility. Bultmann concludes thatthis cannot be a deliberate use of the divine name; otherwise the Jewswould have reacted very differently.39 He may be right, but I aminclined to think that the true explanation lies further back. Theform-critical background of this saying is the development of theJohannine Sondersprache, of which �ª�Ø (‘depart’) is an importantitem. By the time that the motif of Jesus’ departure was being devel-oped the ‹�Ø Kª� KØ�� may have already been added to an increasingstore of such fruitfully ambiguous terms. As employed in 8: 24, 28, theKª� KØ�� (‘I am the one’) may have been intended to resume andencapsulate the other ‘I am’ sayings, themselves, as I have arguedearlier (Chapter 2), especially concise summaries of the gospelmessage.40

Why was the passage concerning Jesus’ mysterious departureinserted in its present context in chapter 7? Because origin and destinyare conceptual correlatives. The question, ‘Where do you come from?’is naturally followed by ‘Where are you going?’ The two ideas areneatly joined in 8: 14: ‘I know whence I have come and where I amgoing (�F �ªø); but you do not know whence I come and where Iam going.’ (In 3: 8 the motif is associated with those born of the spiritand has not yet been particularized.) But the question of originprobably arose in the first place, as was suggested in Chapter 3, outof speculation concerning the Messiah. The question of destiny pre-supposes a christological development of an altogether differentorder. We can see from the conclusion of the second passage thatthe title with which it is naturally associated is not ‘Messiah’ but ‘Sonof God’, though by an additional modulation, as the sequel shows, it

the last stages of the composition of the Gospel. The saying has beenused in support of theview that the Gospel as a whole was written with a Gentile audience in mind. Such anargumentwill onlywork if one clings to themistaken assumption of a single edition of theGospel, put together in a relatively short time.

39 Bultmann, p. 349 n. 3. Barrett agrees: ‘It is simply intolerable that Jesus should bemade to say, ‘‘I amGod, the SupremeGod of theOld Testament, and beingGod I doas I amtold’’ ’ (‘Christocentric or Theocentric?’, 12). Yet perhaps the Johannine prophet, speakingin Jesus’ name,was effectively assertinghis identitywithYahweh, the ‘near’ God of Israel.

40 Cf. Becker, p. 208.

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can also be connected with ‘Son of Man’. Even Bultmann confesseshimself baffled by the link passage, 8: 25–7. But that there is a con-nection, and a deliberate one, seems certain: ‘When you have lifted upthe Son of man, then youwill know that I am [he], Z�Ø Kª� KØ��’ (8: 28).This is Jesus’ answer to the question, ‘Who are you?’ (8: 25), and itshows, as Bultmann says, ‘that everything that he has claimed forhimself is gathered up in the title ‘‘Son of Man’’ ’.41

Why should this be so? The answer to this question is interesting,for as has already been argued in chapter 9 it discloses the relation-ship between the wisdom christology of the Prologue and that of theremainder of the Gospel, otherwise remarkably free of direct allusionsto the wisdom tradition.

‘You will seek me and you will not find me; where I am [then] youcannot come’ (7: 34, 36; 8: 22; 13: 33). As in the Prologue, the wisdommotif implied in this saying belongs to the old tradition of remote, orinaccessible wisdom. Indeed it is at the heart of this tradition. Wis-dom addresses the scoffers: ‘They will call upon me, but I will notanswer; they will seek me diligently but will not find me’ (Prov. 1: 28).The same tradition is reflected in the Farewell Discourse, where, aswe have seen, the ambiguity of the term �ª�Ø is exploited to ratherdifferent effect. But it stems from the same fundamental insight thatprovides the driving-force of the Prologue: the earthly career of Jesusexemplifies and incarnates the fate of divine wisdom—to descend toearth and be rejected by men. The Prologue is concerned with theentry of Wisdom—the Logos—into the world of men; the presentsaying is concerned with her—or his—departure, back into the re-mote and inaccessible region from which she sprang. The first oc-currence of the saying makes this plain: it is preceded by the explicitstatement, ‘I shall be with you a little longer, and then I go to himwho sent me: �ªø �æe� �e ���łÆ � ��’ (7: 33). Death is nowenvisaged as a return from a mission.

The closest conceptual parallel to the Johannine schema is to befound in 1 Enoch 42, whereWisdom is said to have left heaven seekingfor a home. According to Enoch she found no home, so she ‘returnedto her place and took her seat in the midst of the angels’. No suchjourney is recorded in the Book of Proverbs, which contents itselfwith asserting (though not unequivocally) the inaccessibility ofwisdom. In quoting Proverbs, John associates the remoteness and

41 Bultmann, p. 349.

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inaccessibility of wisdom with the departure theme that reached himby another route. Although the wording is different here (there is nohint of the Logos), the conceptual background is the same.

At what point the wisdom speculation was married to the missionand agency theology embedded in the phrase ‘to him who sent me’ isimpossible to say. The conjunction may seem unsurprising, but itcannot have been made until the evangelist’s thinking concerningJesus’ mission had moved well outside the sphere of its inception inthe simple ideas of prophecy and agency. Alternatively we may thinkthat it was the picture of divine wisdom returning to her heavenlyhome that allowed the Johannine prophet to think of Jesus’ missionas something qualitatively different from that of the prophets whohad come to Israel as heavenly envoys, bearing but not embodying amessage from on high. Certainly the above and below languageemployed in the second passage (8: 23) to explain and justify Jesus’account of his departure shows that by the time these revelatorydiscourses had become part of the special Johannine tradition therewas already an interplay between two immensely powerful ideaswhose origins probably lay far apart.

In spite of this easy conjunction the vocabulary of departure isnowhere confused with that of ascent. The two ideas seem so close asto be virtually indistinguishable, but the evidence suggests that theyoriginated in different conceptual spheres. The connecting link inthis case is explicit: it is furnished by the above/below contrast thatindicates both origin and essence. In 8: 21–7 this paves the way forthe second prophecy of the exaltation of the Son of Man. This,exceptionally, leads on to a statement concerning Jesus’ mission, afurther indication that this passage, like most of those singled outfor discussion in this chapter, represents the final stage of the evan-gelist’s theological reflection, when all the various strands of histhinking have been woven together:

When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I am [he],and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak thus as my Fathertaught me. And he who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, forI always do what is pleasing to him. (8: 28–9)

What do these passages contribute to the content of the revelatorymessage? An explicit allusion to Jesus’ death? We know now howdetermined ‘the Jews’ are to track him down and kill him (ch. 5). Hisdisciples received a guarded intimation of this at Cana, in the as yet

516 Revelation

mysterious reference to his hour (2: 4); in Jerusalem there wasanother hint, but not one that could be understood at the time(2: 19). Jesus’ promise to give his flesh for the life of the world (6: 51)is similarly cryptic, and completely misconstrued. Not even in theforecast concerning the Son of Man that follows the discussion withNicodemus is there any direct reference to the passion; the fullsignificance of łF is still obscure (and will not be fully clarifieduntil 12: 23–5). In 8: 28 the switch to the active voice, with ‘the Jews’as subject (‹�Æ łø����), is puzzling. Must we infer that the verb łF has come to connote crucifixion? If not, and it is intended tocarry its ordinary meaning, ‘to exalt’, then ‘the Jews’ are the activeagents of Jesus’ exaltation. This is difficult, but may well be withinthe range of Johannine irony. In any case there is certainly anallusion to Jesus’ return to heaven.

As revelatory statements the two passages are more loosely con-structed than those in chapter 3; none the less they may be said tohave injected into Jesus’ teaching the new theme of the completion ofhis mission and his return to the one who sent him. Thus the patternof the Prologue, where the Logos begins at the side of God and endsnestling in his embrace, is now echoed in the message Jesus passes onto the world: his origin and destiny, beyond the comprehension ofthose who do not accept him, are what he has to reveal to those whodo. Is this ‘what the Father taught him’ (8: 28)? No doubt it is part ofthe lesson, but with the addition of an extra nuance: the unity ofFather and Son, who speaks only what he has heard and is neverabandoned by ‘the one who sent him’. (This theme, taken over frompassages such as 4: 34; 8: 18, 28, is more strongly emphasized in12: 44–5, a passage yet to be discussed.) Still we cannot rid ourselvesof the question that has haunted us throughout this chapter: what isthe real content of the mysteries that Jesus has learnt from God?

(c) Epilogue (12: 44–50)

And Jesus cried out and said, ‘He who believes in me, believes not in me butin him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me. I have comeas light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain indarkness. If anyone hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judgehim; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He whorejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I havespoken will be his judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own

The Medium and the Message 517

authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandmentwhat to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternallife. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me.’ (12: 44–50)

Misled by his assumption that the Fourth Gospel was composed as asingle unified work that could in principle be pieced together again inthe proper order, Bultmann thought it necessary to remove the con-cluding paragraph of the Book of Signs from its present place. For onceit is Dodd who shows the greater insight: this is an epilogue in theproper sense, rounding off and summing up the preceding revelation.

In spite of the striking introduction, in which Jesus proclaims orshouts (Œæ��Ø ), it is a carefully constructed piece, belonging, like thepassages discussed in the preceding section, to the last stage of thecomposition of the Gospel. It is set out here in such a way as tohighlight the connections.

44b › �Ø����ø �N� K�b

P �Ø�����Ø �N� K�b

Iººa �N� �e ���łÆ � ��,45 ŒÆd › Ł�øæH K�b

Ł�øæ�E

�e ���łÆ � ��.46a Kªg �H� �N� �e Œ��� Kº�ºıŁÆ,

b ¥ Æ �A� › �Ø����ø �N� K�b K �fi B �Œ��fi Æ �c ��� fi �.47a ŒÆd K ��� �ı IŒ��fi � �H Þ���ø ŒÆd �c �ıº�fi �,

Kªg P Œæ� ø ÆP�� ·

b P ªaæ qºŁ

¥ Æ Œæ� ø �e Œ��� ,Iºº� ¥ Æ ���ø �e Œ��� .

48a › IŁ��H K�b ŒÆd �c ºÆ�� ø �a Þ��Æ� �ı

���Ø �e Œæ� �Æ ÆP�� ·

b › º�ª� n Kºº��Æ KŒ�E � ŒæØ �E ÆP�e K �fi B K���fi � #��æfi Æ.49a ‹�Ø Kªg K� K�Æı�F PŒ Kºº��Æ,

b Iºº� › ���łÆ� �� �Æ�cæ ÆP��� �Ø K �ºc ���øŒ�

�� �Y�ø ŒÆd �� ºÆº��ø.50a ŒÆd r�Æ ‹�Ø # K �ºc ÆP�F �øc ÆN� Ø�� K��Ø .

b L s Kªg ºÆºH,ŒÆŁg� �Yæ�Œ� �Ø › �Æ��æ; o�ø� ºÆºH.42

42 A full literary analysis of the passage cannot be attempted here. It is constitutedof two chiastically structured sections, 44b–48a and 49–50, with an intervening line,48b, which points backwards to the first section (ŒæØ �E) and forwards to the second(› º�ª� n Kºº��Æ). The passage begins and ends with the mission/agency motif. This

518 Revelation

There is really no room for yet another appearance of Jesus beforean unnamed audience. In the story of the Gospel he had already goneinto hiding (KŒæ���, 12: 36), not to be seen again in public before theonset of the passion. The first act of the great trial sequence is over;we are now in the interval, behind the scenes. The evangelist divideshis epilogue, as Dodd sees, into two parts. The first (12: 37–43)comments ruefully on the blindness of Israel in a verse from Isaiah(6: 10) drawn from the common stock of the gospel tradition. Thesecond summarizes the content of what has been revealed so far.Dodd ingeniously suggests43 that ‘the words � ���F� �b �ŒæÆ�� donot mean that on a particular occasion Jesus spoke the words fol-lowing. They mean rather, ‘‘This is the content of the Œ�æıª�Æ.’’ ’Whether or not Dodd is right about this, they are certainly intended(as in 7: 37) to draw the reader’s attention to the particular import-ance of what follows.44

Peder Borgen has argued45 that the passage quotes and adapts atraditional Jesus-saying found in various forms in all four Gospels(Matt. 10: 40; Mark 9: 37; Luke 9: 48; 10: 16; John 5: 23; 8: 19; 13: 20;14: 7, 9; 15: 23). Those with the firmest place in the gospel tradition, asBorgen points out, involve a chain of two agencies. Single agencysayings, however, are well attested in Judaism and are preferred byJohn. (John 13: 20, closer to the Synoptic tradition, is an exception.46)

I have no wish to contest Borgen’s findings. But we must alsorecognize that the most significant of the traditions from whichthis passage is compiled come from within the Gospel’s own fund ofrevelation sayings. Borgen points out the formal resemblance

is carried in the first place by the term › ���łÆ� �� (44b, 45), one of the two names forGod found in John. When this is picked up in 49b it is accompanied by the secondname, �Æ��æ, which is repeated (alone) in the concluding line, 50b. Both the key words,ŒæØ �E and ºÆº�Ø , occur in the intervening line, 48b. Internal resonances are set up bythe terms �Ø�����Ø (44b, 46b), Œ���� (46a, 47b), Þ��Æ�Æ (47a, 48a), and K �º� (49b,50a). In my view, detailed literary analyses of this kind have only a limited value, sincethe most they can prove is that the passage in question can be read as a tightlystructured whole. It is idle to pretend that this method is more objective than anyother. None the less it does serve to direct attention to certain features of the text whichmight otherwise be disregarded.

