For the past 25 years I have had a deeper interest in the four gospels than in my preceding years of adult engagement with faith, theology and spiritual life in Christ.
Among questions significant for me to explore has been the question of the relationship with John's Gospel to the Synoptic Gospels. (That is, to Matthew, Mark, and Luke which have their own differences from each other, but have much common material, and essentially present Jesus in a similar manner, as a wandering Galilean rabbi who is only engaged with Jerusalem at the end of his life.)
There are many differences between John and the Synoptics - so many that many scholars think John's Gospel was composed without knowledge of the other three gospels. My own estimation is that, actually, John did know at least one of the other gospels well, and is precisely different because he chooses to be different - different through theological/christological/pneumatological development of ideas and themes in the Synoptic Gospels so that a deeper meaning or (taking up an ancient word used to describe John's Gospel in distinction from the other gospels) or a spiritual meaning is presented in John's narration of the story of Jesus' life and teaching.
Some of this development is pretty obvious as we read through John's Gospel. For instance, within John 3 we encounter the last times the phrase "the kingdom of God" is used, henceforth to be replaced by the phrase "eternal life." In John 6 there is teaching on the meaning of the bread and wine of communion to an extent and to a depth found nowhere in the Synoptics. Throughout the whole Gospel, the meaning of the relationship between Jesus the Son and God the Father is a recurring theme, presented in a variety of ways, well beyond any talk in the Synoptics of Jesus as "the Son of God", God as "Father" or "Our Father", and Son in relationship to Father and vice versa. The whole of the Gospel of John, from the perspective of Father/Son is a development of a verse common to Matthew and Luke (Matthew 11:27/Luke 10:22).
Recently I thought of another shift. (I am not claiming to be the first to have thought of this shift - only claiming it is the first time I have thought of this particular shift.)
That shift is from Jesus talking in ways which categorise his disciples as "servants" (we could think, for instance, of passages such as Mark 10:33-37 // Matthew 18:1-5 // Luke 9:46-49; Matthew 25:14-30 // Luke 19:11-27) to "friends" (John 15: 13-15). This shift is reinforced by Jesus having special friends: Lazarus (John 11:3, 11) and "The Beloved Disciple" (John 13:23 etc).
This shift to talk of the disciples in more intimate human relationship terms than "servant" is at one with the themes in John's Gospel of the intimacy between God and Jesus (Father/Son) and the role of the Spirit as indwelling the disciples.
And, for me personally, I have been gently challenged: do I think of myself as a "friend" of Jesus (and vice versa) rather than as a "servant"?
24 comments:
The use of *friend* is very interesting. I sometimes worship with Quakers who often refer to each other as "friends" ("the Religious Society of Friends"), bringing to mind Jesus' language - or the Johannine community's language - and inviting a more radically intimate, egalitarian ethos. I'm not sure how many modern liberal Quakers are aware of these Gospel roots, but they are revolutionary, I think. Thanks for drawing our attention here, Peter.
I love the Gospel of John. It is intimate and spiritual and dialogical - all these potent encounters....with Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman etc - in a way that the other Gospels aren't quite. But how to understand its differences from the Synoptics? I struggle with this. It is so much later, so different in many ways. Above all, it shows a Jesus who clearly and openly preaches his full unity with the Father (the famous I am statements). We don't get anything near that in the Synoptics, where Jesus, to my and many centrist scholars' best reading, never claims to be divine.
Most centrist NT scholars do not seem to believe that the Gospel of John was actually written by John the beloved disciple. That seems unlikely for many reasons. So it seems it is the evolving testimony of a community perhaps linked originally to the disciple John, developing somewhat independently from other Christian communities, and finally codifying its distinctive oral tradition ("gospel") sixty years after Jesus' death. I am open to this tradition bearing the unique sensibility and thumbprints of John the disciple, but all we know of oral tradition and transmission would suggest it is very hard to treat this gospel as "historically accurate".
I am very open to hearing what others think. How do you reconcile the Synoptics with John on these issues? If Jesus went around openly teaching his oneness with God, why do Mark, Matthew, and Luke never bother to mention this most startling fact?
In light of the above difficulties with treating John as historically reliable, and in light of its resolutely *spiritual* character, it seems likely to me that that is what the Gospel of John is: the mature reflections of an early Christian community inspired (by the Spirit, who will come and teach everything, as John says) by their experiences of the Christ, and remembering, interpreting, and re-narrating the life of Jesus from this perspective.
