Is it more risky to assume broadly that a gospel reports events or that it constructs them?
Hizonim
Hugo Méndez concludes that the purported Johannine Community posited by scholars is little more than a posit. The more likely true conclusion is that the corpus of Johannine-attributed gospel and epistles are pseudepigraphic works from a single author with a distinct theological point of view who leveraged rhetoric and literary devices to construct a narrative about Jesus to proclaim his unique status as the Son of Man.
Paul Anderson disagrees. The evidence weighs in favor of the Johannine Community being a real, not hypothesized, community, argues Anderson. He suggests that the nuanced and complicated ideas, the incorporation of the Synoptic accounts, and the intimate language of Jesus’s father-son relation with God point to an historical origin of eyewitness testimony, a Beloved Disciple, and a community that developed its commitments.
Méndez responds that they do not disagree with each other in all details; rather, their presuppositions differ. They find agreement that the gospel was written from a unique theological point of view, leaning into extant Jewish themes of eternal life, intimate relationship with God, characterizing logos as a pre-existent and sometimes anthropomorphic, and writing with the intent to disseminate the gospel broadly. It’s with the nature of the text and not its content that Méndez and Anderson quarrel. Too many disparate connections and ideas to attribute to an isolated author, says Anderson; too much well-argued, agenda-driven rhetoric for it not to be the output of a single voice is Méndez’s counter.
The question of presupposition is crucial, shaping how a reader approaches the text. It prompts us to consider whether we view the text as a document rooted in material history or the history of symbols, ideas, personalities, politics, and proclamation.
Is it more risky to assume broadly that a gospel reports events or that it constructs them?
When it comes to interpreting the events of the past, Méndez advocates for a cautious approach:
As I see it, then, Prof. Anderson and I represent two very different ways of approaching these texts. Prof. Anderson approaches these texts as relatively transparent, direct, and trustworthy windows into history. I, on the other hand, view them in a more ambivalent light—as texts whose witness to history is indirect, limited, and problematic. The difference between our views is the difference between confidence and caution. I much prefer caution.
When reading for Thursday’s post on Deuteronomy, one of the commentary intros suggested that Deuteronomy requires each reader also to be an interpreter. I feel this pressure from the Gospel According to John. I am compelled to interpret. I cannot help but dialogue with the text as I read it. Most often, negatively. But this idea of at least some partial truth, on the one hand, and complete fabrication on the other, threatens to bludgeon the interpreter. This is a false choice that conflates truth with fact and assumes the value of an account is contingent on its veracity.
Did these events in the fourth gospel occur? Likely not, in a genuinely historical sense. On this, I’m with Méndez. As I am generally with the corpus of the Biblical literature, owing to my presupposition that of the many, many source documents that compose the library that is the Bible, each is written from a point of view with a rhetorical objective, and that objective is often to persuade rather than to report.
I want to qualify this general conclusion, for example, a court history enumerating the generations is up to something altogether different than the Wisdom literature, and the Priestly concerns with ritual are different than the Elohist and Jawist narratives of a people’s origin, so to categorize the Biblical literature as all being of the same general sort of thing is as mistaken as imposing univocality onto the text as all representing a single point of view in an unfolding and linear narrative that may be closer to a Christian apologetic view. Still, if we restrict my assessment just to the gospel accounts, then it surely is the case that these are proclamations, not documentaries.
To deny the historicity of the gospel account is a threat only if one’s worldview demands that the events are more factually correct than not, as a requisite for right belief and that right belief is a necessary condition to achieve the spiritual resurrection of eternal life that John’s Jesus teaches. Suppose the reader shares Anderson’s confident outlook, described by Méndez as a transparent window into history. In that case, the gospel will be defended in its central assertions and employed as a tool to cultivate heterodoxy and praxis. This is precisely how the gospel seems to be positioned, a sort of manual for early Christians within this sect that has Judea as its origin yet also certain Judeans, including Pharisees, as its rhetorical foil. But what if we were to suspend the belief of historical witness? Even for the sake of another few hundred words in this post, what attitude may we adopt concerning text?
With this shift in presupposition, we can shift the focus. If fabricated, or what I think is at least a more elegant, if not more helpful term, if constructed, why construct the text as it was? This question is infinitely more interesting to me than, “Did this happen?”
In other words, if this material is made up, why is it made up in the way it is?
