The Courageous Gospel. Robert Allan Hill

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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.

      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?

      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.

      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


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