43 Interpretation, p. 382.44 J.-A. Buhner, taking vv. 36 and 44 together, calls this a ‘cry out of hiddenness’

(Schrei aus dem Verborgenen) (‘Denkstrukturen’, 230).45 ‘Use of Tradition’.46 In fact 13: 16–20, with its unusual vocabulary (I����º� etc.) draws upon

Synoptic or Synoptic-type traditions more extensively and more obviously than12: 44–50.

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between 12: 45 and Synoptic sayings such as Matthew 10: 40: ‘he whoreceives me receives him who sent me’ (cf. John 13: 20).47 But Johnuses the term Ł�øæ�E , ‘see’, whose closest conceptual parallel, apartfrom 14: 9 (›æA ) is in 8: 19 (�N�� ÆØ, ‘know’). The obvious reason forthe use of ‘see’ here, however, is the desire to link this verse up withthe blindness motif that precedes and the light motif that follows. (Nosuch link-up was felt to be necessary to the case of 8: 19, although thelight saying of 8: 12 is not very far away.) In the present contextthe light motif has gathered an extra resonance from its proximity tothe brilliant sequence of the healing of the blind man in chapter 9.This concludes with a judgement saying (9: 39); and since we weretold that the miracle took place at the pool of Siloam (‘which meansSent’, 9: 7) the opening of the Epilogue looks like a compressedreminder of that whole episode, with which it shares the themes offaith, mission, sight, light, darkness, and judgement.

The passage echoes many earlier revelation sayings also, especiallythose in chapter 3: ‘for I did not come to judge the world but to savethe world’ (cf. 3: 17).48 In the Farewell Discourse that follows, ‘theworld’ replaces ‘the Jews’ as the general term for Jesus’ adversaries.Here, though, the connotations are precisely those of 3: 16–21—Jesushas come into the world in order to save it. As in 3: 31–6 there is astrong hint of futuristic eschatology: ‘He who rejects me and does notreceivemy sayings has a judge; theword that I have spokenwill be hisjudge on the last day’ (12: 48). Bultmann naturally assigns this sayingto the ecclesiastical redactor, but one may surmise that the author ofthe Epilogue (in all probability the Johannine prophet himself) is moreinterested in completeness than consistency.

The main motif of the latter half of the passage is another familiartheme, Jesus’ dependence on the Father. This harks back to theopening; for to say that ‘He who believes in me believes not in mebut in himwho sentme’ is to imply that ‘What I say I say as the Fatherhas biddenme.’ The sender and the Father, the twonames for God thatlie at the heart of Jesus’ revelation, neatly bracket the whole passage.

‘The fact that 12: 46–8 is very much like 3: 16–19’, commentsBrown, ‘makes it quite plausible that, in part, 12: 44–50 is a variant

47 The converse saying, in 12: 48, is much closer to Luke 10: 16, with which, asBrown points out, it shares the verb IŁ���E (‘reject’), not found elsewhere in John.

48 Brown (pp. 147, 490) stresses how closely 12: 46–8 resembles 3: 16–19. The Kº�ºıŁÆof 12: 46 is the first-person equivalent of a mission-saying; it is a hair’s breadth away, asBuhner has shown (Gesandte, 138–52), from an ‘I am’ saying (in this case from 8: 12).

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of material found elsewhere in John but preserved by a differentdisciple.’49 Of course one cannot altogether discount this possibility;but in view of its position, the craft with which it is composed, andthe deliberate allusion to all the salient themes of revelation, Dodd’sview is to be preferred; the piece was designed as a coping-stone tocrown all that has gone before—and perhaps with just a glimpse ofwhat lies ahead.

conclusion

The passages analysed above are the ones singled out by the evan-gelist himself as representative of his view. To see this there is noneed to go to the lengths of excluding all but the handful of passagesascribed by Bultmann to the hand of the evangelist or to his hypo-thetical revelation source. Virtually all substantial works of literaturecontain lines or verses to which the discerning critic can point asespecially instructive or illuminating. This selection represents anattempt to follow the evangelist’s own directions. The conclusion ofchapter 12 is particularly significant, constituting as it does a coda tothe whole Book of Signs. Certainly it would be possible to isolate eachof the motifs found in these verses and to pursue them through theGospel. The first part of this chapter is an admittedly sketchy attemptin this direction. But we should then still be left with the question,why these motifs and why not others? This is surely the first questionthat must be answered, and it is one that partly justifies Bultmann’sapparently arbitrary conclusions.

What we have in these passages is a series of vignettes thatencapsulate a view of the gospel as revelation. They say almost noth-ing of the content of this revelation; it is to be delivered by a divineenvoy, charged with the task of carrying it to the world, the object ofGod’s salvific love. The effect of this revelation will be dramaticallydivisive. Those who reject it ipso facto pronounce judgement uponthemselves. Those who accept it are granted a new life—the life ofthe new age. Having fulfilled his mission, the purpose of his entryinto the world, the Son will return to the Father who sent him.

If this is not gnosis it is remarkably close. Where the Fourth Gospeldiverges from Gnosticism is in its insistence upon the salvific will of

49 Brown, p. 490.

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God. There is only one God and only one world, the object of his love.The message is not inconsistent with Christian belief; Paul’s teachingon the cross, for example. But it is not tied to this, or only by theslightest and slenderest of threads. In fact there is no mention ofthe cross in any of these passages: death is conceived as departure( �ª�Ø ), exaltation ( łF ), or ascent (I Æ�Æ� �Ø ). Such descriptionsas the Gospel contains of what may be thought of loosely as historicalepisodes have no place in these summaries. It is as if the gospel storyhas been filtered through a fine mesh; all that is left is a lingeringessence of revelatory discourse, exuding nothing more tangible thana persistent and quite distinctive aroma.

Of the names of Jesus only that of Son (of God) could be deducedwith any assurance. There is no trace of ‘Messiah’; ‘Son of Man’occurs in one passage (8: 28) but not in the Epilogue. This is consist-ent with the main lines of the Gospel narrative and consequentlycould be superimposed upon this without having to be stretched ortrimmed, but by no amount of ingenuity could the Gospel story bederived from the blueprint. To appreciate how easily the narrative fitsupon any of these sketches one would have to know it well already.

This knowledge is presupposed, of course, in the reader of theGospel. It is to ensure that the reader connects the revelatory schemawith the history that the evangelist punctuates his narrative with anumber of examples of it, modifying these slightly to suit the context.Further to guard against misunderstanding he also inserts at inter-vals certain helpful hints and pointers (e.g. 2: 22; 7: 39). Neverthelessthere are some surprising omissions from the revelatory schema: thename of Jesus, the title Messiah, the cross and the passion—even theresurrection.

From this perspective the attraction of Bultmann’s general solu-tion to the puzzles of the Gospel is manifest. For him the revelatoryschema is not something the evangelist invented for himself: hefound it in his source. This accounts for all the gaps; it is not thathe actually cut anything out, since themes and motifs whose omis-sion would otherwise be almost impossible to explain were not pre-sent in the first place. My own solution is that the various elements ofthe schema emerged after prolonged and sometimes painful reflec-tion in the course of a struggle with the establishment party in thesynagogue. Traces of this struggle remain in the Gospel text;the witness motif, for example, mentioned only once in a purelyrevelatory passage (3: 32), was forged in the course of controversies

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with the Pharisees. Other elements, e.g. the positive use of the lightmotif, are more probably the fruit of the prophetic activity of theevangelist and his community.

Though this solution is not as neat as Bultmann’s, it is less arbi-trary, more in accord with the admittedly scanty evidence furnishedby the Gospel itself. And at the same time it confronts squarely theproblems that Bultmann, alone of the commentators on the Gospel,refuses to shirk.

Why then are the cross and resurrection omitted from thesesummaries? Faithful to the tradition, the evangelist concludes hisnarrative much on the same lines as his predecessors, but distils fromthe two sets of stories lessons of immediate relevance to his commu-nity. Cross and resurrection have a double significance for John. Onthe first level of understanding they signify, together, Jesus’ passagefrom this world to the world above—his return to the Father whosent him. When thinking of the cross in this connection the evan-gelist uses the term łF ; the equivalent term for resurrection isI Æ�Æ� �Ø ; �ª�Ø they share: it straddles the divide between the twohalves of the Gospel, but its full meaning does not emerge until theextended reflection of the farewell discourse draws out the implica-tions of Jesus’ physical absence for the life of the community. Thoughnot explicitly mentioned in the final summary (12: 44–50), the depart-ure motif certainly belongs to the revelatory schema and does notrequire to be underlined.

For John the sentence passed on Jesus is above all the final act inthe long, sad story of Jesus’ rejection by his own people, ‘the Jews’.The rejection is experienced in its own way by the Christian com-munity also. Far more than a personal rebuff, it implies a turningaway from the light, a culpable blindness for which the Gospel’s wordis Œæ��Ø�, the self-condemnation of those who prefer darkness to light.In a situation where the true believers know themselves to be sur-rounded by an alien and uncomprehending world the pain of thecross is above all the pain of being repulsed and eventually expelledby one’s own people. The trial of Jesus ended in crucifixion, but thiswas only the culmination of a judgement that began as soon as Jesusstarted to proclaim his message. It is now being lived out by hisdisciples.

The spiritual lesson of the resurrection, spelt out in the Lazarusstory, is summed up in the term �øc ÆN� Ø�, the life of the new age,John’s version of the preaching of the kingdom. This has been

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discussed at some length in Chapter 10 and it is unnecessary to saymore here. What is picked out by the evangelist for his revelatoryschema is not the event of resurrection but its enduring significancein the experience of the community.

It may fairly be said, then, that despite appearances the Johanninerevelatory schema does include all the basic elements of the Christiankerygma. All Christian preachers instinctively adapt these to thesituation of those whom they are addressing. It should occasion nosurprise to find John the Evangelist doing the same.

This answer, however, is far from solving all the difficulties. Even ifthe revelatory schema was not simply taken over from a Gnosticsource, as Bultmann maintained, but somehow distilled from theChristian kerygma, it remains curiously devoid of any factual content,utterly unlike, in this respect, the so-called kerygmatic discourses foundin the first half of the Book of Acts. We have encountered this difficultyat every stage. ‘He who comes from above’, we are told, ‘bears witnesstowhat he has seen and heard’ (3: 31–2). He declares to the world whathe has heard from the one who sent him (8: 26), who has himselfinstructed him what to say (12: 49). This repeated insistence uponJesus’ revelatory role is like a promise continually reiterated butnever fulfilled. Meeks speaks in this context, quite justifiably, of anempty ‘revelation form’.50

The challenge that has haunted the whole of this chapter mustnow be tackled head-on. What is revealed in the Fourth Gospel apartfrom the mere fact of revelation?

We may start by dismissing two untenable answers. The first is thenaıve assumption that whatever is stated in propositional form mustbe taken as literally true, and therefore a proper object of theologicalreflection and speculation. This will not work, if only because manyof the statements in the Gospel are formally contradictory (‘MyFather who sent me’: ‘I and the Father are one’) and therefore haveto be interpreted before they are properly understood. And as soon asone abandons a literal understanding one is confronted by the kind ofdisagreement that muddies up the clear waters of revelation andeffectively disables the whole concept.

The second answer is that of Oscar Cullmann. In his book Salvationin History he argues that ‘the important thing for the [fourth] evan-gelist is that God’s self-communication, its saving activity, has its

50 ‘Man from Heaven’, 150.

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mid-point in the historical life of the man Jesus of Nazareth . . . Allrevelation, all God’s acting, is disclosed from this mid-point.’51 ButJohn is not interested in salvation-history; it might be true to say thathe sees ‘the historical life of the man Jesus’ (whom he identifies as theLogos) as the culmination of God’s revelation to mankind, but this isa very partial summary of what he is saying, and the concept of amid-point is Cullmann’s, not John’s.

Both of these answers labour under the disadvantage of placingthe locus of revelation outside the Gospel itself, treating this as asource of sacred truths or even, at worst, as a kind of pond in whichto fish for proof-texts. Bultmann’s answer, remaining well within theGospel, is very different: in fact it suffers from the opposite defect, arefined fastidiousness which cuts out much that is integral to theGospel narrative under the pretext of demythologization.

In an attempt to avoid the dilemma of Bultmann’s ‘empty that’Gail O’Day has argued that instead of searching for the content ofrevelation we should rather concern ourselves with its mode: the‘how’ rather than the ‘what’. She rightly sees that the Bultmanniandichotomy between the bare fact of Jesus as revealer and the contentof his revelation ‘allows almost no middle ground, middle groundthat should be occupied by the Fourth Gospel text’.52 Accordingly,she proposes to ‘approach the question of revelation by examiningthe interrelationship of narrative mode and theological claim in theFourth Gospel’;53 for ‘without full attention to the revelatory dy-namic of the Fourth Gospel Text,’ as she points out, ‘we are not inthe world of the Fourth Gospel’.54

In principle this project is a good one, but it is badly executedbecause O’Day has failed to ask the first, obvious question: ‘What is aGospel?’55 The most cogent criticism of Bultmann’s position comes,

51 Salvation in History, 270. 52 Revelation, 44.53 Ibid. 2. 54 Ibid. 45.55 Such a question might have led her to the true solution to the problem, but

unfortunately she is side-tracked into an examination of the nature of irony. This sheregards as the literary form which has provided John ‘with the appropriate vehicle forhis theology of revelation’ (3). In many places, such as in her discussion of the twolevels of meaning in irony, her enquiry runs parallel to my own analysis of the Gospelgenre. But irony is not a genre or literary form but a trope or technique. It provides atbest a partial answer to the question she sets out to solve. Moreover, her interestingdiscussion of irony fails to issue in a definition and she does not make it quite clear howthe key fits. My impression is that it wobbles in the lock. Another writer to make use ofthe same concept, Paul D. Duke (Irony), fares no better. Irony, as Terence Cave hasshown (Recognitions (Oxford, 1988)), is a relative latecomer in the history of European

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somewhat surprisingly, from his pupil Ernst Kasemann, who speaksof ‘the inclusion of both the history of Jesus and that of the Christiankerygma under the comprehensive concept ‘‘Gospel’’ ’ and points outthat John deliberately chose to couch his message in this particularform. ‘It seems to me’, he concludes, ‘that if one has absolutely nointerest in the historical Jesus, then one does not write a Gospel, but,on the contrary, finds the Gospel form inadequate.’56

Kasemann’s position is one-sided too, of course. John has nointerest in the historical Jesus as such. In Browning’s terminology,he is writing about stars, not about points. But it is true that he haschosen to write a Gospel rather than letters or a collection of sayings,and it is instructive to reflect what his Gospel would look like iftransferred to another medium, a homily, say, like the Letter to theHebrews, or a revelatory discourse of the kind found quite frequentlyin the Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi (e.g. the Trimorphic Proten-noia or the Thunder, Perfect Mind), and in the Odes of Solomon.

