Reconsidering Johannine Christianity

A Social Identity Approach

Raimo Hakola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317436560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Reconsidering Johannine Christianity presents a full-scale application of social identity approach to the Johannine writings. This book reconsiders a widely held scholarly assumption that the writings commonly taken to represent Johannine Christianity – the Gospel of John and the First, Second and Third Epistles of John – reflect the situation of an introverted early Christian group. It claims that dualistic polarities appearing in these texts should be taken as attempts to construct a secure social identity, not as evidence of social isolation. While some scholars (most notably, Richard Bauckham) have argued that the New Testament gospels were not addressed to specific early Christian communities but to all Christians, this book proposes that we should take different branches of early Christianity, not as localized and closed groups, but as imagined communities that envision distinct early Christian identities. It also reassesses the scholarly consensus according to which the Johannine Epistles presuppose and build upon the finished version of the Fourth Gospel and argues that the Johannine tradition, already in its initial stages, was diverse.

1 Introduction

In this study, I reconsider the character of Johannine Christianity by applying a social psychological social identity approach to the writings commonly taken to represent this branch of early Christianity—the Gospel of John and the First, Second and Third Epistles of John.¹ In the Gospel of John, a clear demarcation between different groups is accentuated with the use of such dualistic polarities as be from above vs. be from below, be from God vs. be from the devil, light vs. darkness. The same kinds of polarities are typical of the three Johannine Epistles, where the faith of the writer and his addressees are contrasted to the apostasy of those called “antichrists”—a term that sets the groups in question as poles apart. Such polaristic expressions are not used in a systematic way in the Synoptic Gospels or in other writings of the New Testament. This makes it necessary to explain why they are taken up and what their function is for the Johannine writers and their audience. In earlier scholarship, this Johannine dualism has quite often been taken to reflect the isolation of the Johannine Christians from their surroundings and the sectarian nature of their community. I will claim, however, that we should take extreme dualistic polarities as an attempt to create a secure social identity in a world that too often frustrates attempts to set up clearly defined and distinct categories.

Dualism as a Construction Rather than a Reflection of Separation

In the earlier scholarship, the use of different dualistic contrasts in the Johannine writings is usually seen as a reflection of the real life experiences of the community behind these writings. In the case of the Gospel, the dualistic worldview is seen as a reaction to the persecution of the community by the Jewish authorities who had expelled the members of the community from the synagogue (cf. John 9:22; 12:42; 16:4; a classic presentation of this theory is Martyn [1968] 2003). In the Epistles, dualistic images are seen as a part of the response of the writer(s) to a crisis evoked by the appearance of “anti-christs” who “went out from us, but who did not belong to us” (1 John 2:19; R. E. Brown 1982: 69–115). In both cases, polemic against outsiders is taken to mirror the history of the community and the actions and arguments of those under attack in a straightforward manner. The Johannine writings have been taken to represent a sectarian identity and the Johannine community’s attempts to legitimate its isolation from society at large.²

In this book, I share in criticisms levelled against the so-called mirror-readings that have taken polemical early Christian writings as mirrors in which we can see reflected the people and the arguments under attack (Barclay 1987). While scholars have repeatedly taken the conflict between Jesus and his Jewish opponents in the Gospel as a reflection of a real-life conflict between the Johannine community and the early rabbinic movement, I have already earlier claimed that external evidence for this kind of conflict is meagre (Hakola 2005: 41–86; in a similar vein, Reinhartz 2001a: 37–53; Nicklas 2001: 49–72; Carter 2008: 19–51, 68–72; Kloppenborg 2011). The early rabbinic movement has been described in recent studies as a relatively powerless group concerned with issues of purity. This view emerges from the study of the earliest layers of Mishnaic laws as well as from the study of legal case histories connected with rabbis of different eras (Goodman 1983: 93–118; Neusner 1988: 76–121; Hezser 1997: 360–368; S. J. D. Cohen 1999: 961–990; Stemberger 1999: 85–99; L. I. Levine 2005: 466–498). Early rabbis were neither representative of Judaism at the time nor were they in any position to enforce their views on a deviant minority like the early Christians. References to the minim, a term covering different groups that rabbis regarded as heretical, are far too miscellaneous and scattered to be used as evidence for a large-scale harassment of dissidents by rabbis. On the basis of rabbinic evidence, it is simply misleading to suppose that the rabbis were the instigators of any kind of systematic oppression of the minim in general or early Christians in particular (S. J. D. Cohen 1984: 50; Setzer 1994: 161; Goodman 1996: 506).

