of others. My meditations on According to John are intended to be both theological musings and devotional helps. They were written as explorations of a way of life and its symbolic universe to open a window for the benefit of others.
I have always considered writing to be an activity that while carried out in private is done in dialogue with others. This is true both in the actual writing of the first drafts, when one’s interlocutors are in one’s imagination, and in the actual back and forth with those with whom one shares drafts in order to receive comments, criticisms or suggestions. The final draft of this book owes much to three friends who gave me most valuable feedback. Terence Martin, a long time colleague and friend from my years teaching at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, read the full text and gave me much support and advice at leisurely, lively lunches. Jean and Don Rhoads, long-standing friends since the time when Don and I were beginning our academic careers, read these pages with much care and offered most acute comments about their content. To these friends I owe a great debt of gratitude. As always, Henry Neufeld, my editor and publisher, distinguished himself by his enthusiasm for the project and his professional competence. As the one actually making the book available to the reading public, he has my most sincere admiration. The book is dedicated to “la Mutter,” my grandmother, a woman with an indomitable spirit, a generous heart and an intuitive desire to serve. She helped women give birth to countless babies in a forgotten countryside in Argentina. Her life was a testimony to the value of both the fleshly and the spiritual birth.
Introduction
From a strictly historical point of view, one of the details of the life of Jesus about which there is absolute agreement is that he was crucified by the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate. It is also quite certain that at the crucifixion Jesus’ disciples thought that their investment in Jesus had become a losing proposition. They decided, therefore, to return to the fishing business, as the last chapter of According to John reports. The announcements that Jesus was alive and had been seen by responsible disciples took them by surprise. This new fact was understood among early followers of the Jesus Movement in two quite different ways.
Those followers of Jesus who harbored apocalyptic expectations immediately understood that God had raised Jesus from the dead. This gave them a totally different understanding of what had been going on during the time they had spent with Jesus, as well as a new meaning to the crucifixion. Until then they thought they had witnessed an execution. Now they had to re-interpret its purpose. We do not know how they made sense at first of what they had experienced. There is a gap of about twenty years between the death of Jesus and the ministry of Paul, the first Christian whose writings we possess. He placed the crucifixion and the resurrection in a dramatic and unique apocalyptic cosmic horizon. According to him, Jesus’ death had been the triumph of God over the power of sin and death. It meant that human life, which since the sin of Adam had been in a world under evil powers, is no longer unavoidably under their dominion. On the one hand, the death of Jesus put an end to the stranglehold these powers had over all human beings. On the other hand, by the resurrection of Christ, God carried out a New Creation by the power of the Spirit. In other words, the world that resulted from the Fall of Adam had come to an end. The Risen Christ is the Second Adam and the first being of a new life in the Spirit. The cross and the resurrection are the pivot on which the ages turn. His death was the end of this present Evil Age, and his resurrection the inauguration of the Age of Messiah, which any day soon would culminate in the Age to Come. The apocalyptic doctrine of the two ages gave Paul the framework within which to understand what God had done at the cross and the resurrection.
Other Christians, those who did not share the apocalyptic mind set, understood that the fact that Jesus was now alive meant that he actually was a divine being who had not died on the cross. The Roman soldiers certainly crucified a body, but the divine being who had used that body during his earthly mission abandoned it once he no longer needed it. Thus, the incarnated divine being had not died on a cross. Jesus was not a human being at all. He was a divine being in a human body. His mission had been to actualize before human beings God’s love for God’s creatures and to communicate to them how to live a life that would become eternal in God’s very abode. Jesus’ presence among humans gave them a clear object on which to exercise faith and gain knowledge of God’s final intentions for them. The crucifixion had been the trampoline that launched his ascent back to the Father.
Eventually Christians came to understand the Christ event in terms that incorporated elements of both initial explanations. The dominant view insisted on the reality of the incarnation of a divine being and that Jesus had actually died on the cross. The view that Jesus had been an immortal divine being who only appeared to be human was then declared anathema. It became known as docetism, the first Christian heresy. Its explicit condemnation is found in the words of John the Elder: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus [in the flesh] is not of God” (1 John 4:2 – 3).
According to John had its origin within a Christian community that viewed Jesus as a divine manifestation of God. When Christianity made it a test of faith to affirm the reality of the incarnation into a human being who actually died and had been raised from the dead, the Johannine community joined the Christian mainstream. Unlike the Gospel of Thomas, for example, which contains only sayings of Jesus and overlooks his death, presenting him as a divine being who imparts esoteric wisdom, According to John contains a narrative of his trial and crucifixion and makes explicit reference to his resurrection (20:8). Moreover, the post-resurrection appearance to Thomas is an explicit anti-docetic argument that ties the Risen Christ to the body that died on the cross.
Still, in According to John’s account of his capture at the Garden of Gethsemane and his trial, Jesus is always in command of the situation. At the garden there is no agony, and Judas does not betray him with a kiss. Speaking of his imminent departure from this world, Jesus claims to have the power to put down his life and the power to take it up again (10:18). In the trial before Pilate the power of the Roman Empire is declared derivative (19:11). John the Baptist does not baptize him with the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (1:29 – 34). Throughout his ministry he can read what is in the minds of others without their speaking (2:24 – 25). This has caused scholars to see in this gospel a tacit or implicit docetism. That is, while the gospel in its final form is clearly anti-docetic, making the point that the Christ who appeared to the disciples after the crucifixion had the body with the marks of the nails and the spear that had pierced it at the cross, it does present a Jesus who is fully divine and may legitimately be worshipped (9:38). It would seem, therefore, that the gospel took initial shape in a community that understood the fact that Jesus was alive after his crucifixion in terms of his divine origin, quite apart from an apocalyptic framework. That picture of Jesus makes him not really human. Those elements of this picture, which eventually came to be identified as docetic, belong to the early stages in the development of the gospel, when the Johannine community was somewhat isolated from the rest of Christianity. By the time the gospel was integrated into the Christian mainstream and began to circulate together with the synoptics, it had been edited to emphasize the reality of his death.
Recognizing the diversity that characterized early Christianity is the key to an understanding of the origins and the purpose of According to John. Up until the middle of the twentieth century critical scholarship more or less took for granted that this gospel had been written in the second century by a Christian who wished to make Christianity understandable to a Hellenistic audience. With this in mind the author had left out the apocalyptic message of Jesus and transposed the message of Jesus into a Hellenistic key. According to this view, the gospel was the culmination of a straight line of theological development which began with the Synoptic gospels, was developed by Paul in his letters and reached its climax in According to John. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, made it clear that Judaism, and even the apocalyptic sectarian community at Qumran, was thoroughly Hellenized by Jesus’ time. The then popular distinctions between Hebraic and Hellenistic thought and between Palestinian and Diaspora Judaism were severely modified by the new evidence. The old model for understanding the oral traditions about Jesus, which classified them by determining whether they came from a Jewish-Palestinian-Aramaic speaking, a Jewish-Palestinian-Greek speaking, a Jewish-Greek-speaking-Diaspora, or a Gentile-Greek speaking environment, has been thoroughly rejected. Most scholars now agree