There is in fact much in the Odes, both in style and in content, toremind us of the Fourth Gospel: the dualism, including the symbol-ism of light and darkness and the opposition of life and death, thesense of persecution and rejection, the unity of the congregation ofthe saved, who owe their salvation to the intercession of ‘the Son ofGod’. The symbolism is richer and the language more extravagant,as is the case throughout the Odes, but it would be easy to pruneaway the more extreme conceits to leave something with an evencloser resemblance to one of the Johannine discourses. Certain ofthese, especially the allegories of the good shepherd and the vine, arealready quite close to some of the Odes. But—and this is the point—inserted into a narrative that tells of the life of Jesus on earth, they are

poetics, dominated for so long by the more flexible and conceptually more powerfulmodel of recognition. This concept, hitherto ignored in Johannine scholarship, plays asignificant role in the architecture of the Gospel. The high point of the Prologue is therecognition of the identity of the Logos, God’s plan for the world, with the person ofChrist, just as the high point of the concluding paragraph is a cry of faith followingupon a belated recognition. The second half of ch. 1 consists of a series of confessions,in a section I have labelled I ƪ �æØ�Ø�, of Jesus’ messianic status, culminating inNathanael’s vision. There follows a series of recognitions—the Samaritan woman,Peter, the blind man, Martha, mostly focused upon a particular title: Saviour, HolyOne, Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man. We should perhaps add to this list Pilate’s pleafor recognition, in a dramatic gesture: ‘Behold the Man.’ Finally, whilst all these takeplace, so to speak, on stage, the audience (readers) are experiencing a recognition oftheir own. This too Cave has shown to be an application of the Aristotelian model.

56 ‘Blind Alleys’, 41.

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part of a story; unlike the Odes they are not spoken from on high by aChrist already enthroned by the side of God; they repeatedly affirm, atleast implicitly, the identity of the earthly Jesus and the Risen Lord.

In the Letter to the Hebrews, to take our other example, thisidentity is affirmed. What is more, the earthly Jesus is portrayed asa man beset by human weakness, uttering the kind of prayer thatthe Johannine Jesus explicitly renounced: ‘In the days of his flesh,Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears,to him who was able to save him from death’ (Heb. 5: 7; contrastJohn 12: 27). Hebrews shares with the Fourth Gospel a conviction ofthe overriding importance of faith in the Christian life, thoughadmittedly it has rather a different conception of the nature offaith. It would not be difficult to extract the lessons of John 4 and 6

from the narratives in which they are embedded and to combinethem in a midrash on the story of Exodus. The result would resemblethe paraenetic passage in Hebrews 3–4. Then the ideas of the reve-lation discourses could be woven together into a meditative reflec-tion of the kind found in the central section of Hebrews. Even as it isthe Gospel frequently hints at the passion and resurrection before itembarks upon a full account of these in the last few chapters. Such adocument could include virtually all that Bultmann says about theFourth Gospel in the chapters he devotes to it in his Theology of theNew Testament. But there would be no healing miracles or othersigns, no altercations with the Jews, no conversations with thedisciples.

What we should miss above all else in such a homily would beJesus’ voice, the voice not of a divine being remote from humanconcerns, but of one who has taken up residence on earth. He isunique, certainly, a man from above, a stranger from heaven. But headdresses his friends as one who has endured persecution and rejec-tion and won through. His voice is raised from time to time, inemphasis or in anger. But it remains equable, serene, assured.There is no other voice like it in literature.

We are left, then, with a Gospel, and with good reasons for en-quiring about the significance of that very fact. It was observedearlier that the frequent references to revelation in the revelatoryschema resemble a promise that is continually reiterated but neverfulfilled. But the promise is left unfulfilled only because it is unfulfil-lable, since there are no heavenly mysteries revealed to Jesus by Godexcept those disclosed in his own life and death.

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Meeks counters Bultmann’s familiar paradox that Jesus revealsonly that he is the revealer with a paradox of his own. Not quite,he says: ‘He reveals rather that he is an enigma.’57 But the point issurely that if we seek for answers only in what Jesus says we arebound to be disappointed. Neither in the revelatory schema nor inany other of Jesus’ discourses will we find the kind of detaileddescription of heavenly mysteries so frequent in apocalyptic. ‘Heav-enly things’, by yet another paradox, are not to be sought in heaven.

Nor are they disclosed in words alone. In Chapter 8 we saw thatthe fourth evangelist was keenly aware of the nature and implica-tions of the Gospel genre. He accepted quite as whole-heartedly asMark the fundamental paradox of the Christian belief in the lordshipof Jesus and the complexities of embodying it in a story. Bultmann’sconception of the Johannine theology of revelation, for all its bril-liance, has a fundamental flaw. He is too anxious to discard thenarrative husk of the Gospel in order to get at the kernel of revelationinside.58 The evangelist’s own insight into the meaning of the gospelmessage is not borrowed from an alien religion, nor is it detachablefrom his story. He knows that the meaning is a mystery, and aheavenly mystery at that: it is a truth from God, entrusted to a singlemessenger. Hence a further paradox: there is no extra revelationabove and beyond the tradition concerning Jesus that the evangelisthas inherited and is anxious to transmit to others. His own under-standing of the tradition was acquired gradually and painfully from aprofound reflection upon his faith.

At the heart of these paradoxes stands the enigmatic figure of theSon of Man. ‘The story of Jesus’, Meeks points out, ‘is all played out onearth, despite the frequent indications that he really belongs else-where.’59 The heavenly persona of Jesus, if one may put it this way,is neither the Messiah nor the divine agent, since traditionally both ofthese have a job to do on earth. On the other hand, the ascent/descentmotif associated with the Son of Man is always accompanied by theassertion that his true home is in heaven. The title of M. de Jonge’sbook, Stranger fromHeaven, is an accurate summary of the Jesus of theFourth Gospel; it is accurate because the ideas associated with ‘Son of

57 ‘Man from Heaven’, 151.58 For similar observations, in agreement with scholars such as T. Onuki,

U. Schnelle, and H. Thyen, see now Frey, Eschatologie, ii. 205–7, making essentiallythe same point.

59 Ibid. 145.

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Man’ have been allowed to infiltrate the whole Gospel. Thus thefundamental paradox consists in the identification of a man, Jesus,with a heavenly being whose message has nothing to do with thethings of earth. The form is apocalyptic but, to repeat what was said inthe conclusion to Chapters 6 and 7, the destiny of Jesus is the reverse ofan apocalypse. This, not some esoteric mystery disclosed to a seer ordreamer, is the true revelation. It is indeed God’s plan for the world,but in so far as the plan is transcribed in terms of a human life it is notto be understood from words but from deeds. No wonder, then, thatany attempt to separate out the message from the life results in an‘empty’ revelation form. Not the least of the Gospel’s ironies is theemphasis upon dialogue and discourse at the expense of action, thestress uponwords as opposed toworks, so that Bultmann can actuallyargue that Jesus’ works must be thought of exclusively as words. Thetruth is that the two must be held together; no understanding of thebook is possible if one loses sight of the simple fact that it is not atheological tract but a Gospel.What the divine agent ‘heard’ fromGodis disclosed not in hiswords but in his life; the ‘what’ is displayed in the‘how’. The matter of the Gospel, its true content, is indistinguishablefrom its form: the medium is the message.

The Medium and the Message 529

bibliography

This bibliography is restricted to books and articles cited in the text or notes.Fuller, classified bibliographies may be found in the commentaries of Brown,Becker, and Haenchen.Commentaries are referred to in the notes by the name of the commentator

alone.Dates in square brackets refer to earlier editions; to the first, unless

otherwise indicated.

commentaries

Barrett, C. K., The Gospel according to St. John2 (London, 1978 [1955]).Becker, J., Das Evangelium des Johannes, 2 vols. (Gutersloh, 1979/81).Bernard, J. H., The Gospel according to St. John, 2 vols., ed. A. H. McNeile(Edinburgh, 1928).

Boismard, M.-E., and Lamouille, A., Synopse des quatre evangiles en francais,iii. L’Evangile de Jean (Paris, 1977).

Brown, R. E., The Gospel according to John, 2 vols. (New York, 1966/70).Bultmann, R., The Gospel of John (Oxford, 1971) [¼ Das Evangelium desJohannes (Gottingen, 1941), with the Supplement of 1966].

Haenchen, E., A Commentary on the Gospel of John, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1984)[¼ Das Johannesevangelium, ed. U. Busse (Tubingen, 1980)].

Hirsch, E., Das vierte Evangelium in seiner ursprunglichen Gestalt verdeutschtund erklart (Tubingen, 1936).

Hoskyns, E. C., The Fourth Gospel2, ed. F. N. Davey (London, 1947 [1940]).Keener, C. S., The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols. (Peabody, Mass.,2003).

Lightfoot, R. H., St. John’s Gospel: A Commentary (Oxford, 1956).Lincoln, A. T., The Gospel according to St. John (London, New York, 2005).Lindars, B., The Gospel of John (London, 1972).Loisy, A., Le Quatrieme Evangile (Paris, 1903).Moloney, F. J., The Gospel of John (Collegeville, Minn., 1998).Odeberg, H., The Fourth Gospel: Interpreted in its relation to contemporaneousreligious currents in Palestine and the Hellenistic-Oriental world (Uppsala,1929).

Schlatter, A., Der Evangelist Johannes: Wie er spricht, denkt und glaubt: EinKommentar (Stuttgart, 1930).

Schnackenburg, R., The Gospel according to St. John, 3 vols. (London, 1968/80/82).

Wellhausen, J., Das Evangelium Johannis (Berlin, 1908).Westcott, B. F., The Gospel according to St: John2 (1882 [1880]).

books and articles

Abbott, E. A., Johannine Vocabulary: A Comparison of the Words of the FourthGospel with Those of the Three (London, 1905).

Ackermann, J. S., ‘The Rabbinical Interpretation of Ps 82 and the Gospel ofJohn: John 10: 34 and the Prologue’, HTR 59 (1966), 186–91.

Alexander, P. S., ‘3 (Hebrew Apocalypse of ) Enoch’, OTPs i. 223–315.—— ‘Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament’, ZNW 74 (1983), 237–46.Ashton, J., ‘History and Theology in New Testament Studies’, in C. Rowlandand C. Tuckett (eds.), The Nature of New Testament Theology: Essays inHonour of Robert Morgan (Oxford, 2006), 1–17.

—— The Interpretation of John (London, 1986; 2nd edn. Edinburgh, 1997).—— ‘The Jews in John’, Studying John, 36–70.—— ‘Riddles and Mysteries: The Way, the Truth, and the Life’, in R. T.Fortna and T. Thatcher (eds.), Jesus in Johannine Tradition, 333–42.

—— ‘The Shepherd’, Studying John, 114–40.—— Studying John: Approaches to the Fourth Gospel (Oxford, 1994).—— ‘The Transformation of Wisdom’, Studying John, 5–35.—— ‘TheWoman at theWell’, in J. Barton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion toBiblical Interpretation (Cambridge, 1998), 259–74.

Attridge, H. W., ‘Thematic Development and Source Elaboration in John 7:1–36’, CBQ 42 (1980), 160–70.

Aune, D. E., ‘Dualism in the Fourth Gospel and the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in D. E.Aune et al. (eds.), Neotestamentica et Philonica: Studies in Honor of PederBorgen (Leiden, 2003), 281–303.

—— Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World(Michigan, 1983).

—— The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity (Leiden,1972).

Bammel, E., ‘ ‘‘John Did No Miracle’’: John 10: 41’, in C. F. D. Moule (ed.),Miracles: Cambridge Studies in their Philosophy and History (London, 1965),175–202.

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(Munster, 1970 [1960]).Thyen, H., ‘Aus der Literatur zum Johannesevangelium’, TRu 39 (1974), 1–69;222–52; 289–330; 42 (1977), 211–70; 43 (1978), 328–59; 44 (1979), 97–134.

—— ‘ ‘‘Das Heil kommt von den Juden’’ ’, in D. Luhrmann and G. Strecker(eds.), Kirche: Festschrift fur Gunther Bornkamm zum 75. Geburtstag (Tubin-gen, 1980), 163–84.

—— ‘Entwicklungen innerhalb der johanneischen Theologie und Kirche imSpiegel von Joh 21 und der Lieblingsjungertexte des Evangeliums’, in M. deJonge (ed.), L’Evangile de Jean, 259–99.

Tomson, P. J., ‘The Names Israel and Jew in Ancient Judaism and the NewTestament’, Bijdragen, tijdschrift voor filosofie en theologie, 47 (1986), 120–40,266–89.