When we ask this question about today’s assigned gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary, John 6.35, 41-51, the fourth gospel’s cup runneth over when it comes to drawing from the scriptures of Israel and intimate knowledge of cultic practice and the general topography of Jerusalem.
Consider these allusions:
“I am” statements from the “I am what I will be” name of God in Exodus 3.14, from where Jews derive our most hoy name for God, so holy it is not pronounced, YHWH (YHVH in the Hebrew: Yud Heh Vav Heh), often substituted LORD in call caps in English translations and spoken Adonai in Hebrew
The Bread of Life discourse also seeks to connect Jesus to Moses
“Who sent me” introduces the idea of Jesus as a messenger or agent, like the Ancient of Days sends the Son of Man. The Son of Man has the authority of the Ancient of Days. The general idea of a representative being fully authorized to speak with the name and power of the one represented is itself Talmudic. The Mishnah tractate Berakhot explains, “a person’s agent has legal status equivalent to one’s own.”
Jesus, a Son of Joseph, not of God, mimics both the Synoptic understanding, for example, Mark 6.2-6, but more broadly inherits a prophetic tradition of rejection by one’s community, like with Jeremiah and Isaiah
The universalist nature of salvation itself is the logical conclusion of a Jewish idea of God that, in the messianic age, all nations are turned toward the God of Israel; we see these same ideas espoused by the Sadducees, who in fact disagreed with the Pharisees, so both the Johannine account and the Sadducees own writing share similarities and each are in debate with the Pharisees
In just a few verses, heavy-handed references to the Torah are invoked, seemingly only to be recast in a vision of Judaism, or one type of the Judaisms available in the first century, but one that is re-oriented to Jesus.
Readers here, with this post, may ask, “What’s the payoff for this presuppositional re-orientation?” What would need to be given up to take this account as more likely true than the historical veracity view? Responding to the former allows us to view the fourth gospel, even with its high Christology, as a continuation of diverse thought within Judaism(s) rather than something set over and against it. To the latter, if one’s apologetic commitment is to the divine sonship of Jesus the Christ and his unique role in resurrection and salvation, then our analysis challenges the exclusivity of such a framework. Undoubtedly, such a view triggers downstream revision of one’s theological commitments, but theology is always, or at least ought to be, downstream from the text.
Now, we’re back to Méndez and Anderson. To approach the text confidently as a window into history is perhaps a more satisfying Christian apologetic view, and to be cautious, as Méndez advocates, and assume narrative construction, may rob readers of a certain “because the Bible tells me so” ethic. But from where I sit, the utility of sacred literature is not for its metaphysical realism or ontological commitments but for its unique ability to put modern readers in dialogue with our ancient past, to try and understand their historical setting, what mattered to them, how they made sense of their place in the world, and how we negotiate with those ancient values to construct some sort of meaning-making in our present.
John’s gospel is theologically, philosophically, and culturally fascinating in its treatment and collision with other Jewish and early Christian writing. Read confidently but not critically, John’s gospel is a treatise against Judaism, but read carefully, it’s a debate, disagreement, and theologically loaded document of diversity within a gray period of not-quite Judaism, not-quite Christianity. When treading such uncertain terrain, my inclination is toward caution rather than confidence.