Guess I'm saying a more descriptive title for John might be:
The Gospel of the Spirit of Christ as experienced by the Johannine Community
Richard Bauckham in 'Gospel of Glory. Major Themes in Johannine Theology' (2015, pp 64-69) has a special discussion of love and friendship in John's Gospel, pointing out how Jesus' love for his friend Lazarus actually brings him into mortal danger, laying down his life for his friends: 'Jesus already knows that he will bring Lazarus back to life, but he also knows that this act of love for his friend will lead to his own death' (p 66). The whole book is a perceptive collection of exegetical essays on the gospel as well as a concluding chapter on 'The Johannine Jesus and the Synoptic Jesus' which reduces the gap a bit when we grasp the deliberate incompleteness and selectivity of John, as well as its highly schematic character e.g. the 'book'of seven 'signs', the seven 'I am' sayings and the intertextuality with the OT. It is not for nothing that in the Orthodox Church the evangelist is known as St John the Theologian, for no other gospel reveals the mind of Christ more explicitly.
On the historical reliability of John, Craig Blombberg wrote an affirmative monograph some years ago which marshalls the arguments. One question concerns the cleansing of the temple (ch 2): has John dischronologised the tradition or were there in fact *two such events in Jesus's ministry? It ay e a minority view but I opt for two for a range of exegetical reasons in which John actually casts light on the Synoptics.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
It was common in the past generations to invoke anonymous "communities" as somehow being "behind" the Gospels, but Bauckham dismisses this idea as unfounded - and maybe a reflex of the old Formgeschichte which he believes he has overthrown (especially in his 'Jesus and the Eyewitnesses'). And this is fair because "communities" don't write books, individuals do.
Bauckham himself doesn't believe the apostle John wrote the Gospel but rather another dubbed 'the Beloved Disciple'. Others assert the traditional view that John is the Beloved Disciple. Who is the 'we' of ch 21?
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
"...when we grasp the deliberate incompleteness and selectivity of John...."
But Bauckham seems to reading John alongside the synoptics as if "John" had knowledge of them. We do. But "John" didn't, right?
It is hard for me to regard Bauckham's views as authoritative after seeing his eyewitness theory so thoroughly refuted by Bart Ehrman
https://youtu.be/dw1T5AEhk9E?si=tMmzqjd2FIc0bfTi
My understanding is that most centrist NT scholars - e g. Raymond Brown - hold to the idea of a Johannine community.
No, some dettails in John 3 presuppose knowledge of Mark (on the imprisonment of John the Baptist). See the relevant essay in Bauckham's 'The Gospel for All Christians'. The 'incompleteness and selectivity of John' means that John is aware of a bigger story of Jesus (see the last verse).
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Francis's latest encyclical, "Dilexit Nos" (He Loved Us), begins with gospel friendship, too:
“HE LOVED US”, Saint Paul says of Christ (cf. Rom 8:37), in order to make us realize that nothing can ever “separate us” from that love (Rom 8:39). Paul could say this with certainty because Jesus himself had told his disciples, “I have loved you” (Jn 15:9, 12). Even now, the Lord says to us, “I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15)."
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/20241024-enciclica-dilexit-nos.html
Thank you for comments above. There might be another blog post arising ... John's use of Mark ... etc!
I think there is a paradox in the (arguable) relationship between John and Mark (or John and the Synoptics). If he did know one or more of them (which would explain similarities between them) then why is he so different (omitting much Synoptic material, introducing his own material), and what do the differences say about the character of his gospel as a history of Jesus (he uses miracle/sign stories to present Jesus the theologian, notably the feeding of the 5000 and the bread of life discourse which follows)?
Lots more to say. May attempt that in a future post.
Peter, you might find Bauckham's book an interesting dialogue partner for the questions you ask. There is a shortish but tantalising chapter on the subject of John and the Synoptics.
David Wenham also wrote an article (or little monograph) on John some years ago, the gist of which (IIRC) was that John's 'I am' discourses are spelling out the implications of what is said much more indirectly in the Synoptics, e.g. through the parable of the lost sheep, or other sayings of Jesus.
Mark, I haven't listened yet to the Bauckham-Ehrman debate, so I don't have an opinion on that (as if that mattered!).