Torrey, C. C., ‘ ‘‘When I am lifted up from the earth’’: John 12: 32’, JBL 51

(1932), 320–2.Tovey, D., Narrative Art and Act in the Fourth Gospel (Sheffield, 1997).Tromp, J., The Assumption of Moses: A Critical Edition with Commentary(Leiden, 1993).

Tuckett, C. (ed.), The Messianic Secret (London, 1983).Vana, L., ‘La Birkat ha-minim est-elle une priere contre les Judeo-chretiens?’,in N. Belayche and S. C. Mimoune (eds.), Les Communautes religieuses dansle monde Greco-Romain: Essai de definition (Turnhout, Belgium, 2003),201–41.

Van Belle, G., ‘The Meaning of ����EÆ in Jn 20,30–41’, ETL 74 (1998), 300–25.Van der Horst, P. W., ‘The Birkat ha-minim in Recent Research’, ExpT 105

(1993–4), 363–8.Vanderkam, J. C., Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (Washing-ton, DC, 1984).

Van der Woude, A. S., Die messianischen Vorstellungen der Gemeinde vonQumran (Assen, 1957).

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Van der Woude, A. S., ‘Melchisedek als himmlische Erlosergestalt in denneugefundenen eschatologischen Midrashim aus Qumran Hohle XI’, OTS14 (1965), 354–73.

Vanhoye, A., ‘Interrogation johannique et exegese de Cana ( Jn 2, 4)’, Bib 55(1974), 157–67.

—— ‘L’Œuvre du Christ, don du Pere ( Jn 5, 36 et 17, 4)’, RScR (1960),377–419.

Van Unnik, W. C., ‘The Purpose of St. John’s Gospel’, Studia Evangelica,1 [ ¼ Texte und Untersuchungen, 73 (Berlin, 1959), 382–411].

Vermes, G., Jesus the Jew (London, 1973).—— The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (London, 1987; 1st edn. 1961, 2ndedn. 1975).

Veyne, P., Les Grecs ont-ils cru a leurs mythes? (Paris, 1983).Visotzky, B. L., ‘Methodological Considerations in the Study of John’sInteraction with First Century Judaism’, in J. R.. Donahue (ed.), Life inAbundance, 91–107.

Von Rad, G., Wisdom in Israel (London, 1972).Vouga, F., Le Cadre historique et l’intention theologique de Jean (Paris, 1977).Wahlde, U. C. von, ‘The Johannine Jews: A Critical Survey’, NTS 28 (1982),33–60.

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Bibliography 553

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index of references

Bold print indicates that the passage in question is central to the argument.

Certain Christian writings such as The Ascension of Isaiah are included, as iscustomary, among the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.

john

Chapter 1Chs. 1–3 37–41Chs. 1–4 68 n. 17, 81 n. 48,368 n. 2

1 93

1–14 387

1–18 248 n. 24, 305, 363, 367–71,503–5

3 494

4 387, 388, 389, 4944–5 389

5 69, 372–3, 387, 388, 389, 397,504

6 213

6–7 155,6–8 500

7 187

10 397

10–11 387

11 97, 204, 44211–12 109, 39012 300 n. 4, 370, 390, 39712–13 388, 50813 370–114 299, 300 n. 4, 344, 360, 363,

370, 383, 387, 474, 47715 123 n. 54, 50016 187

17 80, 148 n. 17, 299, 369, 417, 44818 93, 299, 369, 370 n. 5

19 167, 500, 50819–27 168 n. 5619–49 155–8, 169–7019–50 148

19–51 186–9224 167

26 208

28 163

29 162, 370 n. 5, 461–2, 466, 50029–34 168 n. 5631 208

32 249

33 208, 21334 161–2, 370 n. 5, 50035–49 110

36 370 n. 5, 466, 50041 149, 158, 41243 155 n. 29, 159 n. 3445 208

46 149

49 249, 370 n. 550 474

51 121 n. 48, 242 n. 4, 244–51,252 n. 31, 276, 468 n. 18, 482

Chapter 2Chs. 2–12 116

1–11 170–7, 182, 188, 192–4, 4042 47 n. 224 183, 461, 462, 5176 68 n. 17, 75 n. 3211 370 n. 5, 474

12 47 n. 2213 68 n. 17, 75 n. 3213–22 106, 138, 168 n. 57, 19714 339

19 131, 51719–21 80, 46119–22 338–41, 34321 322 n. 2722 470, 52223 234 n. 523–5 277

Chapter 3Ch. 3 277–80, 341Chs. 3–4 371, 416Chs. 3–12 388

2 239

1–8 404

1–10 469 n. 201–15 511

1–21 199 n. 102 239

3 124

5 124, 154 n. 28, 5086 210 n. 34, 343, 5088 344, 442, 508, 51411 252

11–12 499

11–13 251, 25312 7, 417, 51112–13 251 n. 3012–15 461

13 242 n. 4, 244, 251–9, 271, 300,468 n. 18

14 242 n. 4, 243, 267–71, 461, 46814–15 251

15 127, 50916 268, 397, 44216–17 115, 22116–19 406, 52016–21 82, 127 n. 60, 507–10, 52017 265 n. 70, 39719–20 417

19–21 394 n. 1520 371

22 47 n. 2223 440

28 213

28–9 191

30 156

31 396

31–2 524

31–6 82, 140, 251 n. 30, 501–2,511, 519–13, 520

32 522

34 343–435 224 n. 70, 321 n. 7235–6 512

36 127, 401

Chapter 4Ch. 4 135, 148, 341, 5271–3 373

3 47 n. 22, 981–42 97, 199 n. 105–9 98

9 109, 168 n. 57, 20810 131, 33810–11 404

14 404

16 98 n. 719–26 99

20–4 75 n. 32, 68 n. 1720–6 98

22 97–923 79, 44825 148, 15831–4 131

34 52, 329, 497 n. 11,498, 517

35–8 168 n. 5737 417

39–42 199, 39042 370 n. 5, 39743 47 n. 2243–54 204

556 Index

44 234 n. 5, 50946 47 n. 22,46–54 44, 168 n. 57, 179 n. 79,182, 194

48 496, 49750 404

53 97

Chapter 5Ch. 5 27, 44, 106, 109, 132, 215,368 n. 2, 488, 504

Chs. 5–10 27, 95, 4111 44, 47 n. 22, 68 n. 17, 75 n. 322–9 169 n. 58, 235, 4129 82 n. 5010 68 n. 17, 8210–16 404

12–15 169 n. 5815 68 n. 1716 68 n. 17, 82 n. 51, 37316–18 199

17 448

17–18 81–5, 51417–30 84 n. 5518 44, 68 n. 17, 82 n. 50, 97, 41219 219 n. 5919–30 227–819–47 47, 11820 46, 192, 49721 405

22 225, 265 n. 70, 40622–4 406

23 68, 124 n. 56, 220 n. 62, 51927 118, 242 n. 4, 225, 259–66,

275

28–9 265 n. 70, 219 n. 5930 217 n. 52, 219 n. 59, 22830–37 119 n. 4231 117 n. 3731–40 116, 118–2033 191, 50036 46, 52, 119 n. 44, 220 n. 62,329 n. 40, 497, 520

36–9 500–137 220 n. 62, 300, 501 n. 1638 220 n. 6239 68, 112 n. 29, 340, 38639–40 47

43 87, 29045 68, 116 n. 3446 300, 41746–7 120

Chapter 6Ch. 6, 36, 44, 67, 68 n. 17, 106,137, 368 n. 2, 416 n, 55, 527

1 44–8, 105, 366 n. 12 44

4 48, 68 n. 17, 75 n. 324–7 44

13–14 80

14 157 n. 31, 370 n. 526 497

27 114 n. 33, 242 n. 4, 27128–9 46

29 127, 49730–4 112 n. 2931–58 47

35 125 n. 58, 129, 130, 40435–48 126 n. 6037 127, 16638 228

39 462

40 228

41 48, 67 n. 12, 125 n. 58, 41542 208, 27643 415

44 220 n. 6246 259 n. 5748 125 n. 58, 40451 125 n. 58, 404, 410 n. 48, 51751–8 466

52 48, 67 n. 12, 41653 242 n. 4, 27157 220 n. 6259 191

Index 557

60–6 113 n. 3161 415

61–3 461

62 242 n. 4, 244, 259, 271, 468n. 18

63 51, 34468 51, 129, 20569 148, 370 n. 5

Chapter 7Ch. 7 132, 148, 185, 215 n. 45,220–1, 233–9

Chs. 7–8 85 n. 57, 133Chs. 7–10 109

1 44, 68 n. 17, 81 n. 47, 138, 2142 46, 68 n. 17, 75 n. 322–13 138

3 82 n. 50, 524 115–16, 4176 175 n. 697 497

10 47 n. 22, 373, 41711 68 n. 1712 415

13 68 nn. 16&1714–19 214–515–24 118 n. 4016–18 219 n. 5917 112 n. 2918 470

19–20 81 n. 4719–24 82 n. 50, 214 n. 4421 497 n. 1122 68 n. 1722–4 121

23 210

25 81 n. 47, 214 n. 4425–31 148

26 323

27 207–1128 123 n. 54, 208, 219 n. 59, 243,

270–128–9 211

29 208

30 81 n. 47, 46131 183, 20532 81 n. 47, 116 n. 34, 376, 462,513

32–6 117 n. 3633–4 68 n. 1733–6 375–6, 425, 513–1734 366 n. 1, 462, 47035 68 n. 1737 80, 116 n. 36, 123 n. 54, 51937–8 376

37–9 345

37–44 376 n. 1137–52 202–638 123, 40439 444, 470, 52240–1 370 n. 541 166, 207–841–7 301

42 208

43 415

45 116 n. 3445–52 67 n. 14, 415, 51346 376

52 208

Chapter 8Ch. 8 27, 106, 132, 38812 125 n. 58, 127 n. 60, 129, 390,394, 397, 520

12–20 116–1813 237

13–19 119 n. 4213–20 501

14 119, 237, 51416 220 n. 6217 68 n. 1618 220 n. 62, 51719 124 n. 56, 442, 519–2020 81 n. 47, 191, 46121 133, 37921–2 426

558 Index

21–7 513–1721–30 116 n. 3622 68 nn. 16&17, 52223 210, 396, 397 n. 25, 417, 42624 86 n. 58, 125 n. 58, 51426 524

28 86 n. 58, 125 n. 58, 217 n. 52,242 n. 4, 243, 268, 270–1, 398,461, 468–9, 514

28–9 219 n. 59, 516–729 269, 470 n. 2430–40 505

31 85 n. 5731–59 85, 39832 507

33 68

35 417, 44137–44 79

39 6841 68, 82, 84 n. 5541–7 301

42 219 n. 5944 81 n. 47, 97, 41048 68 n. 17, 7352 68 n. 1755 301

56 2, 282, 300–156–9 271

57 68 n. 1758 125 n. 5858–9 85–91, 51459 373

Chapter 9Ch. 9 48–9,106, 113 n. 31, 148,504

1 373

1–7 412

1–41 116, 120–23–4 52

4 417, 4974–5 394–55 127 n. 607 520

14 412

16 416

18 68 n. 1722 31–3, 68 n. 16,17; 74, 144 n. 5,145 n. 7, 148, 196, 412

28 417, 25629 209

35 242 n. 435–9 266

35–41 121 n. 4838 370 n. 539 371, 397 n. 25, 417, 52039–41 114 n. 33, 36141 49, 395, 406, 417

Chapter 10Ch. 10 27, 1061 366 n. 1, 1051–2 417

1–7 114

1–18 36, 48–9, 106, 114 n. 33,118 n. 41, 140, 466 n. 14

4–5 417

5–11 466

6 49, 3217 125 n. 587–9 127 n. 60, 128 n. 62, 1299 125 n. 58, 32110 127, 397, 41711 125 n. 58, 127, n. 60, 461,465–6

12 417

14 125 n. 58, 127, n. 6015 52, 231, 46616 23, 129, 11417 466

18 224 n. 70, 321 n. 72, 46619 416

19–21 48

22 46, 47 n. 2222–4 52

24 68 n. 1724–5 323, 498

Index 559

24–30 121 n. 4725 87, 290, 49725–8 52

26 48, 402 n. 3626–7 114 n. 3328 462

30 219, 52431 68 n. 1732 55, 49733 68 n. 17, 497 n. 1134 68 n. 1634–6 91–4, 51436 220 n. 6237 497

37–8 55

38 219

38–9 374

39 81 n. 47, 13840 47 n. 2240–2 138

41 183, 18642 469

Chapter 11Ch. 11 36, 106, 137–40, 305,368 n. 2, 416 n. 55, 488

Chs.11–12 137 n. 28 68 n. 179 397 n. 259–10 417

11 323

12 405

14 323

17–45 68 n. 1719 251 n. 2625 125 n. 58, 40425–6 410

26 402 n. 3627 148, 157 n. 31, 332, 370 n. 5,492

40 177 n. 7441–2 229

42 220 n. 62; 230, 370 n. 5

47 116 n. 3450–2 466

51 462

54 47 n. 22, 52, 68 n. 1754–6 374

55 46, 68 n. 17, 75 n. 32, 37457 81 n. 47

Chapter 12Ch. 12 138–40, 416 n. 551 47 n. 221–8 461

1–50 137–407–8 299

12–14 47 n. 2213 370 n. 514–16 340–1, 34316 322, 47020–36 469

21 204

21–2 469 n. 2023 242 n. 4, 243, 469–70, 47223–5 461, 51724 299

24–5 417

24–6 270 n. 87, 466, 46925 397 n. 25, 400–127 230, 462, 464, 52727–8 229–30, 470, 475–627–36 299