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8 responses to “Interpreting John’s Gospel: Historical Realism vs. Narrative Construction”
Sarah Barnes
I always feel an immediate internal push back to saying early Christianity is just one run of the mill Jewish movement among many. For me, it begs the question: if this was all so Jewish and kosher and already part of the normal expectations, why did the Jews reject Jesus? But I feel like that question evokes a hundred more, did the Jews reject Jesus? How many Jews became the Jesus-movement and how many opposed? I feel like it creates as many problems as it solves. And I hear the fundamentalist Christian triumphantly using it to thumb their nose at Jews. Ha! It was all spelled out in the Hebrew Bible and it is the hardness of their hearts and their legalism, they had to be cut off so the gentiles could be grafted in! I have too much baggage to come at this with a level head (I wonder how many people can really be level headed about the most influential text and the movement it created. Who is truly outside of its grasp, theologian, critical scholar and the rest of us) To take a few steps away, does it make sense to point out all the ways the Sabbatean movement was evoking Jewish language and metaphor, that really Shabbetai was just relying on the innovations in kabbala that happened in the century before him without saying clearly and emphatically that this guy was a nut! He was dangerous and good thing he ultimately did not succeed in derailing Judaism! There are a lot of debates about Shabbatai Tzvi (and literally everything else!) preserved from his lifetime among major Rabbis. Some endorsing, some opposing his Messiahahip. There is no record of a debate among Jews about what to make of this Jesus character. I always feel an immediate internal push back to saying early Christianity is just one run of the mill Jewish movement among many. For me, it begs the question: if this was all so Jewish and kosher and already part of the normal expectations, why did the Jews reject Jesus? But I feel like that question evokes a hundred more, did the Jews reject Jesus? How many Jews became the Jesus-movement and how many opposed? I feel like it creates as many problems as it solves. And I hear the fundamentalist Christian triumphantly using it to thumb their nose at Jews. Ha! It was all spelled out in the Hebrew Bible and it is the hardness of their hearts and their legalism, they had to be cut off so the gentiles could be grafted in! I have too much baggage to come at this with a level head (I wonder how many people can really be level headed about the most influential text and the movement it created. Who is truly outside of its grasp, theologian, critical scholar and the rest of us)
To take a few steps away, does it make sense to point out all the ways the Sabbatean movement was evoking Jewish language and metaphor, that really Shabbetai was just relying on the innovations in kabbal that happened in the century before him? The guy was still a nut! He was dangerous and good thing he ultimately did not succeed in derailing Judaism! There are a lot of debates about Shabbatai Tzvi (and literally everything else!) preserved from his lifetime among major Rabbis, some endorsing, some opposing his messiahship. It was heated, and there were a lot of rifts. There is no record of a debate among Jews about what to make of this Jesus character. No argument against, all we have is the proclamation for. Isn’t that weird? Was he rejected out of hand? Was it laughable? Was the debate erased? No “this Rabbi says yes! This Rabbi says no.” Even with Bar Kokhba we know Akiva said yes and other Rabbis thought Akiva was an idiot. Which Rabbis went to bat for Jesus, if this is all so normative?
Ok, this is something you and I will have to continue talking about! I think this is all really interesting, and I think it’s really interesting to me because I value your friendship and perspective. I have noted your discomfort with describing the Jesus Movement as another Jewish sect. I don’t feel the same discomfort, and that may be because I don’t have experience interfacing directly with very many evangelicals or fundamentalists. I used to spar with them on TikTok, but then I just stopped stitching large Christian creators. It didn’t seem worth it to me and was only inviting pain and frustration, and I get plenty of that from my three boys! LOL So maybe it is because I do not have much lived experience with the evangelicals that I don’t feel the same discomfort that you do.
I think one distinction that could be useful here is to view the timeline: Historical Jesus would have been here through the 30s. Paul is writing in the 40s, Mark 70, and so on. The later you get, the more “Jesus, Jesus, he’s our guy! Yay-rah!” you get. Mark is pretty chill on it all. He has the messianic secret, and Mark’s gospel has the original shorter ending that leaves it up to the reader (or more like, hearer) to decide what sense to make of Jesus death. But then Matthew and Luke give us virgin birth and resurrection, and John goes full monty on Son of God, so maybe part of the thing here is to precisify just what we mean by “Jesus Movement.” Does this include only those who followed Jesus while living? Does the Jesus Movement include the gospel communities? I guess by raising this, I mean to say that this Jesus stuff gets more “Christian” over time. When we get to Luke Jesus is straight up “Yo! Slide me that yad and let me interpret all these texts that were written about me.” That late stuff is way different from Mark. So I think we should acknowledge the evolving thought over time. So that’s one line of thinking that I have. Maybe we say something like, Yes, historical