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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 that According to John was not written by a disciple of Jesus on the basis of his participation in the story, or by a late author who sat down to write a gospel to attract Hellenists to Christ using oral traditions that circulated in a Gentile-Greek speaking environment.

It seems most likely that the writing now known as According to John took shape in a Christian community within Judaism that over time revised and added materials to its foundational document. What we have is an in-house document that served to give meaning to the significant experiences in the life of this community. The members of this community had belonged previously to Jewish groups in the periphery and did not belong to what eventually became mainstream Christianity. They developed their own way of understanding the significance of Jesus’ life and an internal vocabulary with which to express it. This accounts for its highly evocative but simple language. It echoes as it bounces off the walls.

The Christians who produced this gospel were an enclosed community distinct from the main currents of the early Christian movement. Their “jargon” resonated clearly among them. To read According to John requires being aware that, as Louis J. Martyn explained brilliantly some forty years ago, it contains simultaneously two stories. Obviously we are reading about the life of Jesus, but at the same time we are reading about the experience of a community of Christians with a singular history. It appears that most of its members had been thrown out of a synagogue and they are having heated debates both with members of the synagogue from which they had been expelled and with other Christians who do not share their view of Jesus. While telling the story of Jesus these Christians were also explaining to themselves the meaning of what was happening to them. In other words they told the story of Jesus to understand what they were experiencing. By telling the story of Jesus they were establishing the meaning of their lives. Thus, for example, the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus, where Jesus speaks in the first person singular, is suddenly interrupted by the words: “we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen; but you (plural) do not receive our testimony” (3:11). This is clearly a declaration being made by the Johannine community some decades after the death of Jesus.

As Raymond E. Brown has most effectively explained, the community apparently started with former disciples of John the Baptist and other Jews from the fringes together with Samaritans. Quite likely it also counted among its members relatives of Jesus, more specifically, his mother. Its geographical location is now impossible to determine. Probably it resided in a locality where Gentile God-fearers, that is Gentiles attracted to Judaism, were numerous, and some of them also joined the group.

As a community on the fringes it had tensions with both Jewish and Christian communities. The Jewish synagogue to which most of its members had been attached decided to expel them on account of their claims of divinity for Jesus. This claim was a direct challenge to Judaism’s only doctrine: God is one. Expulsion from the synagogue was a traumatic experience for these Johannine Christians. When push came to shove, some who had been attracted to Jesus, but who were anxious about retaining their social position, decided not to make their faith in Jesus public. They feared the social and economic consequences of expulsion from the synagogue (12:42 – 43) and became disciples “of the night” like Nicodemus (3:1; 7:50; 19:39), or “secret disciples” like Joseph of Arimathea (19:38).

The text now contains vitriolic arguments against the Jews who refused to believe that Jesus was the One Sent by the Father to reveal eternal life to humanity. The animosity between the Johannine and the Rabbinic communities created by the expulsion of the Christians from the synagogue produced strong charges against the Jews. In the meditations that follow I write “the Jews” with quotation marks to alert the reader that the reference is one made by a particular Christian community in the midst of a fierce struggle with Jews who toward the end of the first century had disowned them. “The Jews,” much to the confusion of these Christians, had refused to believe the claims of divinity which they were making for Jesus. This portrayal of the Jews does not fit the Jews who were the contemporaries of Jesus, or Jews in general. All historical reconstructions of the life of Jesus and of his death agree that he was put to death by the Romans. The evidence also indicates that Christians continued to worship at the temple and considered themselves good Jews after the crucifixion. Unlike the apostle Paul, who considered himself a Jew and was proud of it throughout his life, the Johannine Christians eventually broke their ties to Judaism and the law. Thus, while According to John presupposes thorough knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, it presents Jesus as one who is the superior alternative to the law and consigns the law to “the Jews.”

It appears, then, that According to John was an internal document in which the members of the Johannine community interpreted their own experiences as Jews in the light of what they knew about the life of Jesus according to the oral traditions available to them. As such, the gospel is a document which aims to build up the faith of the members of a community that understands its own history in light of the story of Jesus and has adapted the traditions about Jesus to make sense of their own experience. Like the other three gospels, the fourth gospel was written anonymously. All four gospels were given identifying titles when they were collected and published together early in the second century. The ancient manuscripts and modern critical editions of the text of the New Testament name the fourth gospel as According to John (KATA IOANNEN). By adopting this tradition I wish to indicate the artificiality of the title. I will refer to the one who describes or explains what took place as “the narrator.” As has been noted the gospel took shape over a period of about fifty years with several hands adding to and editing the story. There were, therefore, several anonymous narrators.