28 472

29 251 n. 26469 n. 2030 464

31 392, 396, 397 n. 2532–3 463, 46932–4 267–7134 121 n. 48, 242 n. 4, 243, 276,469 n. 20, 470

35 373

35–6 417

36 191, 282, 374, 390, 51937 51

37–43 52, 299–301, 519

560 Index

38 471 n. 2541 2, 28241–3 140

42 114 n. 3342–3 113 n. 3144 123 n. 5444–5 124

44–50 517–21, 52345 217

46, 47 397

46–8 406, 52048 216 n. 51, 40749 220 n. 62, 52450 217 n. 52

Chapter 13Chs. 13–14 425 n. 18Chs. 13–16 132

Chs. 13–17 68 n. 17, 388, 414Chs. 13–20 116

1 397 n. 25, 461, 467 n. 172 462

3 224 n. 70, 426 n. 19, 321 n. 725–11 466

7 322, 34011 129

14 251 n. 2616 124, 21816–20 519 n. 4617 364

19 125 n. 5820 124, 218, 519–2029 139

30 374, 42231 242 n. 4, 243, 245 n. 17, 46131–2 471–232 471 n. 2933 68 n. 17, 132, 133, 377, 399,422, 423–7, 513, 515

33 433

34 432

34–5 377 n. 1234–6 433

36 133, 377, 42737–8 377 n. 12, 46638 462

Chapter 14Ch. 14 346, 399, 418–53, 455 n. 2485 n. 48

Chs. 14–16 27, 341Chs. 14–17 418

2 231, 467 n. 173 456n. 124–6 377–8, 3835 133

5–6 250

6 125 n. 58, 3947 124 n. 56, 5199 217, 285 n. 10, 519–2010 219

10–11 498

12 192, 203 n. 28, 49717 345, 39718 456 n. 12, 457 n. 2124 220 n. 6226 345

30 392, 396, 39931 16, 46, 105, 106, 137, 217 n. 52,465

Chapter 15Ch. 15 106, 433Chs. 15–16 140, 346, 433 n. 32,485 n. 48

Chs. 15–17 36, 137, 306, 388,399

1 125 n. 58, 211 n. 381–10 321

2 127 n. 60, 1295 23, 125 n. 585–6 417

12–17 433

13 466

18–19 399

19 210

Index 561

22 406

22–24 52

23 124 n. 56, 51924 497

25 417

26 345

26–7 502–3

Chapter 162 79, 1135 419 n. 45–25 425

7 362, 444, 467 n. 17, 4987–11 347 n. 297–15 441

8–11 455 n. 611 396, 397 n. 2512 323, 37812–15 441

12–33 323

13 219 n. 59, 318, 345, 378, 451,457 n. 24

13–14 345

13–15 346–7 322

14 322

16–19 419 n. 4, 462–416–23 438–920–1 417

21 396 n. 1922 237

25 321, 37825–30 321–328 425

Chapter 17Ch. 17 2, 140, 220 n. 62, 229, 472,485 n. 48

1 87, 4612 224 n. 70, 321 n. 722–3 166

3 148 n. 17, 211 n. 38, 220 n. 624 52, 119 n. 44, 329, 497 n. 11,472, 498

5 396, 4736 290, 3969 417

11 87, 210, 290, 467 n. 17, 47211–12 89

12 462

13 467 n. 17, 47215 417

16 210

18, 21, 23 220 n. 6224 363, 396, 455 n. 725 220 n. 62, 41726 87, 290

Chapter 18Chs.18–19 109, 4112 462

3 78 n. 45, 116 n. 34, 237, 374,462

4 462

5 208

6–8 374–57 208

8 462

9 462

11 462, 46412 68 n. 17, 78 n. 45, 23714 68 n. 17, 462, 46617 462

20 68 n. 17, 323, 41631 68 n. 1732 463

33 68 n. 1733–5 208

35 70

36 396, 397 n. 2537 346, 413, 50738, 59 68 n. 17

Chapter 191–3 464

3 68 n. 177 68 n. 17, 84 n. 36

562 Index

9 209

12 68 n. 1713 413

14 68 n. 1715 69

19 70, 80, 208, 68 n. 1721 68 n. 1722 413 n. 5324–37 463

26 462

28–30 463–430 347–831 68 n. 1736 80, 463, 46638 68 nn. 16&1740 68 n. 1742 68 n. 17, 75 n. 32

Chapter 201 438

1–10 480–21–23 478–99 339

10 482

11–18 482–417 259, 468 n. 18, 47719 68 n. 16, 48019–23 484–621–2 348

23–4 477

26 438

28 93, 149, 370 n. 529 192, 362–5, 41730 186

30–1 49–52, 496–731 127, 143, 170, 456 n. 10, 492

Chapter 21Ch. 21 14, 30–1, 42–4, 102, 136,306, 488

2 171

4–14 186

7 481

24 499

24–5 456 n. 10

old testament and apocrypha

Genesis1: 14 224

3: 19 273

5: 22–4 257 n. 5414: 18–20 93

15: 7–21 300

16 284–517: 22 246

18: 2 297 n. 3018–19: 1–11 284

19: 10 297 n. 3021: 2 495

21: 9–21 285

22: 2 223 n. 6624: 34 126

26: 3, 24 428 n, 2628: 12 245, 32828: 13 246

28: 15 428 n, 2628: 17 251

31: 3 428 n, 2331: 11–13 284–532: 24 297 n. 3032: 24–30 285

35: 13 246

40–41 317

40: 13, 19 269 n. 8249: 8–12 99

49: 33 434 n. 34

Exodus— 315

3: 1–12 285

3: 2–3 212

3: 2–4 296

3: 6–12 428

3: 10–15 443

3:12 428 n, 26

Index 563

3: 14 86, 904 285, 2967 317

7: 1 83 n. 537: 3 496

7: 19 171

8: 19 317

12: 12 289

12: 29 289 n. 1714–15 495

15: 3 89–9016: 4 130

16: 7–12 415

19: 1 171 n. 5919: 24 173 n. 6320: 21 160

23: 19 288

23: 20 88

23: 20–1 286–9123: 21 88–924: 1 88–9, 28924: 9–11 494 n. 824: 34 126

25: 8 441

29: 45 441

31: 12 288

33: 17–34: 9 299

Leviticus26: 11–12 441

Numbers— 315

12: 7–8 217

14: 27 415

14: 43 428

16: 28 (LXX) 23520: 16 287–8, 28921: 9 (LXX) 268, 46822: 21–39 284–524: 15–17 160

35: 30 118 n. 39

Deuteronomy— 315, 433–4, 447–91: 21 430 n. 283: 27 457 n. 223: 28 429

4: 2 315, 434 n. 334: 3, 9 496

4: 10 434 n. 334: 12 494 n. 8, 500 n. 164: 13, 36 434 n. 335: 22 434 n. 335: 31 434 n. 336: 25 434 n. 337: 18–19 496

8: 1 434 n. 3310: 2, 4 434 n. 3310: 21 496

11: 7 496

11: 8, 22 434 n. 3313: 1–6 207, 214, 23614: 1 82 n. 4915: 5 434 n. 3317: 6 118 n. 3917: 20 434 n. 3318: 15 151

18: 15–18 159–6018: 18 160 n. 35, 212–318: 18–20 284

18: 18–22 236

18: 20 207, 21319: 9 434 n. 3319: 15 118 n. 3926: 8 289

26: 15 441 n. 4827: 1 434 n. 3329: 2–4 496

29: 28 381

29: 29 315

30: 8 434 n. 3430: 11 434 n. 3330: 14 434 n. 3431–4 447

564 Index

31: 1–23 446

31: 1–8 430 n. 27, 43131: 3 295

31: 5 434 n. 3431: 6 428 n. 23, 430 n. 28, 455n. 3

31: 7 455 n. 331: 7–8 429–30, 431, 454 n. 231: 14–23 429, 43131: 16 456 n. 931: 23 428 n. 26, 431, 443,455 n. 3

31: 24 456 n. 1032 428

32: 8 94 n. 7732: 39 375 n. 932: 47 434 n. 3332: 48, 52 447

33 428

33: 8–11 160

Joshua1: 1–9 429, 4461: 6, 7 455 n. 31: 9 28 n. 26, 430 n. 28, 443, 455n. 3

1: 18 455 n. 33: 7 428 n. 267: 12 428

8: 1 430 n. 2810: 25 430 n. 2823: 14 424

Judges2: 1 288, 2895: 19–20 327 n. 366: 11–12 254, n. 426: 11–25 284

6: 12, 16 428 n. 2611: 34 223 n. 6613: 2 189

13: 2–22 284, 28513: 11 297 n. 30

1 Samuel1: 1 189

12: 20 428 n. 2325: 38–42 217

2 Samuel7: 4–16 207

7: 14 164

10: 1–5 217

13: 28 430, 434 n. 34, 443

1 Kings2: 1–9 423–4, 430,443, 446

2: 1 434 n. 348: 15–53 385

11: 38 428 n. 2617: 8–24 182

17: 17–24 174

19: 16 160

22: 19–23 212

1 Chronicles1 and 2 Chronicles 75, 336

21: 17 86

22: 6 434 n. 3422: 16 443

2 Chronicles19: 9 434 n. 3419: 11 443

24: 17 83 n. 5325: 7–8 428

30: 27 441 n. 4836: 15 441 n. 48

Ezra— 74

4: 2, 4 73

4: 12 , 17–22 72

4: 17–22 72

4: 23 72, 746: 21 73

Index 565

Nehemiah— 74

2: 17–19 72

3: 35 (Heb.) 72

Job1: 1 189

28: 11 380

28: 12–27 380, 382, 38328: 20, 23 381–228: 28 458 n. 2738: 7 94 n. 77

Psalms2 164 n. 272: 1–2 162

2: 7 164–521: 5 401 n. 3526: 1, 14 (LXX) 430

26: 8 441 n. 4841: 6, 12 (LXX) 427 n. 2142/43 422 n. 1042: 5 (LXX) 427 n. 2151: 12–13 444

77: 24 (LXX) 130

79/80 243 n. 1180: 16 (LXX) 143 n. 1182: 1–2, 6 92–494: 11 (LXX) 441 n. 48110 164 n. 47119 434

139: 11 389 n. 6

Proverbs— 325

1: 21 378

1: 28 376, 5153: 13, 19 378, 458 n. 274: 5, 7 458 n. 278: 1–21 379

8: 22–31 379–80, 3858: 30 503

8: 36 379

25: 1 321 n. 23

Qohelet5: 1 436

Song of Solomon— 176

Isaiah5: 1–7 177

6: 8 221 n. 646: 9–10 299

25: 8 403

26: 18 439 n. 4429: 11–12 316–1729: 14 458 n. 2735: 5–6 182

40–55 90, 212, 33541: 10 428 n. 2642: 1 161, 26242: 1–4 162

43: 2, 5 428 n. 2643: 9–13 499

43: 18 335–644: 7–11 499

45: 1 161

45: 7 389

46: 7 495

49: 3 244–552: 13 (LXX) 470 n. 2553: 1 (LXX) 471 n. 2553: 1–9 162

61: 1–3 160

62: 4–5 176

63: 9 287

66: 7 439 n. 44

Jeremiah1: 6 221 n. 641: 8 428 n. 261: 9 284

6: 26 223 n. 6623: 5–6 151

23: 18–22 212

23: 21 213

566 Index

30: 11 428 n. 2633: 15 151

42: 11 428 n. 26

Ezekiel1: 26 286

2: 3 221 n. 648: 2–3 286

9: 2 297 n. 3017: 2, 11 320

24: 3, 6 320

34 49

37: 26–7 441

44: 15 391 n. 10

Daniel— 164 n. 47, 309, 311, 328,392 n. 11, 275, 284 n. 9

1–6 317 n. 151: 17 317 n. 152 317–18, 3945: 2 317 n. 157 272, 318, 3287: 2 240 n. 17: 9 254

7: 13–14 243 n. 11, 240–1, (LXX)260–1, 265 n. 69, 282

7: 13 88

7: 14 165–68: 15 241 n. 2, 297 n. 308: 17 313

8: 26 313

9: 21 297 n. 309: 23 318

10: 4–9 286

10: 16, 18 241 n. 2, 297 n. 3010: 21 241 n. 2, 31811: 2 318

12: 1 439 n. 4412: 2 401 n. 3412: 4 313

12: 6–7 297 n. 3012: 9–10 313, 316, 320

Hosea1: 9 428

12: 4–5 283

Amos5: 20 389

8: 10 223 n. 669: 11 165

9: 13 176

Micah5: 1 (Heb.) 207–86: 4 221 n. 64

Habakkuk2: 2 312

Zephaniah1: 15 439 n. 44

Haggai1: 13 428 n. 262: 4–5 443–4

Zechariah2: 11 428 n. 264: 11–12 160

12: 10 223 n. 66

Malachi— 212–33: 16 72

3: 16–18 393

3: 18 159

Tobit12: 14–15 126, 254 n. 44,255

Wisdom of Solomon— 312, 384–6, 392 n. 113: 9, 4: 17 506

9: 4 504

Index 567

9: 10 221

9: 16 210 n. 35

Sirach3: 21–3 381

6: 17 379

15: 3 379

18: 4–5 381

20: 30 381

24 382–3, 38524: 1–33 503–446: 1–6 446 n. 6048: 9–10 159

48: 25 312

50: 25–6 99

Baruch— 312

3: 9–4: 4 382, 3853: 37 379

4: 31, 36 379

Prayer of Manasseh— 312

1 Maccabees— 71 n. 234:2 71 n. 2311: 45–51 71 n. 23

2 Maccabees1: 1–6 76 n. 14

new testament

Matthew— 391 n. 102: 2 166

2: 19 158 n. 323: 17 161

5: 5 401

5: 17, 24 448

8: 27 178

10: 17–20 347 n. 29

10: 24–5 124

10: 32 266 n. 7110: 33 409

10: 34 413–410 :35–6 415

10: 39 400

10: 40 124 n. 56, 216, 218, 519–2011: 3 157 n. 31, 18211: 25–7 229, 23012: 32 397 n. 2512: 46–50 174, 19316: 9 175 n. 6916: 25 400

