The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple

Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John

Bauckham, Richard

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441200792
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Critica e interpretazione biblica

How do historical and literary details contribute to a coherent theological witness to Jesus in the Gospel of John? A leading British evangelical New Testament scholar answers that question with studies on themes from messianism to monotheism, symbolic actions from foot-washing to fish-catching, literary contexts from Qumran to the Hellenistic historians, and figures from Nicodemus to "the beloved disciple" to Papias. Originally published in various journals and collections, these essays are now available for the first time in one affordable volume with a substantial new introduction that ties them all together. A must-have for serious students of the Fourth Gospel.

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INTRODUCTION

The essays collected in this volume cover a wide variety of aspects of the study of the Gospel of John, but they cohere within an approach to the Gospel that differs very significantly from the approach that has been dominant in Johannine scholarship since the late 1970s, though there are signs that this dominant approach is now being undermined or at least considerably modified by very recent trends in Johannine scholarship. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to relate my essays in this volume to current and recent Johannine scholarship, and also to explain their relationships and coherence within the alternative approach to John that they exemplify.

The Dominant Approach

In the last three decades of the twentieth century,[1] Johannine scholarship was characterized by a dominant approach to questions about the origin and character of the Gospel of John. This is certainly not to say that all Johannine scholarship adopted this approach,[2] but, to say the least, the dominant approach could not be ignored by any Johannine scholar. The main elements of the dominant approach are:

1. Little if any credit is given to the traditions of the early church about the origins and authorship of the Gospel, since they are held to be incompatible with the internal evidence of the Gospel itself. The external evidence is assumed to attribute the Gospel to the apostle John the son of Zebedee, but the dominant approach, though it usually presumes that the figure of the Beloved Disciple in the Gospel is based on a historical figure who played a part in the history of the Gospel’s community and traditions, considers the Beloved Disciple neither John the son of Zebedee nor the author of the Gospel. The early Christian tradition’s location of the Gospel’s origin in Ephesus is usually thought to be merely a corollary of the erroneous attribution of the Gospel to John the son of Zebedee. For most exponents of the dominant approach the community behind the Gospel was far too marginal a Christian group to be located in a city such as Ephesus, with its well-known Christian community, associated with Paul, and its position at the hub of many channels of communications.[3]

2. As an account of the history of Jesus this Gospel is far less reliable than the Synoptics, since its traditions have been so thoroughly shaped by the history of the highly distinctive Christian community in which they evolved. The dominant approach takes up the much older (nineteenth-century) scholarly judgment that this Gospel is theology rather than history, but gives it a much more sociohistorical or sociological character. The dominant approach, since it generally regards this Gospel as independent of the Synoptics, is actually more ready than its nineteenth-century precursors to admit that the Gospel may preserve genuinely historical traditions about Jesus that are not to be found in the Synoptics. They would seem, however, to have been preserved in spite of, rather than because of, the character of this Gospel.

3. The Gospel of John is the product of a complex history of literary composition which has left the marks of its various stages on the text as we have it, making it possible to reconstruct its literary prehistory. This confidence in source criticism as a key to understanding the Gospel has Bultmann’s commentary as its most influential forebear, even though Bultmann’s specific theories have not survived well. In the face of more synchronic, literary-critical approaches to reading the Gospel, the dominant approach continues to appeal to the well-known “aporias,” the repetitions and incoherences in the literary sequence of the text, as well as to the inconsistencies in its ideology, that require diachronic explanation.

4. The Gospel is the product of and written for the so-called Johannine community, a small and idiosyncratic branch of early Christianity, sectarian in character, isolated from the rest of the early Christian movement, and formed by its own particular history and conflicts. This aspect of the dominant approach corresponds to the importance given in the same period to the community of each Gospel (understood as both the context of origin and the audience of that Gospel) in study of the Synoptic Gospels. But for several reasons, including the existence of the Johannine letters, reconstruction of the Johannine community has flourished even more than those of the Matthean, Markan, and Lukan communities.

5. Elements 3 and 4 coalesce in that the various stages of the composition of the Gospel are held to reflect developments in the history of the Johannine community. In the dominant approach, the reconstructed history of the text and the reconstructed history of the community are inseparable.[4] This is where the dominant approach of the last three decades of the twentieth century differs from the older (and numerous) theories of multiple sources, authors and redactions. Such theories go back to the nineteenth century, but only from the late 1960s have they been closely connected with the notion of a special Johannine community and the reconstruction of its history.

