New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John Vol. 1. William Barclay
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‘He gave him to his mother’ (Luke 7:15). But in John the miracles are not so much deeds of compassion as deeds which demonstrate the glory of Christ. After the miracle at Cana of Galilee, John comments: ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory’ (2:11). The raising of Lazarus happens ‘for God’s glory’ (11:4). The blind man’s blindness existed to allow a demonstration of the glory of the works of God (John 9:3). To John, it was not that there was no love and compassion in the miracles; but in every one of them he saw the glory of the reality of God breaking into time and into human affairs.
(b) Often the miracles of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel are accompanied by a long discourse. The feeding of the 5,000 is followed by the long discourse on the bread of life (chapter 6); the healing of the blind man springs from the saying that Jesus is the light of the world (chapter 9); and the raising of Lazarus leads up to the saying that Jesus is the resurrection and the life (chapter 11). To John, the miracles were not simply single events in time; they were insights into what God is always doing and what Jesus always is; they were windows into the reality of God. Jesus did not merely once feed 5,000 people; that was an illustration that he is forever the real bread of life. Jesus did not merely once open the eyes of a blind man; he is forever the light of the world. Jesus did not merely once raise Lazarus from the dead; he is forever and for everyone the resurrection and the life. To John, a miracle was never an isolated act; it was always a window into the reality of what Jesus always was and always is and always did and always does.
It was with this in mind that the great scholar Clement of Alexandria (about AD 230) arrived at one of the most famous and true of all verdicts about the origin and aim of the Fourth Gospel. It was his view that the gospels containing the genealogies had been written first – that is, Luke and Matthew; that then Mark, at the request of many who had heard Peter preach, composed his gospel, which embodied the preaching material of Peter; and that then ‘last of all, John, perceiving that what had reference to the bodily things of Jesus’ ministry had been sufficiently related, and encouraged by his friends, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote a spiritual gospel’ (quoted in Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, 6:14). What Clement meant was that John was interested not so much in the mere facts as in the meaning of the facts, that it was not facts he was after but truth. John did not see the events of Jesus’ life simply as events in time; he saw them as windows looking into eternity, and he pressed towards the spiritual meaning of the events and the words of Jesus’ life in a way that the other three gospels did not attempt.
That is still one of the truest verdicts on the Fourth Gospel ever reached. John did write, not a historical, but a spiritual gospel.
So, first of all, John presented Jesus as the mind of God in a person come to earth, and as the one person who possesses reality instead of shadows and is able to lead men and women out of the shadows into the real world of which Plato and the great Greeks had dreamed. The Christianity which had once been clothed in Jewish categories had taken to itself the greatness of the thought of the Greeks.
The Rise of the Heresies
The second of the great facts confronting the Church when the Fourth Gospel was written was the rise of heresy. It was now about seventy years since Jesus had been crucified. By this time, the Church was an organization and an institution. Theologies and creeds were being thought out and stated; and inevitably the thoughts of some people went down mistaken ways, and heresies resulted. A heresy is seldom a complete untruth; it usually results when one facet of the truth is unduly emphasized. We can see at least two of the heresies which the writer of the Fourth Gospel sought to combat.
(a) There were certain Christians, especially Jewish Christians, who gave too high a place to John the Baptist. There was something about him which had an inevitable appeal to the Jews. He walked in the prophetic succession and talked with the prophetic voice. We know that in later times there was an accepted sect of John the Baptist within the orthodox Jewish faith. In Acts 19:1–7, we come upon a little group of twelve on the fringe of the Christian Church who had never got beyond the baptism of John.
Over and over again, the Fourth Gospel quietly, but definitely, relegates John to his proper place. Over and over again, John himself denies that he has ever claimed or possessed the highest place, and without qualification yields that place to Jesus. We have already seen that in the other gospels the ministry of Jesus did not begin until John the Baptist had been put into prison, but that in the Fourth Gospel their ministries overlap. The writer of the Fourth Gospel may well have used that arrangement to show John and Jesus in actual meeting and to show that John used these meetings to admit, and to urge others to admit, the supremacy of Jesus. It is carefully pointed out that John is not ‘that light’ (1:8). He is shown as quite definitely disclaiming all messianic aspirations (1:20ff., 3:28, 4:1, 10:41). It is not even permissible to think of him as the highest witness (5:36). There is no criticism at all of John the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel; but there is a rebuke to those who would give him a place which ought to belong to Jesus and to Jesus alone.
(b) A certain type of heresy which was very widely spread in the days when the Fourth Gospel was written is called by the general name of Gnosticism. Without some understanding of it, much of John’s greatness and much of his aim will be missed. The basic doctrine of Gnosticism was that matter is essentially evil and spirit is essentially good. The Gnostics went on to argue that on that basis God himself cannot touch matter and therefore did not create the world. What he did was to put out a series of emanations. Each of these emanations was further from him, until at last there was one so distant from him that it could touch matter. That emanation was the creator of the world.
By itself that idea is bad enough, but it was made worse by an addition. The Gnostics held that each emanation knew less and less about God, until there was a stage when the emanations were not only ignorant of God but actually hostile to him. So they finally came to the conclusion that the creator god was not only different from the real God, but was also quite ignorant of and actively hostile to him. Cerinthus, one of the leaders of the Gnostics, said that ‘the world was created, not by God, but by a certain power far separate from him, and far distant from that Power who is over the universe, and ignorant of the God who is over all’.
The Gnostics believed that God had nothing to do with the creating of the world. That is why John begins his gospel with the ringing statement: ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being’ (1:3). That is why John insists that ‘God so loved the world’ (3:16). In face of the Gnostics who so mistakenly spiritualized God into a being who could not possibly have anything to do with the world, John presented the Christian doctrine of the God who made the world and whose presence fills the world that he has made.
The beliefs of the Gnostics impinged on their ideas of Jesus.
(a) Some of the Gnostics held that Jesus was one of the emanations which had proceeded from God. They held that he was not in any real sense divine; that he was only a kind of demi-god who was more or less distant from the real God; that he was simply one of a chain of lesser beings between God and the world.
(b) Some of the Gnostics held that Jesus had no real body. A body is matter and God could not touch matter; therefore Jesus was a kind of phantom without real flesh and blood. They held, for instance, that when he stepped on the ground he left no footprint, for his body had neither weight nor substance. They could never have said: ‘The Word became flesh’ (John 1:14). St Augustine tells how he had read much in the work of the philosophers of his day; he had found much that was very like what was in the New Testament, but, he said: ‘ “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” I did not read there.’ That is why John in his First Letter insists that Jesus came in the flesh, and declares that anyone who denies that fact is moved by the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:3). This particular heresy is known as Docetism. Docetism comes from the Greek word dokein which means to seem; and the heresy is so called because it held that Jesus only seemed to be a man.
(c) Some Gnostics held a variation of that heresy. They held that Jesus was a man into whom the Spirit of God came at his baptism; that the Spirit remained with him throughout his life until the end; but since the Spirit of God could never suffer and die, it