18: 3 124 n. 5718: 818: 9 400

19: 24 400

20: 11 415

21: 23 207

23: 34 504

24 307

24: 27 264

24: 30 241 n. 325: 31–46 409

25: 31 241 n. 325: 4125: 4626: 7 139

26: 24 132

26: 64 241 n. 327: 29–31 464

27: 46 464

27: 50 463

28: 9 483

28: 15 69

28: 19 485

28: 29 431

Mark— 330–11:1 143 n. 21: 10 249

1: 24 84, 164 n. 47

568 Index

2: 1–12 82 n. 502: 19 176

2: 21 416

2: 22 176

2: 27 83

3: 4 83

3: 6 84, 1963: 11 84

3: 23–7 321

4: 10–12 323–44: 11–12 130, 320, 3214: 13 323

4: 40 175 n. 694: 41 178

5: 7 84

5: 23, 28, 34 405

6: 56 405

7: 14–17 321

8: 17 175 n. 698: 29 143 n. 2, 3328: 30 330

8: 31 267 n. 75, 2738: 35 400

8: 38 273, 4099: 2–3 475

9: 9–10 330

9: 11 159

9: 31 267 n. 759: 37 124 n. 56, 216, 5199: 43, 47 400

10: 6 455 n. 710: 15 124 n. 5710: 17 400

10: 22–3 400

10: 30 397 n. 2510: 33–4 267 n. 7510: 34, 37 273

10: 52 405

11: 1 139

11: 27–8 118

12: 1–11 222–412: 36–7 243

13 307

13: 8 439 n. 4413: 9–11 347 n. 2913: 19 439 n. 44, 455 n. 713: 22 183

13: 24 389, 439 n. 4413: 26 241

14: 3 139

14: 8 139

14: 9 140

14: 21 132, 42414: 36 230

14: 61–2 144

14: 62 243, 41315: 34 269, 46415: 37 463

15: 39 143 n. 216: 1–8 476

16: 5 481

16: 16 409

Luke1: 2 503

1: 3 350

1: 32, 35 165, 1661: 52 360 n. 642: 25 189

2: 48–50 174

4: 22 275

4: 23 322

5: 30 415

7: 20 182

9: 24 400

9: 26 409

9: 35 161

9: 48 124 n. 56, 216, 51910: 16 124 n. 56, 216, 519,520 n. 47

10: 21–2 229, 23011: 49 370, 50412: 8 266 n. 7112: 8–9 409

12: 11–12 347 n. 2913: 34 211

Index 569

16: 8 397 n. 2517: 33 400

18: 17 124 n. 5718: 24 400

19: 29 139

20: 34 397 n. 2521: 5–36 307

21: 12–15 347 n. 2923: 35 161

23: 46 463

24: 4 481

24: 12 480

24: 26 150

24: 36–49 485

24: 49 348

Acts— 524

1: 4 485

1: 21–2 503

2: 1–5 348

2: 3 147

2: 22–4 179 n. 792: 33 268

2: 36 331, 3333: 14 151

3: 22 154 n. 28, 1605: 31 268

5: 33–40 238

5: 36–7 144 n. 56: 13–14 80

6: 14 338

7 153

7: 17–44 151, 1609: 20 150

13: 6–11 146

13: 46 150

14: 11–12 145–617: 3 150

17: 22–31 146

18: 5, 28 150

19: 1–7 135, n. 6924: 15 403

Romans1: 4 331, 333, 401 n. 341: 17 401

2: 9 439 n. 448: 3–4 221

8: 15 229 n. 8010: 9 332

10: 9–11 409

12: 2 397 n. 2516: 25–6 311, 314, 316, 319

1 Corinthians1: 18–23 465

1: 20 397 n. 251: 23 467

2: 6 397 n. 252: 6–9 311

2: 8 397 n. 253: 18 397 n. 255: 7 466

15 333, 424 n. 1615: 3–5 483 n. 4515: 36–7 417

15: 45 344

2 Corinthians4: 4 397 n. 25

Galatians3: 19 456 n. 84: 1 226

4: 4–5 221

4: 6 222, 229 n. 80

Ephesians— 28

1: 21 397 n. 253: 4–5, 9 311

Philippians2: 8 269

2: 9 268

2: 9–11 331

570 Index

Colossians1: 26 311

1 Thessalonians4: 17 435–6

1 Timothy3: 16 483 n. 456: 14 397 n. 25

2 Timothy2: 12 409

4: 10 397 n. 25

Titus2: 12 397 n. 25

Hebrews— 2

1: 2 224

3–4 527

3: 5–6 226 n. 744: 5 441 n. 484: 8 296, n. 275: 7 527

8: 6 456 n. 8

1 Peter1: 10–12 316–17

1 John— 466

1: 1 361 n. 582: 28 409

3: 5 162

3: 16 466

4: 9 221

4: 17 397 n. 25

Revelation— 319

4: 1 256 n. 50, 27419: 7 176

21: 27 252 n. 3422: 16 127 n. 61

old testament pseudepigrapha and

other jewish writings

Apocalypse of Abraham— 90

8: 3 87

9–10 86–810: 6–14 290

11: 2 290

13: 10–1117: 11 290

17: 13 87

18 87

29: 18–1931: 1–2 162

Apocalypse of Moses— 254 n. 44, 255

ArtapanusMoses— 448

Ascension of Isaiah1: 3 396

2: 4 396

7: 10 326

9: 12–18 299

10: 29 396

2 Baruch— 261, 264, 318 n. 17, 448,508

29: 5 176

44: 259: 5 381

76: 3 449

77–9 450 n. 6581: 1–82: 1 428 n. 2384–5 450 n. 65

Index 571

1 Enoch— 62, 75, 90. 309, 328, 3391: 2 313

1: 3–9 407–81: 7–8 391 n. 105: 6–9 391 n. 105: 7–8 401

11: 1 391 n. 1014 257 n. 5427: 2–3 391 n. 1037–71 157 n. 31, 162, 248 n. 25,

261–3, 325–741: 8 391 n. 1042: 1–3 368–945: 6 391 n. 648: 6 391 n. 650: 2 391 n. 653: 2–758: 3 402

62: 9 263 n. 6371: 14 256 n. 5081: 7–9 391 n. 682: 4 391 n. 1084: 3 369

87: 2 297 n. 3087: 4 449

89: 73 75 n. 3290: 14 297 n. 3090: 37–8 163

92: 3–5 391

92–105 309, 391104: 11–13 316

105 164

108; 14–15 391

2 Enoch— 255 n. 55, 309, 311 n. 811: 34 [B] 314

13: 49–55 [A] 319

13: 71, 76 319

30: 14–15 390 n. 933: 5–7 450 n. 65

33: 9–10 313

35: 2–3 [A]35: 3 313

36: 1 450 n. 6538: 1 254 n. 4539 [ J] 254 n. 45, 258 n. 5540: 20 381

47: 1–3 [A] 314 n. 11, 450n. 65

54 450 n. 6566: 7 450 n. 6568: 2 254 n. 4571–3 254 n. 44, 255

3 Enoch— 311 n. 812: 5 86, 89, 29048D, 1 290

Ezekiel the TragedianExagoge— 256 n. 50, 448

4 Ezra— 151, 261, 292, 339, 347, 392 n.11, 448, 450

3: 14 300

3: 31 382

4: 3–4 318 n. 174: 11 381–24: 21 210 n. 355: 12 264

7: 28 164

7: 29 263

7: 80, 85, 101, 441 n. 4812: 31–2 263

12: 35–8 320

12: 37–8 313

13 248 n. 25, 263–414 450 n. 6514: 5–6 313

14: 45–7 313

572 Index

Joseph and Aseneth— 254 n. 44, 2558: 9 403–4

JosephusAntiquitates Judaicae3. 96 256 n. 503. 180 179

4. 302–6 447 n. 61, 4484. 315 429 n. 274. 326 256 n. 5011. 19–30 73

11. 22 72

11. 84–8 72–311. 173 71–211. 340–6 72–312. 48 71

12. 136 75 n. 3117. 42 76

17. 272–3, 278–9 144, n. 518. 14 403 n. 3818. 20 76

18. 85–7 144 n. 520. 97–9, 167–9 144 n. 5

De Bello Judaico2. 55, 57 144, n. 52. 163 403 n. 387. 26–36, 154 144 n. 5

Jubilees— 291, 309, 334 n. 301 447

1: 17 441

1: 20–5 444

7: 20, 38 434 n. 3417: 11 291

18: 10 291

18: 14 292

20: 2 432

21: 1 434 n. 3422: 23 428 n. 2330: 3–4 432

35: 1 434 n. 3436: 1 424

36: 3, 5, 17 434 n. 3445: 16 319, 450 n. 65

Letter of Aristeas— 36

216 83 n. 53

Memar Marqah— 201

Odes of Solomon— 195 n. 1, 526–715: 10 385, 40328: 6 403

28: 31 385., 40331: 7 403

33: 16–18 126 n. 5834: 4 327

38: 3 403

40: 5 403

40: 6 385

41: 1, 3 403

PhiloDe Specialibus Legibus1. 65 215

De Vita Mosis— 447 n. 61, 4481. 27 180 n. 841. 71 296 n. 281. 158–9 256 n. 50Quod Omnis Probus Liber sit75 76 n. 36

Prayer of Joseph— 246–8, 245 n. 16, 254

n. 44

Psalms of Solomon1: 8 75 n. 322: 2 75 n. 32

Index 573

3: 3–8 391

3: 12 401–215: 4–13 391

17 144 n. 517: 23–4 158

17: 32 177

Pseudo-PhiloLiber Antiquitatum Biblicarum12: 1 256 n. 5019 447–819–20 429 n. 27

The Samaritan Chronicle No.IIOn 1 Kings 17: 15 200 n. 13On 2 Kings 9: 36 200 n. 13

Samaritan Pentateuch— 201

Sibylline Oracles3. 213–15 75

3. 573–9, 702–4 75 n. 31

Testament of Abraham— 254 n. 44, 255 n. 45, 25811 391 n. 10

Testament of Job— 254 n. 44, 255

Testament of Joseph19: 8 163

Testament of Levi7: 2 99

Testament of Moses— 75, 428, 447–8, 450 n. 651: 1–2: 1, 10: 11–12: 13 454–91: 5 450 n. 641: 16–17 449

2:2–10: 10 456 n. 115: 1–6 75 n. 32

10: 11 449

11: 1 449

11: 10 451

11: 16 450–1

Testament of Solomon2: 9; 3: 5–6; 6: 1 396

Testaments of the TwelvePatriarchs

— 432, 445Reuben1: 1–5, 4: 5, 7: 1 434 n. 34Simeon4: 7 432 n. 307: 3, 8: 1 434 n. 34Levi10: 1; 13: 1; 19: 4434 n. 34

Judah— 432

13: 1 434 n. 34Issachar— 432

1: 8–12 428 n. 237: 6–7 432 n. 30Zebulon— 432

8: 5 432 n. 3010: 1 428 n. 2310: 2 434 n. 34Dan— 432

Naphtali1: 1–9; 7: 1 (Heb.) 434 n. 349: 1, 3 (Greek) 434 n. 34Gad4: 2, 6: 1 432 n. 30Asher5: 2 403

Joseph17: 2–3 432 n. 3019: 8 163

574 Index

christian writings

Acts of Pilate— 238 n. 15

Clement of AlexandriaStromata 5. 6. 34, 1 297

EpiphaniusAdversus Haereses30: 16 293 n. 24

Epistula Apostolorum— 333 n. 9

EusebiusHistoria Ecclesiastica1. 2. 15 379 n. 142. 1. 3–4 333 n.92. 15. 1–2 29 n. 602. 23. 8–10 152

4. 22. 7 76 n. 9

Gospel of Peter5: 7 413 n. 53

HippolytusRefutatio omnium haeresium5. 12: 6–13; 16: 4–16 268 n. 779. 28 77 n. 40