6. The reconstruction of the history of the community is partly based on the so-called “two-level” reading of the Gospel narrative, which assumes that the Gospel’s story of Jesus is also to be understood as the story of the Johannine community. The parade example, with which J. Louis Martyn initiated the enterprise of reconstructing the community’s history from the Gospel, is the story of the healing of the blind man in chapter 9. Here Jesus stands for a Christian prophet in the community’s present, the blind man is a Christian convert, and “the Jews” are the authorities of the synagogue to which the Johannine community had belonged until it had been expelled, like the blind man in the story. That the traumatic event in the community’s history that accounts for much of the character of the Gospel as we have it was expulsion from its local synagogue is concluded from this episode in the Gospel (along with 16:2). Similarly the story of Jesus in Samaria in chapter 4 reflects an earlier stage in the community’s history that included successful mission to Samaritans.

7. Reconstructions of the history of the Johannine community are many and diverse, but there is broad agreement that this history focuses on the community’s relationship to the Jewish matrix in which it arose and from which it later painfully separated. The character of the Gospel is intimately related to the origin of the community within the synagogue, its attempts to persuade other members of the synagogue of the messiahship of Jesus, its expulsion from the synagogue and its increasingly bitter and polemical attitude to the parent body from which it had separated. On most accounts, the background, context and membership of the Johannine community are Jewish, though Gentiles play a minor part in some reconstructions. In this respect, the dominant approach is indebted to the effect the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls had in highlighting the Jewishness of the Fourth Gospel in place of the Hellenistic character regularly attributed to it in most earlier scholarship.

Something Completely Different

Over the two decades during which I have pursued serious work on the Gospel, I have found myself abandoning one by one all of these elements of the dominant approach. In my view, the Gospel is an integral whole, including both the prologue and the epilogue, and was designed as such by a single author. I have returned to the traditional view that the distinctiveness of this Gospel, which I certainly do not wish to minimize, is due not to a distinctive community from which it emerged and to which it was addressed, but primarily to a theologically creative and literarily skilled author who produced this distinctive version of the story of Jesus. This author was a personal disciple of Jesus, though not one of the Twelve, who has depicted himself within the narrative as the “disciple Jesus loved.” This seems to me the best interpretation of both the internal evidence of the Gospel and the external evidence, the most reliable of which, properly understood, attributes the Gospel to a John who was not the son of Zebedee but a disciple of Jesus who died in Ephesus, having survived longer than most of Jesus’ disciples.

This Beloved Disciple, from his own memories of Jesus, together with those of the circle of Jesus’ disciples to whom he was closest, and drawing on the resources of the Jewish traditions he knew well, developed a distinctive interpretation of Jesus and his story. This interpretation he embodied in a Gospel on which he must have worked for many years before releasing it to a Christian audience that was certainly not confined to the community in which he lived. My view of both this Gospel and the Synoptics is that they were written for general circulation around all the churches,[5] and that they did quite soon circulate widely. As the author’s lifework, the permanent embodiment of his personal calling to testify to Jesus, the Gospel of John was not occasioned by fluctuating local circumstances but by the author’s convictions about the universal significance of Jesus and his story. Indeed, I think it likely that, as well as addressing Christians, the author deliberately made his work accessible enough to outsiders for it to be read with profit by nonbelievers, Jewish or Gentile, who might be introduced to it by Christian friends.[6] There is nothing esoteric about this Gospel, though it is a work of richly packed meaning available to further study by readers who studied it in the way the author and other Jewish exegetes studied the Hebrew Bible.

Generically, like the Synoptic Gospels, this Gospel is a biography of Jesus—not, of course, a biography in the modern sense, but a Greco-Roman bios. John has adapted the genre to his purpose in somewhat different ways from those adopted by the Synoptic evangelists, but readers would have taken it to be a life of Jesus. They would have read it to find out about Jesus, not in order to find in it an allegorized version of their own community history. Doubtless the author, like all authors, was influenced by the contexts in which he lived and worked, but those contexts are largely unknown to us and, as in the case of most creative works, their influence on the author is not predictable and cannot be reconstructed, except in the most general terms. Reconstructions of the Johannine community from the Gospel are largely fantasy,[7] and even the evidence of the Johannine letters must be used cautiously in interpreting a work that was not, like them, occasioned by specific community concerns,[8] but its author’s gift to all the churches for however long there might be before the coming of the Lord.