That the gospel functioned as an internal document of a sectarian community is evident also by the way it is written. The story of Jesus is not told so as to lead the reader step by step to an understanding of Jesus as the One Sent from heaven by the Father to bring life to humanity. Readers do not have to wait until the end of the story to receive the momentous disclosure of the significance of Jesus’ mission. Instead, it is presupposed that they already know how the story ends. From the very beginning readers must have a good grasp of the symbolic universe of the gospel. They must know the different levels of meaning in which the vocabulary works. Thy must know the echo chamber within which the gospel’s language resonates. This outstanding characteristic of According to John is clear evidence of its sociological positioning. The language is almost a dialect shared by the members of the sect.

This means that the connections between the stories which are found in both According to John and the Synoptic Gospels are not to be read as attempts on the part of this gospel to correct or improve the Synoptic accounts. The connection is to be seen at the level of the oral traditions that were developed along different trajectories in different Christian communities facing different circumstances. It also means that attempts to reconstruct a “historical Jesus” by harmonizing the accounts of the four gospels do not in fact reconstruct the life of Jesus with any historical accuracy. The harmonization of the gospel accounts only succeeds in creating a fifth narrative according to the predilection of people with theological views that are favored by members of a Christian community in the present.

The outline of the ministry of Jesus in the synoptic gospels was designed by According to Mark. It describes a rather short period spent in Galilee of the Gentiles during which Jesus distinguishes himself by his miracles and his controversies with Pharisees. During a trip to the north, at Caesarea Philippi close to the fountains of the Jordan River, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah, Mk. 8:29), and his confession causes Jesus to demand complete silence about his identity. When evil spirits that Jesus expelled from possessed people cried out that Jesus was the Son of God, Jesus also gave them strict orders to keep silent and not reveal his identity. Peter’s confession marks the turning point in Jesus’ ministry in the lands of the gentiles and brings about Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem. Upon arriving at the city, immediately he finds himself opposed by the Sadducees who control the temple and have influence with the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate. Five days after coming to Jerusalem, Jesus hangs from a cross on a small hill outside the city. According to Matthew and According to Luke add to this outline narratives of Jesus’ birth, of the resurrection and of post resurrection appearances which are peculiar to each of them (in the best manuscripts According to Mark ends in 16:8).

According to John was conceived in a different womb and differs notably from the synoptics: here Jesus’ ministry includes Jerusalem from the beginning, and his final stay in the city lasts six months, from the feast of Tabernacles (September/October) till Passover (April/May). In this gospel, rather than imposing silence on those publicly identifying him, Jesus insists that he must be identified correctly, not just as Son of God, but as God. These differences cannot be overlooked, and place the gospel in a category by itself, as the early Church Fathers already recognized.

It has been argued that According to John consists of two sections identified as: “The Book of Signs” and the “The Book of Glory.” Others have proposed that rather than dividing the text into sections one should identify the sources used for its composition. It has been posited, for example, that the author used a source which contained several miracles. This is supported by the numbering of the changing of water into wine (2:1 – 11) and the healing of the son of the imperial officer (4:46 – 54) as the first and the second signs. The ending of the gospel in 20:30 – 31, then, is taken to have been the ending of the Signs Source. What makes the numbering of the two signs evidence of an underlying source is that in the gospel text the cleansing of the temple appears in between them, making the healing of the Roman official’s son the third sign.

Besides the Signs Source, a second source is identified as the one that provided the Revelation Discourses. These are extended monologues in which Jesus presents himself as I AM, the revealer of the Father. To these two sources ably redacted into the present text, it is argued, the authors then added the narrative of the passion, death and resurrection taken from the oral tradition.

A more recent theory identifies sources separating sections where miracles are called signs from sections in which they are called works. The problem with all these reconstructions of the origin of the gospel text in our possession, however, is that they lack a foundation that is based on broad appeals to vocabulary, style or theological perspectives. Against all source theories, it must be noted, the text displays amazing stylistic, verbal and theological integrity. Lacking sufficient supporting evidence, these various source theories have not been widely adopted. Still, many recognize that there may have been a collection of miracle stories which supplied material to the gospel.

In its present form, the gospel contains several inconsistencies or discontinuities. I have already pointed to docetic elements and an anti-docetic stand. I have also mentioned the numbering of the third sign as the second, and that at some points the narrative is interrupted by a communal confession. Some narrative sequences now appear to be dislodged, so that 7:15 – 24 clearly belongs together with the story of the healing of the paralytic at Bethesda (5:1 – 16). The text contains not only two justifications for the authority of Jesus to command the healed paralytic to carry his bed on a Sabbath, but also two rationales for the washing of the disciples’ feet (13:10 – 17), and two Farewell Discourses. The Farewell Discourse which ends in 14:31 with the words “Rise, let us go hence” belongs together with the beginning of chapter 18. Chapters 15 – 17, then, seem a later addition. If the order of chapters 5 and 6 is reversed the topographical references to Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee fit more cogently within the overall narrative. Chapter 20 has a clear ending for the gospel as a whole. The second ending in 21:24 -25 is obviously an afterthought, made necessary by the addition of chapter 21.