Jonathan Bernier has recently summarized the problems in the earlier consensus theory that regards the Johannine community as persecuted by the early rabbinic movement. As Bernier concludes, the mainstream rabbinic scholarship—not just some lone, radical voices—sees that influence of the early rabbis was limited to their own circles. Consequently, the rabbis could have excluded some members of the Johannine community from the synagogue only if these Johannine Christians were at the same time members of the rabbinic movement. As Bernier rightly remarks, however, this idea “would constitute nought but a rearguard effort to defend a two-level reading routed by the data” (2013: 41).

In my view, the criticism of Martyn’s hypothesis is still valid despite Joel Marcus’s (2009) recent effort to defend the basics of Martyn’s proposal. In my original criticism of Martyn’s theory, I tried to emphasize that it is not just the questions related to the Birkat Ha-Minim that are problematic in the theory of Martyn and his supporters. In light of this, it is unfortunate that Marcus focuses almost completely on the Birkat Ha-Minim and deals only in passing with recent reappraisals of the power and influence of the early rabbinic movement. However, Ruth Langer’s and Jonathan Bernier’s recent discussions reinforce arguments that the Birkat Ha-Minim should not be connected with the situation described in John (Langer 2012: 26–29; Bernier 2013: 31–46; see also Kloppenborg 2011: 2–5). In his defence of Martyn’s theory, Marcus is ready to nuance the extent of rabbinic control in the first centuries CE. Marcus concludes that the gospels of Matthew and John

probably emerged from places in which rabbis were able to establish substantial control over the synagogue and the Jewish life in general. Because they had the upper hand in these areas, they could enforce an anti-Christian policy through measures such as Birkat Ha-Minim. In other localities, however, the rabbis probably did not exercise comparable control for several centuries, as is attested by the frequent tension between rabbinic law and piety, on the one hand, and synagogal art and architecture, on the other.

(2009: 551)

Marcus’s conclusion leaves unanswered where early rabbis would have had “the upper hand” and could have exercised “substantial control” over some early Christian groups. The tension between the archaeological record connected to ancient synagogues and rabbinic piety is clearly visible, for example, in places such as Sepphoris and Tiberias, well-known centres of rabbinic learning and influence from the second to fifth centuries. If later rabbis could not enforce their ideals on all their Aramaic-speaking fellow Jews in such places, it is difficult to imagine a locale where early rabbis at the turn of the first and second centuries could have harassed emerging Greek-speaking Christian communities to the extent that is presupposed in the persecution scenario. This is all the more unlikely in a Diaspora setting where Martyn and most other Johannine scholars locate the Fourth Gospel (see the second chapter).

Likewise, there is not enough evidence to reconstruct the stages of the schism and the thinking of the group the writer of 1 John is opposing (1 John 2:18–22; 1 John 4:2–3). Instead of taking the antithetical language in the Gospel or the Epistles as a reflection of reality, we should first and foremost take this language as part of the authors’ claim to a clear identity. Both the Gospel and the Johannine Epistles can be taken as attempts to build a secure identity by creating imaginary symbolic worlds where those who share the writers’ beliefs are set much more clearly apart from the rest of the world than they ever may have been in real life. I will argue here that we cannot take the isolationist tendencies prominent in the Johannine writings as an accurate depiction of the position of the Johannine Christians in their larger socio-cultural environment. Rather than taking John’s clear-cut dualistic images as evidence of the actual alienation of the community, I take them as constitutive of separation.

Another way to explicate how the approach applied in this book differs from many earlier studies on the Johannine writings is to make a distinction between the literary work’s text world, symbolic world and the real world behind the text. While many scholars have not refrained from making bold leaps from the text world of the Johannine writings to the historical situation of the community, the three-world model developed by Kari Syreeni (1999a, 1999b) suggests that all historical reality in literary works is only mediated through the creative imagination of the writers, i.e. through their symbolic worlds.³ The model is based on a distinction among a literary work’s text world, symbolic world and the real world behind the text, and it can be seen as an attempt to create a holistic context that makes it possible to utilize and combine different methodological approaches that are mostly kept apart in the study of the New Testament. Especially the notion of the symbolic world is crucial to the model because this notion emphasizes that constituents of historical reality are not innocently present in any textual world but only as constructed through a distinctive self-understanding. A concept of the symbolic world gives emphasis to how literary works construct and make transparent not only certain textual, linguistic or narrative structures but also many cognitive, emotional, social and behavioural values that legitimate and order a particular view of the world. I claim in this study that while many scholars have taken Johannine dualism as a direct reflection of the historical reality, it should primarily be seen as a part of the construction of a stable symbolic world. When the three-world model is applied to different textual characters, these characters can be taken not only as agents in closed literary worlds or exact counterparts of some historical individuals but as symbols “for ethical values, doctrinal options, social and religious commitments, party strifes, or the like” (Syreeni 1999b, 115). What is said of the Jews in the Gospel or the antichrists in the Epistles may tell more of the writers’ needs than of the referents of these characters in the real world.