Jesus is a first century Judean following cultic practices and ritual purity but rejects that Oral Law, and as the tradition about him gets further from the source, the less OG Jewish it becomes. I mean, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that later gospels get the more signs we have that their audience is less and less Jewish. Here’s another thought. You know I think John the Baptist is Qumran-adjacent. The Sadducees up there at Qumran are all in for ritual purity and hardcore against oral Torah. If JtB is Qumran adjacent, he may have the same commitment to ritual purity and same uneasines with oral law. How do the gospels talk about Jesus? Dude is into ritual purity (how many times is he said to be healing at the mikvah), and what does he fight with the Pharisees about? The Oral Law. Jesus accuses the Pharisees of going against God’s law by appeal to “your traditions and human precepts” or something like that. You know my theory is JtB was Jesus’s mentor and guide, so I see this as one possible explanation for where Jesus gets his ideas. JtB is executed. Jesus is executed. The Sadducees go down with the Temple. Who’s left? The Pharisees and a fractured Jesus Movement between Paul who’s already all over the Roman Empire and is happy to trade in anything distinctly Jewish in exchange for his eschatalogical view that all nations will turn toward the God of Israel, and the crew in Jerusalem, who is like y’all goyim better snip snip if you want to be a christ follower. The Sicarii/zealots ended up somewhere? Josephus describes them as the “fourth philosophy,” right? Were they still farting around? I just think by the middle of the 100s you have Jesus people who were taught the Pharisees have it wrong, but have lost any idea about why they actually think that. And the Pharisees, well, whatever they become, they’re around, and they seem to have their hands full adapting the cult for a more decentralized model, mostly interpreting and codifying law. Who the Jesus Movement was originally gets scattered, and Rome says, “Hey, hey, let’s institutionalize this Christian thing and get everyone doing it, except for those pesky Jews! Come to think of it, they killed Jesus! And hence, 2,000 years of antisemitsm” As to why there isn’t more from the rabbis about the Jesus crew, I don’t know. I have a huge edited volume on the Pharisees with 18 academic papers that I’ve been too intimidated to crack open, but maybe that’s my next long read.
Here’s the last thing I’ll say for now, we shouldn’t let the Evangelicals frame how we think about our own tradition. I’m sure the evangelicals will look to take a W wherever they can. A whole slew of ’em loved to tell me how, “Jesus knew your scripture better than your own people.” What a dumb thing to say. But Evangelicals only care about their own power, control, and perceived moral superiority. I don’t say that to downplay your actual lived experience and continued psychological baggage that is forever part of who you are! I think you are wonderful, and I am so sorry that part of your story has included this difficult past. But my point is that evangelicals won’t spend the time actually learning this stuff. They’ll react, they’ll proof text. They’ll be patronizing and disrespectful. And, ultimately, they’ll have to sit at the kids table when we’re having lox with Miriam, Aaron, and Moshe in the world to come.
Hey, thanks for being willing to help me work this out. I guess for me, the fact that Paul is so early and seems so wackadoodle – throwing away not just the oral law but saying the law of Moses leads to death, and his equating performance of mitzvot with justification through works righteousness – really that’s the stuff that makes me so queasy and it’s so so early! Paul also seems pretty “Jesus is the only guy and the stuff is about to go down!”, at least as much as the later Gospels, so I’m not sure how helpful maligning later Gospels is. Paul is a pretty nice scapegoat though. He never met Jesus after all, but I’m not sure if it is helpful to try precision cutting up what was almost certainly a very small movement in those first few decades into little distinct bits. Paul is the guy who defined Christianity first, before the Gospels and he became the largest author of the New Testament. And you don’t need the book of Romans explaining the pruning of the native olive branches if Jews were totally cool with this movement from the get go. You don’t have Paul going to the synagogues first but being rejected and forced to start his own congregations if he is just doing normal Jewish stuff.
I think as much can be gained from pointing to the tempering of the doomsday message of Christianity over time as the amplifying of Jesus’ numero uno status over time. These people were convinced that it was the end of the world and then that message had to be smoothed over as time goes on. Doomsday cults are not usually totally normal, totally in line with the theology of their contemporaries, except for this one end of the world part, right? Whatever Jesus taught never had time to get off the ground as a kosher normal Jewish movement (if it ever was) before Paul, and Paul was not doing normal kosher Judaism.
I keep coming back to the Mormons (sorry Mormons). These guys use imagery from all over the Bible while coming up with something that was heretical and clearly brand new! And they were also pretty obsessed with the end of the world. These are latter day saints after all. There was no question these guys were going to be excluded from normative Christianity from day one. The funny thing is that to explain the differences between Mormons and Christians to a, I don’t know, Buddhist, they probably wouldn’t even understand the differences.
