becomes a real personality (1:40–1, 6:8–9, 12:22); that we get a glimpse of the character of Philip (6:5–7, 14:8–9); that we hear the carping protest of Judas at the anointing at Bethany (12:4–5). And the strange thing is that these little extra touches are intensely revealing. John’s pictures of Thomas and Andrew and Philip are like little cameos or vignettes in which the character of each man is etched in a way we cannot forget.
Further, again and again John has little extra details which read like the memories of one who was there. The loaves which the young boy brought to Jesus were barley loaves (6:9); when Jesus came to the disciples as they crossed the lake in the storm, they had rowed between three and four miles (6:19); there were six stone water pots at Cana of Galilee (2:6); it is only John who tells of the four soldiers gambling for the seamless robe as Jesus dies (19:23); he knows the exact weight of the myrrh and aloes which were used to anoint the dead body of Jesus (19:39); and he remembers how the perfume of the ointment filled the house at the anointing at Bethany (12:3). Many of these things are such apparently unimportant details that they are inexplicable unless they are the memories of someone who was there.
However much John may differ from the other three gospels, that difference is to be explained not by ignorance but rather by the fact that he had more knowledge or better sources or a more vivid memory than the others.
Further evidence of the specialized information of the writer of the Fourth Gospel is his detailed knowledge of Palestine and of Jerusalem. He knows how long it took to build the Temple (2:20); that the Jews and the Samaritans had a permanent quarrel (4:9); the low Jewish view of women (4:9); and how the Jews regard the Sabbath (5:10, 7:21–3, 9:14). His knowledge of the geography of Palestine is intimate. He knows of two Bethanys, one of which is beyond Jordan (1:28, 12:1); he knows that Bethsaida was the home of some of the disciples (1:44, 12:21); that Cana is in Galilee (2:1, 4:46, 21:2); and that Sychar is near Shechem (4:5). He has what one might call a street-by-street knowledge of Jerusalem. He knows the sheepgate and the pool near it (5:2); the pool of Siloam (9:7); Solomon’s Porch (10:23); the brook Kidron (18:1); the pavement which is called Gabbatha (19:13); and Golgotha, which is like a skull (19:17). It must be remembered that Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 and that John did not write until around AD 100; and yet from his memory he knows Jerusalem like the back of his hand.
The Circumstances in which John Wrote
We have seen that there are very real differences between the Fourth Gospel and the other three gospels; and we have seen that, whatever the reason, it was not lack of knowledge on John’s part. We must now go on to ask, what was the aim with which John wrote? If we can discover this, we will discover why he selected and treated his facts as he did.
The Fourth Gospel was written in Ephesus around AD 100. By that time, two special features had emerged in the situation of the Christian Church. First, Christianity had gone out into the Gentile world. By that time, the Christian Church was no longer predominantly Jewish; it was in fact overwhelmingly Gentile. The vast majority of its members now came not from a Jewish but a Greek background. That being so, Christianity had to be restated. It was not that the truth of Christianity had changed; but the terms and the categories in which it found expression had to be changed.
Take but one instance. A Greek might take up the Gospel according to St Matthew and immediately on opening it would be confronted with a long genealogy. Genealogies were familiar enough to Jews, but quite unintelligible to Greeks. Moving on, the reader would be confronted with a Jesus who was the Son of David, a king of whom the Greeks had never heard, and the symbol of a racial and nationalist ambition which had no significance for the Greeks. The picture presented was of Jesus as the Messiah, a term of which Greeks had never heard. Must Greeks who wished to become Christians be compelled to reorganize their entire thinking into Jewish categories? Must they learn a good deal about Jewish history and Jewish apocalyptic literature (which told about the coming of the Messiah) before they could become Christians? As the biblical scholar E. J. Goodspeed phrased it: ‘Was there no way in which [they] might be introduced directly to the values of Christian salvation without being for ever routed, we might even say, detoured, through Judaism?’ Greeks were among the world’s greatest thinkers. Was it necessary for them to abandon all their own great intellectual heritage in order to think entirely in Jewish terms and categories of thought?
John faced that problem fairly and squarely. And he found one of the greatest solutions which ever entered the human mind. Later on, in the commentary, we shall deal much more fully with John’s great solution. At the moment, we touch on it briefly. The Greeks had two great conceptions.
(a) They had the conception of the Logos. In Greek, logos means two things – it means word and it means reason. Jews were entirely familiar with the all-powerful word of God. ‘God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light’ (Genesis 1:3). Greeks were entirely familiar with the thought of reason. They looked at this world; they saw a magnificent and dependable order. Night and day came with unfailing regularity; the year kept its seasons in unvarying course; the stars and the planets moved in their unaltering path; nature had her unvarying laws. What produced this order? Greeks answered unhesitatingly: the Logos, the mind of God, is responsible for the majestic order of the world. They went on: what is it that gives human beings power to think, to reason and to know? Again they answered unhesitatingly: the Logos, the mind of God, dwelling within an individual makes that person a thinking rational being.
John seized on this. It was in this way that he thought of Jesus. He said to the Greeks: ‘All your lives you have been fascinated by this great, guiding, controlling mind of God. The mind of God has come to earth in the man Jesus. Look at him and you see what the mind and thought of God are like.’ John had discovered a new category in which Greeks might think of Jesus, a category in which Jesus was presented as nothing less than God acting in human form.
(b) They had the conception of two worlds. The Greeks always conceived of two worlds. The one was the world in which we live. It was a wonderful world in its way but a world of shadows and copies and unrealities. The other was the real world, in which the great realities, of which our earthly things are only poor, pale copies, stand for ever. To the Greeks, the unseen world was the real one; the seen world was only shadowy unreality.
Plato systematized this way of thinking in his doctrine of forms or ideas. He held that in the unseen world there was the perfect pattern of everything, and the things of this world were shadowy copies of these eternal patterns. To put it simply, Plato held that somewhere there was a perfect pattern of a table of which all earthly tables are inadequate copies; somewhere there was the perfect pattern of the good and the beautiful of which all earthly goodness and earthly beauty are imperfect copies. And the great reality, the supreme idea, the pattern of all patterns and the form of all forms was God. The great problem was how to get into this world of reality, how to get out of our shadows into the eternal truths.
John declares that that is what Jesus enables us to do. He is reality come to earth. The Greek word for real in this sense is alēthinos; it is very closely connected with the word alēthēs, which means true, and alētheia, which means the truth. The Authorized and Revised Standard Versions translate alēthinos as true; they would be far better to translate it as real. Jesus is the real light (1:9); Jesus is the real bread (6:32); Jesus is the real vine (15:1); to Jesus belongs the real judgment (8:16). Jesus alone has reality in our world of shadows and imperfections.
Something follows from that. Every action that Jesus did was, therefore, not only an act in time but a window which allows us to see into reality. That is what John means when he talks of Jesus’ miracles as signs signs (sēmeia). The wonderful works of Jesus were not simply wonderful; they were windows opening on to the reality which is God. This explains why John tells the miracle stories in a quite different way from the other three gospel writers. There are two differences.
(a) In the Fourth Gospel, we miss the note of compassion which is in the miracle stories of the others. In the others, Jesus is moved with compassion for the leper (Mark 1:41); his sympathy goes out to Jairus (Mark 5:22); he is sorry for the father of the epileptic boy (Mark 9:14); when he raises to life