The idea that historical sources tell more about those who have written them than about the things they describe has become all the more common in historical research. For example, this notion is salient in the so-called historical image research (Fält 2002: 7–12; Kahlos 2011: 4–5; Rauhala 2012: 11–16). This approach takes different cultural representations as images that are longer lasting and more durable than opinions or attitudes. It is suggested that these kinds of images may be regarded as simplified models of the reality through which individuals and groups perceive the world. It is not so much the correctness of images that is the object of the study but what images mean for those who have constructed and maintained them. As Maijastina Kahlos has remarked, it is possible to take various portraits of “others” common in different ancient literary sources as these kinds of images and focus on the group or community that has constructed the image of the other (2011: 5). In this book, I insist that, while our potential for reaching exact conclusions about the actual social and historical context of the Johannine writings is limited, we can elucidate the ways the writers of these writings constructed images of those regarded as others and in this way tried to create and maintain distinct early Christian identities.⁴

From a larger perspective, my basic claim reflects the effects of the so-called linguistic turn that has aroused theoretical discussion concerning the extent to which language can be seen to reflect and represent reality. Historians and social historians have not generally been ready to throw aside traditional aims and procedures of historical inquiry, but they have become increasingly aware of “the historically generated and always contingent nature of structures of culture” (Spiegel 2005: 25). Accordingly, historical sources are not only or even not mainly approached as reflecting historical reality but as actively shaping and constructing it. This important methodological caution has been missing almost completely in many earlier reconstructions of the Johannine community or in recent attempts to defend the historical accuracy of the New Testament gospels.

A Case for Johannine Christianity

Despite some recent claims to the contrary, I maintain that early Christian gospels in general and the Johannine writings in particular helped construct distinct social identities among various early Christian groups. My basic position is in line with recent, widely held scholarly trends that try to do justice to the diversity of early Christianity (e.g., Räisänen 2010: 5–6). However, the existence of specific early Christian groups behind each canonical gospel has been vehemently denied by Richard Bauckham and some other scholars, who have argued that the New Testament gospels were not addressed to specific early Christian communities but to all Christians at the end of the first century. Bauckham originally made this provocative assertion in the article appearing in The Gospels for All Christians (1998a), which also contains articles from other scholars supporting Bauckham’s general thesis. Bauckham later applied this general thesis to the Fourth Gospel (2001; 2007: 113–123). Bauckham’s idea has received fierce criticism (Esler 1998b: 235–248; Sim 2001; Mitchell 2005; Kazen 2005), which, in turn, has led Bauckham and his supporters to defend the original proposal in a number of publications (Bauckham 1998d, 2010; Bird 2006a, 2006b, 2010). In Johannine studies, Robert Kysar (2005) has raised questions concerning the validity of the community hypothesis independently of Bauckham’s proposal. Edward Klink (2007) has criticized the Johannine community hypothesis in a monograph based on his dissertation supervised by Bauckham. Klink has also edited the collection The Audiences of the Gospels (2010a), where he introduces the different phases of the current debate and draws together the results of the contributions of the volume (Klink 2010b, 2010c).⁵

Already in its original form, the thesis that the gospels are written for all Christians was a mixed bag of arguments. Consequently, the discussion has dealt with such wide-ranging themes as ancient book production, the circulation and genre of the gospels, the mobility of early Christian teachers, the patristic evidence of gospel writers and their audiences and the audiences of the non-canonical Gospels. Klink has remarked that while the debate “began as a challenge to the current consensus,” it “has yielded a consensual chaos” (2010b: 22). However, Adele Reinhartz aptly concludes that none of the issues such as the genre or circulation of the gospels or the mobility of Christian teachers is “decisive for the issue of the Gospel audiences. In fact, each can be used not only to support the ‘all Christi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Johannine Christianity and the Mediterranean Diaspora
• 3 The Beginnings of a Tradition: The Relation between the Gospel and the Johannine Epistles
• 4 Collective Victimhood and Social Identity: The Counsel of Caiaphas Reconsidered (John 11:47–53)
• 5 Social Identity and the Lures and Threats of Being Similar: John and the Jews Who Believed in Jesus (John 8:31–47)
• 6 The Burden of Ambiguity: Nicodemus and the Social Identity of the Johannine Christians
• 7 Conclusion
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• General Index