I have enjoyed the discussion in the comments to the post below about John's Gospel, a discussion which has ranged over a number of questions concerning the history John tells and the theology expressed through that telling. Is John's theological history more theology than history?
I want to offer an observation or two here but am not specifically relating these observations to any observations in the comments below as I do not have time this week - much travelling about to take place - to fully engage in a fascinating conversation (and a respectful one too - thank you commenters).
Observation 1
John's Gospel, whatever we make of the cleansing of the temple (is John's "early" cleansing a shift in time or a second cleansing to the Synoptics' late cleansing?) or the day of Jesus' crucifixion (which differs by a day from the Synoptics' version) or any other anomaly we seeby comparing John with the Synoptics, is a historical account in at least this way: John's narrative outline is the Synoptics' outline in respect of the big events: baptism, miracles/signs and teaching/discourses, entry into Jerusalem at the end of his life, debate and dispute, a last supper with disciples, betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, burial and resurrection. That is, when John talks about the Word being made flesh (1:14), he is talking about the Word being made Jesus of Nazareth in the same way as the Synoptics. This man called Jesus and no other man called by any other name, and this man Jesus has things happen to him and is involved in events as all the gospels recount. John's Gospel is historical in the same way as the Synoptics regarding most of the significant events of Jesus' life. Whatever spiritual or heavenly insights we glean from John such as about Jesus as the apocalyptic revealer-agent of God, descended to us and ascending back to the Father (see end of John 1, John 3), with all the mystical overtones involved in such passages, everything in John's Gospel is about the man Jesus, just as the Synoptics are.
Observation 2
John's Gospel can be historical (per observation 1 above) without implication that the way it tells history satisfies expectations we may have for consistency. If the cleansing of the temple according to John is placed chronologically differently to the Synoptics, that is awkward to explain because it means there is an inconsistency between the Johannine and Synoptical histories of Jesus. We don't like inconsistencies between histories. But what if there is an explanation other than that "there must have been two cleansings, one told by John, one told by the Synoptics"? What if, in a different world and in a different time, that way of telling history, driven by wish to make a theological point or three, was accepted as "okay"? And, if that is so, it may undermine our regard for John as history and not exactly uplift the mana of John as theology. But is the "our" here as important as understanding the "he": John wrote the gospel not us!
That is enough for now. I am off on a roadie to Waitangi. Next week, see my report on events there. Might it be a theological history of what happened in a deeply historical place, over which there is much arguing as to the meaning and significance thereunto :).
3 comments:
(Very) many years ago as a student in Dunedin, I heard a speaker introduce his thoughts on John's Gospel and its differences to the Synoptics by contrasting what we would know of a person primarily from his words and acts in public compared to having privileged access to his actual consciousness and self-understanding (in other words, his mind). That germinal idea, the insider versus the public observer, has remained with me ever since, and has essentially been how I view John's relation to the Synoptics. Later I would read of Eusebius writing that John composed a "spiritual gospel", which I imagine is pretty much the same idea: think of biographies of Churchill based on newspapers and Hansard and those based on his own diaries.
It's also the case that John's Gospel is rendering explicit claims about Jesus (his origin, self-understanding, relation to the Father etc) which are more implicit in the Synoptics. Yes, they are stylistically and formally very different. But even into the Synoptics the "Johannine thunderbolt" flashes in Matthew 11, revealing for a moment the intimate filial consciousness of Christ. Simon Gathercole of Cambridge has written a very accessible book on 'The Pre-existent Son" focusing on, among other things, the 'I have come' statements in the Synoptics which point to pre-existence and divinity. Again, this strikes me as the Synoptics declaring in a reserved way what John declares in open daylight, the implicit made explicit. Or think of how in the Synoptics Jesus tells parables about a good shepherd but in John openly states, "I am the good shepherd." The third person parable becomes a first person declaration.
Of course the speech patterns in John are very different from the Synoptics. Do we conclude from this that John is fictionalising? Or do we consider rather that the Messiah may have spoken differently in private to individuals from how he spoke in public to crowds in Galilee? The other complication is that speech and authorial commentary are often hard to distinguish in John, the one flowing into the other without clear markers. But I have no doubt that John understood himself to be truly communicating the mind of the Messiah. Perhaps it is for this reason that St John is esteemed in the Orthodox Churches as the Theologian par excellence.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
The true humanity of Christ in John's Gospel was certainly upheld by the Church Fathers, by exegetes such as Theodore of Mopsuestia, the leader of the Antiochene school of interpretation. In particular, they noted against docetic interpreters, that John 4 depicted Jesus as being tired and thirsty, that he possessed real human emotions of love and sorrow toward Lazarus, and that the reality of his death was underlined in John 19.
I am not sure what it means to suggest that 'John wrote in a different world and time from ours'. Hellenistic history writing was already very developed by the first century, and writers understood about sources and the order of events. Although John is not to be compared with Josephus (John's scope is both much narrower and much deeper), he does a special interest in giving time notices and the sequence of events. John 2.20 locates this event in AD 27 or 28 (if Josephus is correct), which would be too early for the conventional dating of Jesus' death at the Passover of 30 (or 33).
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Dear William
There is a lot to talk about herein and I am time-short due to travelling and not yet learned ability to use my computer while driving ... or maybe my computer could drive wirelessly while I dictate my comments into for AI to post on my behalf :)
Whimsy aside, you and I disagree about how "history" works within John's Gospel, but not on John's Gospel dealing, in its distinctive way, with the historical Jesus. We also agree on this statement in your comment above:
"But I have no doubt that John understood himself to be truly communicating the mind of the Messiah. "
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