JeromeAdversus Iovinianum1: 26 171 n. 60

Commentary on Isaiah11: 12 191

Justin MartyrApologies1. 35: 6 413 n. 531. 60 268 n. 771. 63: 5 296

Dialogue with Trypho8. 4 208

56 295

59–60 296 n. 2875. 1 295–680. 4 77 n. 4081. 4 135

91. 94, 112 268

n. 77110: 1 208

112 268 n. 77

Letter of Barnabas— 2

12: 5–7 268 n. 7718: 1–2 390 n. 9

OrigenCommentary on John2. 31 246

10. 4 355–6, 490

Pseudo-ClementRecognitions33–71 152–440: 1 183 n. 93

Homilies3: 11, 21, 53; 11: 19, 26; 12:29; 13: 14 154 n. 28

Shepherd of Hermas— 2

Parables9. 14. 5 87 n. 63

Vision2. 1. 3 318 n. 173. 3. 1 318 n. 17

TatianDiatesseron18–22 45 n. 12

Index 575

TertullianDe praescriptione haereticorum28: 6 445

gnostic texts

Gospel of Thomas1: 1 333 n. 9Gospel of Truth38 87 n. 63Pistis Sophia— 333

Thunder, Perfect Mind— 128, 526Trimorphic Protennoia— 526

classical authors

IamblichusDe Vita Pythagorica liber— 26

PhilostratusVita Apollonii— 26

PolybiusHistories16. 39. 5 75 n. 11

TacitusAnnals1. 1. 3 354

Histories5. 9 144 n. 5

dead sea scrolls

1QS Community Rule— 167, 3112: 24 506

3: 13–4: 26 393 n. 44: 6 499

4: 17 392

4: 17–19 394

5: 2 391 n. 108: 11–12 313 n. 99: 10–11 160

10: 9–11: 2 402

n. 3711: 20–2 274 n. 95

1QSa Rule of the Congregation1: 2, 24; 2: 3 391

n. 10

1QH Thanksgiving Hymns— 311

3: 8–12 439 n. 447: 26–7 506

9: 24 312

10: 13 312

1QM War Scroll— 311, 40811: 7 160

13: 12 506

15–19 408 n. 46

1QpHab Habakkuk Pesher— 311

7: 1–5 312, 314

1Q22 1QWords of Moses— 447, 450, 456 n, 14

1Q27 Mysteries1: 5–7 31, 381, 391–2

4Q174 4QFlorilegium1: 6–7 338

1: 11–13 164–51: 19 162

576 Index

4Q175 Testimonia147 n. 11, 160

4Q181 Ages of Creation402 n. 37

4Q246 Aramaic Apocalypse— 165–6, 265 n. 69

4Q285 War Scroll— 159

4Q299–301 Mysteries— 381, 392

4Q400–407 Songs of the SabbathSacrifice

— 93, 441 n. 48401: 11. 3 94 n. 77

4Q415–19 Instruction— 311, 381

4Q420–1 Ways of Righteousness— 381

4Q452— 393 n. 14

4Q534 Elect of God— 162

11Q13 Melchisedek— 93–4

CD Damascus Document— 75

1: 11–13 312

2. 12 160

4. 2–3 391 n. 104. 16–18 75 n. 325. 6–7 75 n. 326. 1 160

13. 5–14. 2 99

rabbinic literature

MishnahBerakoth3: 3, 4: 1 403

28b –29a 31–3

Ta’anith3: 8 225

H˙agigah

2: 1 381

2: 7 77 n. 42

Sot˙ah

3: 4 77 n. 42

Sanhedrin11: 5 214

Shebu’oth7: 8 225–6

Aboth3: 19 82 n. 49

Yadayim4: 6–8 77 n. 42

MekiltaOn Exod. 12: 3 216

On Exod. 12: 12 289 n. 17On Exod. 14: 31 124 n. 56On Exod. 19: 11 300,501 n. 16

On Exod. 19: 20 256

On Exod. 23: 19 288

On Exod. 31: 12 288

Sifra111a on Lev. 26: 9 224 n. 72

Index 577

SifreNum. 103 on 12: 8 124 n. 56Num. 104 on 12: 9 217–8Num. 105 on 12: 10 225 n. 72Num 112 on 15: 11 215

Deut. 12 on 5:9 215

Deut. 312 on 32: 9 223

Babylonian TalmudH˙agigah

14a 264

Sanhedrin38a 264 n. 6838b 88–943a 214

Shebu’oth48b 225–6

Midrash RabbahGenesis Rabbah3: 8 390

28: 12 245–628: 13 246

Exodus Rabbah15: 30 on 12: 12 224

Leviticus Rabbah1: 1 on 1: 1 289

MidrashTanh˙uma

B Wa’era’ 11b. Section 7 81 n.53

B Besallah˙

290 Section 7 223

Targum NeofitiGen. 28: 13 246

Exod. 12: 42 163

Exod. 33: 14 441 n. 48

Targum OnqelosExod. 23: 21 288

Targum Pseudo-Jonathanon Gen. 28: 13 246 n. 19on Exod. 19: 24 173 n. 63

Fragmentary Targumof Genesis 246 n. 19of Exodus 164 n. 43of Job 94 n. 77

Passover Haggadah— 289

578 Index

index of modern authors

Abbott, E. A. 425 n. 18Ackermann, J. S. 92 n. 71Albrektson, B. 495 n. 10Alexander, P. S. 78 n. 64, 89,

290 nn. 20&22Ashton, J., 36 n. 84, 49 n. 27, 64 n. 7,

69 n. 18, 75 n. 30, 98 n. 7, 114,229 n. 81, 320 n. 19, 321 n. 24,368 nn. 2&3, 379, 383 n. 21,389 n. 7, 393 n. 14, 402 n. 37,466 n. 14, 494. n. 7, 503 n. 21

Attridge, H. W. 233 n. 1Auer, E. G. 480

Aune, D. 112 n. 25, 122, 393 n. 14,396 n. 22, 402 n. 37, 440, 441

Bammel, E. 81 n. 47, 116, 138 n. 6,186, 189

Barker, M. 90 n. 67, 247 n. 21,262 n. 62, 286 n. 11, 315 n. 13,494. n. 9

Barosse, T. 190

Barr, J. 229 n. 79, 308 n. 4, 491Barrett, C. K. 42, 64, 90, 161 n.

37,174, 259 n. 56, 413 n. 53,418 n.1, 439, 441 n. 48, 514 n. 39

Barthelemy, J. 260 n. 60Barton, J. 181 n. 90, 309 n. 7,

313 n. 10, 357, 407, 410Barton, J. M. T. 326

Bauckham, R. 20 n. 40, 24 n. 45,27, 28–31, 153 n. 25, 393 n. 14,394 n. 16

Bauer, W. 98

Baumgarten, A. I. 77, 78 n. 43Baur, F. C. 141

Becker, H. 126 n. 59, 420 n. 6Becker, J. 11, 45, 92, 98 n. 7, 101,

103, 135, 136, 140, 181, 233 nn.1&3, 280, 394 n. 15, 399, 420 n.6, 422 n. 10, 425 n. 18, 433 n. 31,436, 453 n. 68, 466 nn. 13&14,485 n. 46, 488 n. 52, 512,514 n. 40

Benton, J. 34, 42Berger, P. 392

Berger, K. 123 n. 53, 218 n. 57Bergmeier, R. 62 n. 4Bernard, J. H. 45 n. 12, 97, 171Bertram, G. 439 n. 44Beutler, J. 11 n. 20, 116 n.

35,117 n. 37, 422 n. 10,427 n. 21, 436 n. 37, 441 n. 48,446 n. 59, 466 n. 15

Bickerman, E. 200 n. 12Bieler, L. 179

Black, M. 262 n. 62Blank, J. 116 n. 35, 252 n. 32,

269 n. 83, 470 n. 22, 502Blenkinsopp, J. 447

Bloch, R. 174 n. 68Boehme, J. 324

Boismard, M.-E. 101, 103, 105,119 n. 43, 155 n. 29, 189, 191,234 n. 5, 235, 422 n. 10,425 n. 18, 437

Bonsirven, J. 413 n. 53Borgen, P. 47, 61, 63, 124, 216,

252 n. 34, 256–9, 282 n. 6,300 n. 4, 519

Boring, M. E. 122 n. 52Bornkamm, G. 446, 461

Bousset, W. 141 n. 1, 358, 388Bowker, J. 272–3Bowman, J. 198

Boyarin, D. 31–3, 69 n. 18, 70, 74,98–9, 113 n. 30

Boyle, N. 34

Bretschneidner, K. G. 112, 141Broshi, M. 76 n. 37Brown, R. E. 85, 101–2, 105, 106,

110–11, 113 n. 30, 131 n. 64,136, 137, 147, 171, 176–7, 185,187, 198–201, 204 n. 24,206 n. 30, 237, 251 n. 30,259 n. 56, 268 n. 76, 269 n. 82,281, 300 n. 2, 345, 420, 427 n. 21,442 n. 51, 445, 446, 472, 480, 520

Browning, R. 353, 490, 526Buchanan, G. W. 198

Buhner, J.-A. 63, 117 n. 36;124 n. 56, 117 n. 36, 124 n. 56,125–6, 217 n. 51, 219 n. 53,220 n. 60, 224 n. 71, 225–8,231 n. 84, 251 n. 30, 283–4,289 n. 17, 519 n. 44, 520 n. 48

Bultmann, R. 2–6, 9, 10, 15–17, 20,43, 44, 47, 48, 51, 52, 57–58, 62,69, 83 n. 53, 85–6, 95, 97–9,100–2, 105, 114, 116, 117, 118n. 40, 125 n. 58, 128, 146 n. 9,147, 148, 149, 155 n. 29, 173, 174,177 n. 72, 184, 189, 190, 191, 192,195, 197, 205 nn. 26&27, 206,208, 210, 211 n. 38, 219, 228,233 nn. 1&3, 234–8, 252 n. 32,257, 265 n. 70, 269, 270, 271–2,278, 279, 280, 282, 300 n. 2, 305,323, 332, 337 n. 18, 344, 346, 361,364–5, 367, 368, 376 n. 11, 379,387, 388, 389 n. 7, 390, 396, 397,408–9, 410, 416–7, 427 n. 21,433 nn. 31&32, 435–6, 439,440 n. 46, 445 n. 55, 464, 465,466, 470–1, 475–6, 477–8,

481 nn. 42&43, 482, 485 n. 47,489, 491, 492–3, 497–8, 499 n.14, 501–2, 505–6, 510–12, 514,518, 522–6, 528–9

Burge, G. M. 343 nn. 22Burney, C. F. 245

Caird, G. B. 471 n. 29Carter, W. 300 n. 4Casey, M. 260 n. 60, 262 n. 62Cave, T. 525 n. 55Cerfaux, L. 322 n. 27Ceriani, A. M. 456 n. 15Chadwick, H. 195 n. 1Charles, R. H. 450 n. 64, 454,

455 nn. 3&7, 456 n. 15, 457 nn.19&21, 458 n. 25

Charlesworth, J. H. 195 n. 1,327 n. 38

Chiesa, B. and Lockwood,W. 293 nn. 22&23

Chilton, B. 411 n. 49Cockburn, C. 354

Coggins, R. J. 73 n. 26Cohen, S. J. D. 77 n. 41Collingwood, R. H. 100

Collins, J. J. 6, 166 n. 51, 260 n. 61,263, 308–10, 402 n. 37

Conzelmann, H. 331 n. 4, 334Coppens, J. 242 n. 6Cortes, E. 420 n. 6, 434 n. 34, 445Cowley, A. 75 n. 33Coxon, P. 317 n. 15Cross, F. M. 165, 166 n. 51, 212 n. 40,

265 n. 69Cullmann, O. 198, 337 n. 15, 524–5Culpepper, R. A. 17 n 31, 18, 130

n. 64, 404 n. 40

Dahl, N. A. 69 n. 19, 147, 282,299–301, 501 n. 16

Dalman, G. H. 401 n. 34Davey, F. N. 350

580 Index

Davies, W. D. 204 n. 24Day, J. 290 n. 19Dekker, C. 233 n. 1Delling, G. 82 n. 49Derrett, J. D. M. 223

Dettwiler, A. 36 n. 84, 418 n. 2Dibelus, M. 4

Dodd. C. H. 4, 14, 15–17, 18, 25n. 48, 31, 36 n. 83, 42, 43, 45, 47,51, 60, 63–4, 83 n. 53, 85 n. 57,97, 103, 118 n. 40, 118 n. 40,119 n. 43, 148, 149, 162–3, 167,171 n 59, 190, 192, 221, 227,231 n. 84, 235, 243 nn. 10&11,247 n. 23, 322, 337 n. 15, 346,400–2, 410 n. 48, 427, 435–6,469, 476 n. 35, 478, 482, 487–8,506, 507, 508, 518–21

Donahue, J. R. 332 n. 5Dschulnigg, P. 35 n. 79Duke, P. D. 525 n. 55Dunn, J. D. G. 122, 230 n. 82, 255

n. 46, 354

Edwards, H. E. 45 n. 14Ebeling, G. 308

Eliot, T. S. 112 n. 25Emerton, J. A. 92–4, 327 n. 38Esler, P. J. 28, 67 n. 13

Faure, A. 35, 51, 104, 176 n. 71Fischer, G. 436 n. 37Fitzmyer, J. A. 93, 162, 165, 394 n. 16Ford, F. M. 352

Fortna, R. T. 20–2, 35, 42 n. 4, 101,104, 105, 149 n. 19, 155 n. 29,175 n. 70, 180, 186, 189, 191, 192,193–4, 233 n. 3, 234 n. 5

Fossum. J. 293 n. 25Freed, E. D. 242 n. 9Frey J. 21, 27 n. 55, 35, 42, 53, 79 n.

46, 97, 100 n. 1, 108 n. 20, 136,252, 336 n. 14, 388, 393 n. 14,

394–5, 398–9, 421, 438 n. 42,441 n. 48, 528 n. 58

Freyne, S. 25

Frye, E. 359 n. 52

Gadamer, H.-G. 336 n. 14Gaechter, P. 227, 231 n. 84Gamble, H. 102 n. 7Gammie, J. G. 327

Garcıa Martinez, F. 165 n. 48Genette, G. 12

Gibson, J. C. L. 273 n. 94Ginzberg, L. 161 n. 36Glasson, T. F. 213–5, 235Golb, N. 293 n. 25Goldin, J. 289 n. 17Goldstein, J. 76 n. 35Gourbillon, J. G. 270 n. 87Green, C. 359 n. 54Grossfeldt, B. 288

Gruenwald, I. 253 n. 37, 314 n. 12,334 n. 10

Guelich, R. 332 n. 7Guttgemans, H. 419 n. 5

Haacker, K. 62, 98–9, 123 n. 55Haenchen, R. 44, 53, 171 n. 61,

179 n, 79, 413 n. 53Hahn, F. 145 n. 7, 220 n. 61Haldimann, K. and Weder, H.