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Look forward to a future post, Peter. But for now, and this isn't a gotcha question (you and William have so much more knowledge in this area than I), how do you - and William, and anyone else - reconcile the differences between the Synoptics vs and John? How do you hold that in your head?
I use to read them as complementary, John fleshing out the Synoptics, but then I saw that that was probably quite naive.
Raymond Brown (The Community of the Beloved Disciple) believes that the Johannine community, with its high christology, developed rather separately to the other apostolic churches before being absorbed back into the church catholic. Historically, that helps explain the profound differences.
My own (intuitive, evidence-less) view is that this Gospel must have developed through mature, unhurried, spiritual discernment - indeed, through the work of the Spirit. Similarly, the confession of Jesus as the Christ, and the sense of the Christ as the Word, the Logos, the Life and Light of humanity, the second person of the Trinity, is not something we can "prove" or claim through history or historical text. Jesus' early disciples clearly didn't understand this, and perhaps, in a sense, the human Jesus didn't fully either (though I don't doubt he knew his full union with the Father).
David Moore, previous vicar at Saint Luke's, used to emphasize that after intense, transformative religious experience we need *time* to fully discern and integrate what's really happened. He would point to two accounts of Paul's conversion: the "Star Wars" version where he's converted and back out there evangelizing straight away, and the version where he heads off to Arabia for a while to fully work out just what's happened. It takes Paul three years to meet up with the church in Jersalem. Could the separateness of the Johannine community, and the big gap between Jesus' death and when the gospel appears, rather than be terribly problematic in terms of their "truth" (defined historically) actually be crucial in forming its depth, its spiritual truth?
I haven't read much of Brown's work so I can't comment (although I did hear him lecture once not long before his untimely death). I would, however, make these three brief observations:
1. Be wary of reifying an idea like "sectarian community" then reading it back into the text so that you see "evidence" for it everywhere: the very definition of "petitio principii". First prove that such a "community" actually existed. Bauckham prefers to look at second century testimony (Papias etc).
2. When you allow for differences in language, John's teaching on the Cross, salvation and indwelling work of the Holy Spirit is actually very close to Paul. John and Paul are the two great theologians of the NT.
3. High Christology doesn't mean "late", as liberal Protestantism claims. The incarnationist theology in Philiippians 2 is high, so too is the Christology in Hebrews, which is pre-70. What if the Fourth Gospel is a lot earlier than we traditionally think?
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Just a quick comment on the Ehrman-Bauckham 2016 discussions on Premier Radio that Mark linked to. I think Ehrman has rather underestimated the degree of practical bilingualism in 1st century 'Palestine', as well as literacy among Jews (reading at least, if not writing). I have finally begun reading Martin Hengel's 'Judaism and Hellenism'. It is not a new work (it appeared in English in 1974) but is a detailed study of 300 years of Hellenism in the land prior to the birth of Christ. Greek wasn't just known in the Jerusalem elite, but was the language of the Gentile city of Sepphoris near Nazareth (where a jobbing carpenter-builder might look for work) and the Decapolis on the east side of Lake Galilee, and Matt 4 says crowds from the Decapolis came to hear Jesus. What language did Jesus use to speak to the Syro-Phoenician woman - or to Pilate? I doubt it was Aramaic.
I'm only an auto-didact in Greek (koine and Attic), but I can tell that Mark is written in comparatively simple Greek (with Semitic style features, as if a Galilean fisherman was recounting his memories for the Greek-speaking churches in Rome) and so is the Fourth Gospel - certainly a lot easier than a first century Atticising work like Chariton's novel 'Callirhoe' or the exalted tone of Arrian's 'Anabasis' (life of Alexander). On Jesus' likely occasional use of Greek, see youtube lectures by Peter Williams, warden of Tyndale House Cambridge.