These many perplexing difficulties may be taken to indicate that the gospel developed over a period of time with sections added into an existing text as circumstances changed. Nearly everyone agrees that the final revision took place between 95 and 110 CE. At one time the gospel was dated between 150 and 175 CE. The discovery of a little scrap of papyrus containing words of chapter 17 on the front and words of chapter 18 on the reverse has made that dating impossible. This papyrus fragment was found in Egypt and is dated between 125 and 150 CE. The earliest full text of the gospel now in our possession is part of an Egyptian papyrus codex dated around 175 CE.

The characteristics of According to John which I have been describing serve to increase the desire to plumb its depths and appreciate its message. The complexity of its origin within one of the many trajectories adopted by different communities of the Jesus Movement in their attempts to understand God’s workings in the person of Jesus reveals the theological creativity of those Christians and has left us with an enticing and somewhat enigmatic gospel. Attempts to understand it, therefore, must be characterized by humility. No one may claim to have established the absolutely correct interpretation of its message. The text allows for many valid interpretations. Still, anyone who intends to explore its horizon and plumb its depths has to choose what at the moment seems to be the most valid among them. Those of us reading the gospel in the twenty-first century can only struggle trying to penetrate the meaning that to the original community must have been quite plain. No one can guarantee that she or he has captured the meaning as a whole. The cultural patterns of thought in the first century are not at all ours. Faced with this barrier I have opted for describing as best I can what the text says in terms of my understanding of its symbolic universe. This does not mean that I accept as valid all its presuppositions or its points of view, or that I find its presentation of themes quite satisfactory. For example, I find quite inadequate the notion that sickness is caused by sin (9:2), and the pervasive tension between determinism and free will: only those who are drawn by God come to Jesus, but those who refuse to believe are condemned. The notion that a woman’s purpose in life is primarily to bear children (16:21) is also quite problematic. Even as I find the vision of living abiding in Christ quite admirable, I would have liked for the gospel to give a more concrete picture of how such a life looks like.

Thus, while the gospel contains elements which may be foreign to us, it still offers a marvelous vision of the significance of Jesus, the man who many saw merely as the son of Joseph and Mary and others saw as the Son of God. The vision of the latter group is one that sparks a desire to understand it and to wonder about the implications it contains. Its influence in the history of Christianity, it would seem, has been enormous, well beyond the highest expectations the Johannine community may have had. Any attempt to enter that world must begin with the study of the grammar of the Johannine language, recognizing its significance and attempting to penetrate its inner resonances. The language is the carrier of the theology of the community. Theology is the result of faith being expressed within cultural parameters and a meaningful symbolic universe. The following meditations are my attempts to understand the theology of the Johannine community.

As do other books of the Bible, According to John reveals how some of the early Christians expressed their faith fully, creatively, powerfully within their symbolic universe and cultural parameters. The Christian Gospel, no doubt, transcends all its expressions and their cultural limitations. As such it is capable of being expressed in any culture and in any symbolic universe. Letting a text of Scripture speak for itself in its own voice causes one to marvel at the visions it projects. After all, Jesus did not come to reveal information about this or that. He came to reveal life, and he lived in full possession of it in order to give it to others.

According to John understands the Gospel as the communication of the power of life as truth itself. Both Paul and According to John point out that when truth and love are in tension, love is to be given precedence because God is love. To live the faith is to live life faithfully, not to live THE FAITH as an imposed dogmatic truth.

I began this introduction with the phrase “from a strictly historical point of view.” My intention, however, is not to read the gospel historically in an attempt to reconstruct the life of Jesus or that of the Johannine community. I depend on the light thrown by historical research, however, to capture the theological ways in which this gospel presents Jesus and a Christian community united by bonds of love within a world that threatens its very existence. As a community that lived in the world but saw itself apart from the world, it came to appreciate a way to life in the world sustained by the Spirit that the Son had breathed on his disciples before his return to the Father (20:22). The vision of the life of faith exposed in their foundational document has been a permanent source of comfort to Christians through the centuries.

One of the purposes of this book of meditations is to demonstrate that it is quite possible to take seriously the results of modern critical study of the ancient texts and be a modern believer in the One Sent by the Father. Of course, such an attempt is not just a purely academic exercise to satisfy my curiosity or that of my contemporaries. As I have stated, I believe the gospel took shape as an internal document of a community that was experiencing severe tests. That fact does not preclude its becoming a prized document of Christians through the centuries. Some readers may point out that I have overlooked important themes in this gospel. I make no claim to have exhausted its amazing treasury. I have only attempted to take a look at the riches in its vaults. I hope my efforts are not just explications but paths to understanding, avenues that lead to further explorations. If the reading of my meditations sparks reflection and insight into the symbolic universe of some early Christians and helps envision ways to live in the world, my efforts will have been amply rewarded.