5 n. 8, 11Harnack, A von 161 n. 37, 413 n. 53Harner, P. B. 90

Harrington, D. J. 447 n. 63Harrelson, W. 383 n. 20Harris, J. R. 247, 282, 369Hartman, L. 90 n. 66, 408 n. 45Hartman, L. F. and Di Lella,

A. A. 260 n. 60Harvey, A. 82 n. 51, 117 n. 37,

411 n. 50, 412, 414, 500 n. 15Havekamp-Begemann, E. 360,

n. 55

Index 581

Hayman, P. 5 n. 9Heekerens, H.-P. 194

Hegel, G. W. F. 2, n. 2Heidegger, M. 142

Heitmuller, W. 388

Hengel, M. 25, 35, 100 n. 1, 166,177 n. 72, 222 n. 65, 223–4,332 n. 8, 358

Henley, W. E. 142

Hickling, C. J. A. 81 n. 48, 168 n. 57Hilgenfeld, A. 318 n. 17Hill, D. 122, 144 n. 5, 391 n. 10Hirsch, E. 141 n. 1, 235Hoegen-Rohls, C. 13, 421 n. 9Holladay, C. 180 n. 84Holtzmann, H. J. 388

Hooker, M. 272

Horbury, W. 248 n. 25Horsley, R A. 144 n. 5Hoskyns, E. 348–53, 365, 440–1Howard, W. F. 19 n. 37

Isaacs, M. E. 122 n. 52

James, M. R. 247

Jeremias, J. 42, 229, 230 n. 82, 231n. 84, 320 n. 20

Johnson, J. 359

Johnston, G. 122, n. 52Jones, F. S. 151 n, 25Jonge, M. de 7 n.14, 84 n. 55, 85

n. 57, 94 n. 77, 121 n. 48, 147n. 11, 148 nn. 16&17, 181 n. 89,205 n. 26, 403 n. 39, 432, 492n. 5, 528

Julicher A. 322

Kahler, M. 460

Kasemann, E. 4, 141, n. 1, 219 n. 58,307–8, 460–5, 473–6, 477, 526

Katz, S. 32

Keener, C. S. 42, 43, 46, 47, 51, 136Kermode, F. 423 n. 13

Kierkegaard, S. 362–5, 471Kirk, G. S. 35 n. 75Kittel, G. 491

Knibb, M. 163 n. 42, 308 n. 4, 326Koch, K. 308 n. 4Koester, H. 179 n. 79, 195Kreyenbuhl, J. 98 n. 5Kuhn, H.-W. 402 n. 37Kundsin, K. 428 n. 24Kysar, R. 22–4

Lacomara, A. 446 n. 59Lagrange, M.-J. 161 n. 37Lamarche, P. 144 n. 4, 494 n. 8Langbrandtner, W. 102, 185Laperrousaz, E.-M. 450 n. 64, 454,

455 nn. 2,3&7, 457 n. 15Le Deaut, R. 163 n. 43, 222 n. 65Lentzen-Deis, F. L. 246, n. 19Leon-Dufour, X. 222 n. 65, 337Leroy, H. 103, 130, 279 n. 5, 426, 507Lessing, G. E. 362–5Lidsbarsky, M. 3

Lienhardt, G. 90 n. 67Lightfoot, R. H. 161 n. 37, 413Lincoln, A. 46, 52Lindars, B. 42, 47, 85 n. 57, 101–2,

106 n. 11, 117 n. 36, 124 n. 57,128 n. 62, 136, 137–40, 163n. 42, 186, 233 nn. 1&2, 242 n. 6,259 n. 58, 300 n. 2, 337 n. 18,416 n. 55, 422 n. 12, 433, 450,452, 473, 481 n. 43, 489 n. 54,510 n. 32

Loader, W. R. G. 242 n. 5Lohfink, N. 443 n. 53Loisy, A. 161 n. 37, 171 n. 60, 413Lona, H. E. 85 n. 57Lowe, M. 66–7Luke, D. 34 n. 72

McCaffrey, J. 436 n. 37McDade, J. 250 n. 26

582 Index

Macdonald, J. 200 n. 13MacGregor, G. H. C. 270 n. 87McNamara, M. 269 n. 79MacRae, G. 126 n. 59Malatesta, E. 491 n. 1Mallarme, S. 357

Marshall. I. H. 220 n. 61Martin, P. 33 n. 70Martyn, J. L. 6, 24, 29, 31–3, 75 n. 32,

82 n. 50, 85 n. 57, 107–8,110–13, 114 n. 33, 117 n. 38,120 n. 45, 136, 149, 153–4,155 n. 29, 159 n. 34, 181–3, 190,192, 196, 198, 203, 214–5, 238n. 15, 242, 266, 274, 275, 327–8,335–8, 351, 358, 395, 451

Meeks, W. A. 31, 60–1, 64 n. 8, 84n. 56, 134, 157 n. 31, 166, 201,202 n. 20, 204–5, 210, 213–5,217, 235, 244, 250, 253 n. 39, 257,266, 278, 279, 281–2, 300 n. 4,398, 413 n. 53, 426, 446 n. 60,472, 511, 524, 528

Menken, M. J. J. 92 n. 70Michaelis,W. 245 n. 14Michel, H.-J. 428 n. 23Minear, P.S. 42

Mitchell. M. M. 28, 29 n. 60Mitchell, S. 146 n. 8Moloney, F. J. 243 n. 10, 252 n. 34,

255 n. 49, 268 n. 77Montgomery, J. A. 200 n. 12,

260 n. 60Moore, G. F. 61, 403 n. 38Morgan, R. 10 n. 16Moule, C. F. D. 230 n. 83Mowinckel, S. 145 n. 7, 158, 164Muller, U. B. 135 n. 69, 248 n. 25,

260 n. 60, 450 n. 65, 465 n. 10,471 n. 28

Munck, J. 420 n. 6Murray, R. 90, n. 67

Naveh, J. and Shaked, S. 290 n. 19Neufeld, V. H. 332 n. 6Newsom, C. 93, 94 n. 77, 441 n. 48Nickelsburg, G. W. E. 75 n. 32,

163 n. 42, 402 n. 37Nicholson, G. C. 17 n. 32

O’Day, G. M. 491 n. 1, 525Odeberg, H. 83, 86, 89, 90, 247 n. 23,

253, 268 n. 76, 318, 499Olsson, B. 171 n. 59, 173, 199 n. 10Onuki, T. 336 n. 14, 528 n. 58Ottoson, M. 317 n. 14

Page, D. L. 35 n. 75Pamment, M. 243 n. 10Pancaro, S. 82 n. 50, 434 n. 33Pastor, L. 342 n. 21Patten, P. 320

Pelletier, A. 36 n. 82Pennington, A. 314 n. 11Perrin, N. 143 n. 2, 332 n. 5Petersen, E. 502 n. 18Petrement, S. 397 n. 23Pilgaard, A. 180 n. 84Ploger, O. 71 n. 23Porsch, F. 343 nn. 22Potterie, de la, I. 318, 320 n. 19,

340 n. 19, 346, 413 n. 53,418 n. 3, 506

Powell, M. A. 18 n. 34Preiss, Th. 216, 218Priest, J. 454, 455 n. 3, 457

nn. 15&19Proust, M. 352 n. 18Pummer, R. 62 n. 4Purvis, J.D. 198, 201 n. 16

Quispel, G. 86 n. 62

Rad, G. von 380, 428Raisanen, H. 320 n. 22, 324

Index 583

Ranke, L. von 354

Reim, G. 166 n. 53, 245 n. 14Rein, M. 120n. 26Reinhartz, A. 395

Reitzenstein R. 388

Rensberger, D. 134 n. 66, 277 n. 1,279 n. 5

Richardson J. 36 n. 81Rissi, M. 177 n. 72Rivkin, E. 77 n. 42Roberts, C. H. and Skeat, T. C.

46 n. 16.Robinson, J. A. T. 164, 189, 352–3,

396 n. 19Robinson, J. M. 176 n. 71, 185,

330 n. 1Ross, J. F. 212

Rowland, C. 7 n. 15, 245 n. 16,253 n. 37, 260 n. 61, 283–4, 286,308 n. 3, 381, 411 n. 49

Rubinkiewicz, R. 86 n. 62Ruckstuhl, E. 35 n. 79, 252 n. 33Rudolph, K. 397 n. 23Russell, D. G. 335 n. 13

Sanders, E. P. 78 n. 44, 337, 355Sandmel, S. 96 n. 79Sasse, H. 419 n. 4Saussure, F. de 12

Schalit, A. 454, 455 nn. 3&7,456 n. 10

Schelbert, G. 229 n. 80Schenke, L. 119 n. 42Schlatter, A. 71 n. 23, 119 n. 43,

215 n. 48, 256 n. 51Schlier, H. 83 n. 52Schnackenburg, R. 45, 90, 135 n. 69,

136, 147, 160 n. 37, 162, 164, 178,183 n. 93, 191, 231, 242, 243 n.12, 251 n. 30, 252 n. 32, 259 n.56, 278, 401 n. 34, 433 n. 31, 437,463, 469 n. 19

Schneider, J. 233 n. 1

Schnelle, U. 102, 528 n. 58Scholem, G. 253 n. 37Scholitissek, K. 11

Schottroff, L. 397 n. 23Schulz, S. 242 n. 9Schurer, E. 78 n. 44, 403 n. 38Schwartz, E. 19–20, 34, 53, 100,

185, 250Schweitzer, A. 24, 142, 355, 483 n. 45Schweizer, E. 126 n. 59, 127

n. 60, 221Segal, A. F. 62, 78, 88–9, 264 n. 68,

300

Segovia, F. F. 20 n, 39, 422 n. 10,453 n. 68

Serra, A. M. 173 n. 63Shaked, S. 290 n. 19Sidebottom, F. M. 252 n. 34Sim, D. C. 28

Simon, M. 151

Skarsaune, O. 296 n. 28Skehan, P. 160 n. 35Skinner, Q. 491 n. 1Slencza, R. 365 n. 65Smith, D. Moody 122 n. 52, 177 n.

72, 178–80Smith, J. Z. 26–7, 245 n. 16, 246–7Smith, M. 31, 76 n. 34, 177 n. 72,

179 n. 78, 247 n. 23, 307 n. 1Spitta, F. 120 n. 45, 157 n. 30,

161 n. 37, 189, 235, 419 n. 4,422 n. 10

Staley, J. L. 17 n. 33Stauffer E. 420, 428Stein, E. 355

Stevens, W. 355–6Stibbe, M. W. G. 12, 45, 47, 372 n. 6Stolz, F. 90, n. 67Stone, M. E. 76 n. 38, 263 n. 67,

300 n. 6, 309 n. 6, 381, 384Strack, H. L. and Billerbeck, P. 83

n. 53, 119 n. 43, 203 n. 27,210 n. 36, 403 n. 38

584 Index

Strauss, D. F. 19, 100, 141Strathmann, H. 499

Strecker, G. 153 n. 26Strotmann, A. 379 n. 13Strugnell, J. 93

Suggs, M. J. 230 n. 82Suter, D. W. 325–7Swedenborg, E. 324–5Sweet, J. P. M. 454, 457 n. 15

Talbert, C. H. 27 n. 54, 253–5Talmon, S. 72, 393Taylor, V. 320 n. 20, 324Templeton, D. A. 254 n. 40Theobald, M. 98 n. 7, 99 n. 10Thompson, J. M. 35, 50–1Thusing, W. 470 n. 22Thyen, H. 42, 64, 97, 136, 528 n. 58Tomson, P. J. 71 n. 23Torrey, C. C. 268–9Tovey, D. 18 n. 35, 19Toynbee, A. 24 n. 46Tromp, J. 454, 455 n. 3, 456 n. 11,

458 n. 26, 459 n. 1

Vana, L. 32

Van Belle, G. 51, 491 n. 1Van der Horst, P. W. 32 n. 68VanderKam, J. C. 257 n. 54Van der Woude, A. S. 93 n. 75, 94,

161 n. 36Vanhoye, A. 119 n. 44, 174, 329

n. 40, 497 n. 11Van Iersel, B. M. F. 220 n. 61,

222 n. 65Van Unnik, W. C. 164

Vermes, G. 93, 147 n. 11, 165 n. 48,182, 408 n. 46, 456 n, 14

Veyne, P. 490 n. 55Visotsky, B. L. 32 n. 66Vouga, F. 130 n. 64

Wahlde, U. C. von 65 n. 9, 67 n. 12,167 n. 55, 233 n. 1, 237 n. 13

Wartelle, A. 296 n. 29Wead, D. W. 337 n. 15Weimar, P. 240 n. 1, 260 n. 60Weizsacker, C. von 112

Wellhausen, J. 19, 34, 100, 120 n. 45,137, 175 n. 70, 190 n. 7

Wengst, K. 134, 162 n. 40Werner, M. 284 n. 9Westcott, B. F. 42, 427 n. 21Wetter, G. A. P. 141 n. 1, 178 n. 76Wevers, J. W. 287

Wilkens, W. 138

Willemse, J. 143 n. 3Williams, C. 86 n. 60, 90, 126 n. 59,

374 n. 9, 462Windisch, H. 161 n. 37, 251, 422,

442, 445 n. 54Wittgenstein L. 351

Wittkower R. 342, 354Wolfson, H. A. 293–4Woll, D. B. 422 n. 10, 453 n. 68Wrede, W. 10, 112, 144 n. 6, 320–2,

324, 330–5, 475

Ziesler, J. 221 n. 64Zimmermann, J. 162, 165 n. 48,

166 n. 51Zumstein, J. 418 n. 2

Index 585