At least Ehrman agrees (I think!) with Bauckham than form criticism is dead. Now all that has to be exorcised is anonymous "communities" - along with scholarly inventions like Q.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Hengel's conclusion to the long chapter 2 of 'Judaism and Hellenism' (vol 1) on the Greek language, education and culture in first century Palestine: 'These circumstances make the differentiation between "Palestinian" and "Hellenistic" Judaism, which is one of the fundamental heuristic principles of NT scholarship ... no longer adequate. We have to count on the possibility that even in Jewish Palestine, individual groups grew up bilingual and thus stood on the boundary of two cultures. This problem arises not only with Jerusalem, but also with Galilee, which had for a long time had special links with the Phoenician cities; we can ask whether some of the immediate circles of Jesus' disciples were not themselves bilingual. At any rate, two of the twelve, Andrew and Philip had Greek names (Mark 3.18) , and Simon Cephas-Peter, Andrews's brother, later undertook extensive missionary journeys among the Jewish Diaspora of the West, which spoke only Greek.' (p. 105)
Ehrman doesn't seem to show any knowledge of this and works on the outdated Bultmannian "Hellenistic vs. Palestinian Jewish' model.I have given reasons for taking Hengel's conclusions further.
Pax et bonum (eirene kai agathon/shalom w'tov)
William Greenhalgh
Thanks for engaging, William. But I'm not so sure...
Ehrman's work is extremely up to date and he reads widely, inckudung anthropological and historical linguistic studies. He has written several textbooks on NT and early Christian literature. He is very evidence based and is saying that we don't have any evidence *currently* for Palestinian Jews with a knowledge of written Greek (or only one book). But anyway...
The point for me is that Christians who want to keep dralwing on the well of John's Gospel don't need to push against the currents of historical scholarship to do so. We don't have to insist that John etc is earlier than it reasonably is or *must* be written by eye witnesses etc. Speaking as a thoroughly middle-aged person now, I like the idea of a mature work that is the product of mature, steady discernment and offers perspectives different from the other apostles and churches.
Eirene kai agathon!
"...we don't have any evidence *currently* for Palestinian Jews with a knowledge of written Greek..."
Sorry, a bit hasty and ill-formed: the one example we seem to have of a Palestinian Jews iwriting a book in Greek in this period is a single aristocrat. So the idea of Gailean fishermen producung a work of written Greek such as sophisticated as Luke or John let alone simpler Mark is highly unlikely.
But I don't want to base my faith on these sorts of historical arguments. Or any argument really!
I appreciate the original post as well as William and Mark’s ongoing debate. I am reluctant to listen to the two theologians as I like the thought that the gospels go back to eye witnesses! But I enjoy reading these opinions.
But whatever the truth of any of the points of view, Jesus clearly made an unforgettable impact on those who saw him, which has somehow reached us as well. My faith rests, not only on the truth of Scripture but also on the experiences I have had of his hand on my life. These experiences have been in line with the expression of his life, death and resurrection as found in the gospels.
As Mark said, my faith does not rest on arguments, blessedly. So maybe I should listen!!!!
Mark, some false comparisons and historical errors there.
1. Ehrman is referring to Josephus, who wrote not only the 7-volume 'Jewish War', the 21-vol. 'Antiquities of the Jews', the 2-vol. 'Against Apion' and his autobiography. He wrote under imperial (Flavian) sponsorship and his works survive because they were copied and archived in libraries, again with imperial support. The Gospels are very short by comparison (single volumes you can fit on a single scroll). Actually there were numerous Jewish and Jewish-Gnostic 'gospels' written in Greek in the first two centuries and even some of the DSS are in Greek.
2. Remember that 99% of writings from the ancient world have disappeared irrevocably - not just the writings of nobodies with the money and leisure to write, but the VAST majority of the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, most of the history books of Livy, most of Pliny's 'Natural History' (for which my Latin teacher said she was eternally thankful), and even Cicero's 'Hortensius' which was so instrumental in Augustine's conversion. ALL the works of Aristotle would have been lost, had not a disciple stored them in a cave (imagine that: no Aristotle would have meant no Averroes, no Maimonides, no Thomas Aquinas). Ehrman's claim fails here as well. Only the TINIEST fraction of first century writings survived the first century through copying - there are almost no MSS from the first century AD. That is why (among other reasons) the Qumran discoveries are so significant.
3. If you think Christian faith doesn't need historical evidence, you are pushing against the explicit words of John's Gospel and arguing, you are arguing for Disney wish fulfilment ('when you wish upon a star') and not New Testament faith. I am reminded of those zealous partisans of the Boxer Rebellion who passionately believed that their 'faith' made them bulletproof.
4. You cannot invoke 'the Spirit' absent the witness of real human beings living in history. Ehrman the agnostic would say: "You are just projecting your own thought processes and calling them 'the Spirit'." This is exactly the critique of Ludwig Feuerbach against Christianity.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Good points, William. These are my initial responses, but I appreciate you writing amd will continue to ponder.