Can I just be a little more transparent and expose my own conspiratorial thinking: academic movements rise up to make money. Right now Messianic Judaism and interest in downplaying the differences between Judaism and Christianity is in vogue. I went to the big-box store near me the other day and the majority of books in the spirituality and religion section were written by a Jesus Rabbi (with peyos!) Christians only recently started having Seders in their church basements. These are not even the Messianic Jews, I’m talking about evangelical Christians. The first time I ever heard about Hillel and Shammai was reading “Velvet Elvis” by Rob Bell. I’m sure many, many Christians also only heard of them recently, in the last 20 years or so. But Messianic Judaism is also growing by leaps and bounds. And I don’t think academia is above trends and above going after a cash cow. Scholars don’t have enough to go off of, there is not enough data to say much of anything about the early Jesus movement. Did the Pharisees keep existing after the second temple? That’s what everyone says but there is no conclusive proof that they did, there is no proof that the Rabbis had anything to do with the Pharisees, it is useful to say they did. We have no proof that John the Baptist had anything to do with Qumran, none. And even if he did, Qumran was batty! It was a weird cult in the middle of the desert and their writing and libraries would be of very little interest (because they are so obviously not a good representative of normative religious practice at the time) except they are all we have. Our data set is skewed. This whole endeavor is interesting, obviously, but this is not a hard science we are talking about here. There is so little that can be said for certain, but papers need to be written and peer reviewed, conferences need to be attended, grants need to be secured and because there isn’t any way to prove any of this definitively, we are left with really cerebral speculation. And the language and training is so technical and specialized, they must know what they’re talking about. And I’m fueling the system with my own insatiable curiosity about it all.
Now is that a long winded way of saying because I don’t like the outcome of the scholarship I’m going to hand wave it all away? Does that make me as bad as the fundamentalist?
My honest response to all of this is simply I don’t know. Maybe the entire project here is bankrupt and you’re exposing that. I mean seriously, maybe it’s time for me to leave it behind. The core of my view on this topic is that with varying degrees of detail and accuracy, the gospel accounts paint the portrait of their leader who was raised around the Temple, seemed to be pro-sacrificial system and pro-ritual purity, looks to have a viewpoint about the Law, seemed to engage in legal debates, and when writing about that leader, authors use almost exclusively imagery and (sometimes jumbled) quotes from Torah. Authors went to great lengths to place him in the line of David, to get him in Bethlehem, to position JtB like Elijah to stand up Jesus like messiah, to give him a Moses goes to Egypt story, and to give him a few key sermons that look to me like he’s placing a fence around Torah (“You’ve heard it said, but I say…”) I don’t think not much of a word of this can be trusted as factually correct. I just think the very core of the Jesus narrative is inseparable from the Scriptures of Israel and the cultic practices of the Temple. Is that because he really did those things? Don’t know. Is it because an oral tradition that described him doing those things was preserved, I don’t know. Is it because elite writers in Rome knew enough about Jewish tradition to plop Jesus in the middle of it to try and give him credibility? I don’t know. Was the Jesus Movement large? Don’t know. Did it draw the attention of any prominent Jewish religious leaders? Gamaliel gets a mention in the NT but otherwise the Temple leaders are only implicated in plotting against Jesus, which is ugly, but the way the Sadducees and Pharisees talked about each other was ugly, too. Like you, always more questions than answers. But where this all leaves me is that Judaism was central to the formation of the Jesus cult, and I’d rather address the Jewish bits with love, respect, and insider views rather than let Christians run wild with the text on the page.
I am wrestling my demons at you. I should probably keep my inside thoughts inside. Part of me wants to redeem Jesus, I still like the guy. I still measure other Rabbis by how similar they are to him. Part of me thinks the split between Judaism and Christianity is a tragedy. But I can’t redeem the New Testament, not even the Gospels. I want nothing to do with Paul. Both seem to be coming from a place of bitterness towards the Jews for rejecting their message. And that sort of thing as intagroup dialogue is damaging enough, but once that messaging is picked up by an entirely unrelated group, there is no way to undo the antisemitism. I wish someone would translate a Bible “Woe to you Catholics and Protestants! Hypocrites!”
My sister, our people’s influence is with them always, even when they aren’t paying attention to it.
Deut 6.5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
Lev 19.18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”
Mattew 22.36ff: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
You, my friend, are beloved. You, my friend, are b’teslem elochim. And so are they. Besides, if Jesus were ever to return, he’ll feel a lot more at home with us at the shul than at the megachurch. xx.
[…] I’ve done a lot of theoretical work in this post, but at the risk of overstating assumptions, allow me to say one more thing: We don’t know if the Johannine Community was a community or a single pseudepigraphic writer. This is what we discussed last week. […]
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