The Courageous Gospel. Robert Allan Hill
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the divine name formula—I AM—recurs as a leitmotiv throughout the gospel. Over and over again, Jesus claims the name of God that was revealed to Moses at the burning bush. He uses it dozens of times in this text, for example in the walk on the sea and in his trial before Pilate. The evangelist clearly intends that the reader and believer understand that Jesus is divine, representative of the Father, one with the Father, revealer of the Father’s glory, himself truly God.
The development of this high Christology over time created serious social and political problems for the Johannine Christians. Like other Christian groups, the Johannine Christians were originally part of the local synagogue. They were Christian Jews, believing in Christ, but continuing to worship as Jews. Somewhere toward the end of the first century, these Christians were kicked out of the synagogue altogether, and evidence from the Gospel text indicates that this expulsion occurred because the Johannine Christians’ Christology was so high that it became unacceptable to Jewish monotheism. Johannine Christians were persecuted and beaten by the Jewish leaders, and the fact that they were no longer counted religiously as Jews made them vulnerable to persecution by the Romans. The decision by the Jewish leaders to evict these Christians from the synagogue placed them in mortal danger, and it cut them off from all the social networks that had sustained their lives. They were politically, socially, emotionally, and theologically dislocated. Martyn has demonstrated that the whole Gospel can be read as a two-level drama.22 One level tells the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. On the other level one can discern the story of the Johannine community itself, struggling to make theological sense of their life cut off from the synagogue.
The Johannine community did not begin with such a high Christology, and it cost them quite a lot to retain it as they were expelled from the synagogue, so the question arises, how did this higher Christology develop? Bultmann proposed that the evangelist was a converted Gnostic.23 For decades scholars rejected this view, defending the orthodoxy of the Johannine text by distinguishing between the Gnostic and apocalyptic world views, asserting that since the Fourth Gospel contains at least some elements of apocalyptic eschatology, it would not have been compatible with Gnostic influences. Hill has shown that there was more variety in both Gnostic and apocalyptic literature than had previously been acknowledged, so that their world views overlapped and the possibility of Gnostic influences in the Fourth Gospel can be supported.24
Raymond Brown suggests that it was the incorporation of converted Samaritans into the Johannine community that pressed the group toward a higher Christology.25 Ashton rejects this view, arguing that Samaritan beliefs would not have militated in this direction. Ashton himself argues that Judaism was not monolithic in the first century, and that there were many existing Jewish motifs that were incorporated more or less organically into the Johannine faith, pressing it toward a higher Christology. As some were expelled from the synagogue for affirming the divinity of Christ, their commitment to this belief was strengthened.26
Another possible source of the higher Johannine Christology is the Paraclete. In the final discourses of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples that he cannot explain everything to them, but he promises that the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, will come later to teach the disciples all they need to know. Like all the early Christian communities, the Johannine Christians looked back on Jesus’ life through the lens of the Resurrection, reinterpreting the pre-Easter events in light of Easter Day. Claiming the authority of the Paraclete as the source of revelation, each member of the Johannine community was free to reinterpret Jesus’ life in light of the Resurrection in almost any way he or she chose. At least some Johannine Christians may have read the Resurrection a lot more broadly than others, resulting in a more divine understanding of Christ. They were probably encouraged to do this by the presence in the culture of Gnostic and Essene views as well as the various Jewish images that Ashton cites.
Johannine Anti-Semitism
The Fourth Gospel is well known for its negative portrayal of people the Evangelist refers to as “the Jews.” This enmity has been used by some Christians for centuries as an excuse for violent anti-Semitism, and it is today a source of great concern for students who want to feel free to love the soaring beauty of the Gospel but who must reject its anti-Semitic character. How can one make sense of this?
To understand the characterization of Jews in this Gospel, he first question one needs to answer is, Who are “the Jews”? Many people have asked why Jesus and the disciples, who were Jews themselves, would refer to “the Jews” as though they were the “other” group in this gospel. This term probably does not refer to all Jews, but primarily to the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders who took control of the synagogues in the chaotic period after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE.27 Under their leadership, this group began to enforce a uniformity of belief and practice that had not been emphasized so much in the decades around Jesus’ lifetime. This group of Jewish leaders made decisions that seriously affected the Christian community for whom the Gospel of John was written, including their eventual expulsion from the synagogue. Since the gospel writer was writing for a community that was trying to make sense of this period of stern religious enforcement, he retrojected the actions and attitudes of this group of Jewish leaders back into the story of Jesus’ life and his interactions with the Jewish leaders of his own day.
The decision by the Jewish leaders to evict the Johannine community from the synagogue placed them in mortal danger, and it cut them off from all the social networks that had sustained their lives. At the same time that this eviction solidified these Christians’ belief in the divinity of Christ, it made them angry and fearful of the Jewish leaders who had put them in this position.
One can see this fear and anger most frequently in the little asides that the gospel writer provides to guide his readers in interpreting his story. For example, in Chapter 20, which describes Jesus’ resurrection appearances, the gospel writer tells us that the disciples were hiding in a room that was locked “for fear of the Jews.” It is impossible to know if the first disciples were feeling this fearful on that first Easter Day, but it is certain that the Johannine Christians were hiding behind locked doors to protect themselves from the Jewish leaders who wanted to persecute them.
One can also see this negative attitude toward Jews in Jesus’ own conversations (as reported by this gospel writer). For example, in the eighth chapter, Jesus calls the Jews liars and sons of the devil. It is unlikely that Jesus himself had quite such an antagonistic relationship with Pharisees as this story describes,28 so this part of the gospel suggests instead the kind of interactions that the Johannine Christians were having with the Jewish authorities around 100 CE.
Finally, and most famously, the negative portrayal of the Jews appears in the Passion story. The Jewish leaders are painted as sinister and cowardly, wanting to kill Jesus, but conniving to get the Romans to do it for them; and the crowd chooses Barabbas to be saved rather than Jesus, shouting “Crucify him!” In this gospel, Pilate is portrayed as the one official who finds Jesus to be innocent, but who yields to pressure to crucify him nevertheless. It is impossible to know, two thousand years later, exactly what the role of the Jewish authorities or the Jewish populace was in the crucifixion of Jesus, but it is clear that this gospel writer portrays them in the worst possible light, because he wanted to use the gospel story to help his community make sense of their own lives, which were endangered and cut off from social support by the Jewish leaders.
This story was written to provide spiritual and emotional support for an early second century community that was under persecution. It is the responsibility of modern readers to keep those defensive messages from being turned in persecution against Jews today. This does not mean that one must reject the whole gospel, however. Having understood and rejected the text’s hateful messages about