On 1 and 2: modern historical scholarship, presumably, understands this, and, on (2) at least, factors this into a more modest version of historical truth as probability. Maybe manuscripts will emerge that evidence more traditional Christian claims: that the Gospels were written by eye witnesses, or even the apostles themselves. That John's Gospel is the earliest. That the many historical disparities between them can be reconciled. But until then we can't fill in the blanks with traditional views *and* call it historical truth, and especially when current evidence suggests different probabilities. That sounds too much like wish fulfilment to me.
3: Does Christian faith "need" "historical evidence"? Whether it needs it or not, of course Christianity arises from a certain encounter with God acting within human history. But faith is an act of the whole person and particularly the inner core - our will and soul, our surrender to love. We can't be, it seems to me, compelled to faith/love/deep trust merely by a summation of historical facts, as if faith is a "case" to be made in a court of law. I think that's often the mistake of many, often Protestant apologists. A hangover of the Enlightenment view of "truth".
4. No, I don't want to invoke the Spirit in absence of humans at all, but as working within them! And there are limits to the secular historical method in regard to this. When I read historical accounts of John's Gospel, they can be helpful, informative. But they are very limited in representing its fullness.
Mark asks: "Does Christian faith "need" "historical evidence"?"
That is the same as asking, 'Did the Word become flesh and dwell among us?' What does John 21.14 invite us to do?
Once, when teaching a class on Buddhism, I commented, 'If Buddhism is true, it would be true regardless of whether Siddhartha had ever existed or not, because it's a series of truth-claims about the nature of the world and human beings.' (The only exception to this is Pure-Land or Amida Buddhism, which I think is probably shaped by Christian thinking - but I didn't bother them about that or the folk syncretism of most Buddhism.) OTOH, if Jesus hadn't existed, Christianity is certainly refuted.
On the much-maligned 'Enlightenment', a couple of comments.
1. The first 'Enlightenment' thinkers included many Christians who rightly protested against the fanaticism that devastated Europe in the Thirty Years War and the Wars of Religion in France. A call for reason in matters of religion was not unreasonable.
2. Later 'Enlightenment' thinkers (Toland, Hume, Kant, and in popular form Thomas Jefferson and his expurgated NT) took Newtonian mechanics in a way that Newton didn't and pictured a Deistic clockwork universe in which miracles didn't or couldn't happen. So Jesus and the New Testament were demythologised into unitarian moralism in which incarnation and miracles did not happen. This is not at all what Protestant apologetics taught: they did not share the Enlightenment view of "truth".
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
In its fullness, in its Catholic-ness, Christian faith includes history and reason ("historical evidence"), but God strictly doesn't need anything much to happen, even less be proved, to communicate God's being and love to us. We are imprinted with Christ as the Life and Light inside and all around us.
Mark, God "communicated his being and love to us" PRECISELY through the Incarnation, not merely through (subjective) prophetic experiences. This is precisely the point of John 1.14 that you are missing: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." "Became flesh" means to assume an individual human nature and identity. "Among us" means in the client kingdom, then tetrachy, of Iudaea Romana c. 5 BC - AD 30. "We" means "John and his fellows". "Glory" means "the revelatory divine signs" of his miracles of love and power (John 2.11) and his supreme self-sacrifice on the Cross whereby the Father glorifies his Son (John 17.1-5). All of these refer to historical events and persons. This is not "the fullness of Christian faith", it is its essence. (The "fullness of Christian faith" is its consummation in the Beatific Vision.) To think otherwise is to slip into a kind of Gnosticism or docetism.
It is incoherent nonsense to assert that Christianity is true even if we doubt whether the things described in the Gospels really happened. Bart Ehrman at least understands that. To think and teach otherwise is to deal in counterfeit currency.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
I am with you William in my small and ill-informed way. That’s why I cling to the sense that memories of Jesus were vivid and passed on, along with the scattering of names throughout the four gospels. Jesus and those friends and followers are real people whom Jesus really interacted with and whose lives were changed because of that.
Maybe that takes faith too but God gives faith when we ask.
Otherwise we can end up like the theologians of about thirty years ago who voted on which sayings of Jesus were authentic and which were not. That seems to me arrogant in the extreme! Granted there are all sorts of difficulties in understanding the Scriptures but we don’t need to throw out historicity as well.
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