Recent scholarship, skeptical of any attempt to reconstruct the historical Jesus from this Gospel, has instead poured its energies and its desire for historical specificity into reconstructing the historical Johannine community. Like the quest of the historical Jesus, the quest of the historical Johannine community has produced a wide variety of results, but, unlike the former quest, that of the Johannine community has yet to produce criteria of authenticity and critical methodological reflection. The undisciplined way in which it treats the Gospel as evidence of the history of the community, along with the complexity of possible combinations of different analyses of sources and redactions with different views of the community, make its results unfalsifiable and infinitely variable. Since the Johannine community is understood to be isolated from the rest of the early Christian movement and since it has left no mark either on the non-Johannine literature in the New Testament or on other early Christian sources, there is no external evidence that can act as a control on imaginative reconstruction. Even Martyn’s appeal to one piece of external evidence—the supposed promulgation of the Birkat ha-Minim (a liturgical curse against heretics to be recited in synagogues) by the rabbis at Jamnia[9]—as a key to the history of the Johannine community has been very largely abandoned by proponents of the dominant approach.[10]

The widely prevalent assumption that the Gospel is primarily a source for the history of the community and only secondarily a source for the history of Jesus is misconceived. At least we have overwhelming evidence that there was a historical Jesus, and we have other sources with which to compare the Gospel of John. The genre of the work also requires us to read it as a book about Jesus. But what most Johannine scholars have notably failed to take seriously is that the Gospel’s theology itself requires a concern for history. The theological claim of the prologue that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14) presupposes that Jesus was a real human person in real history.[11] This is not negated by the degree of reflective interpretation that the author incorporates—certainly a greater degree than in the Synoptic Gospels—because the interpretation is in search of the profoundest meaning of what Jesus said and did. We should not expect the history to have been lost behind the interpretation but rather to have been highlighted by the interpretation.

The present collection of essays is not a systematic presentation or demonstration of this approach to the Gospel of John in all its interconnected aspects. It devotes far more attention to some aspects than others. But the rest of this introductory chapter will place the essays within the context of the overall approach that has just been sketched.

Authorship

Chapters 2 and 3 deal, respectively, with external and internal evidence of the authorship of the Gospel. The external evidence has usually (despite some dissenters with whom I agree) been held to be unanimous in identifying the author as John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ twelve apostles. I present the case for a different reading of the best of the second-century evidence, that which can be traced to Papias of Hierapolis and to the local tradition of the church of Ephesus. This evidence I think points instead to another disciple of Jesus, not one of the Twelve, but also called John (which was one of the commonest of Palestinian Jewish male names). It was doubtless inevitable that this relatively unknown John should come to be identified with the famous John the son of Zebedee. This interpretation of the external evidence is, in my view, much easier to square with the internal evidence of the Gospel. Despite the classic case made by B. F. Westcott in 1889[12] and often repeated since then,[13] to the effect that the internal evidence of the Gospel points to the identification of the beloved disciple as John the son of Zebedee, I take the view of many other scholars[14] that the Gospel’s portrayal of the beloved disciple makes most sense if he was not one of the Twelve, not one of the itinerant disciples who traveled around with Jesus, but a disciple resident in Jerusalem, who hosted Jesus and his disciples for the Last Supper[15] and took the mother of Jesus into his Jerusalem home (19:27). Westcott’s case relied too heavily on a view of the exclusive importance of the Twelve drawn overliterally from Mark. Though Mark concentrates his attention on the Twelve and rarely mentions any other disciples of Jesus, Luke’s Gospel in particular makes it clear that Jesus had large numbers of disciples, both those who traveled with him and the Twelve (e.g., 6:17; 10:1; 19:37) and others who stayed at home (e.g., 10:38–42). There is no reason to suppose that no more than the Twelve were present at the Last Supper just because they are the only disciples Mark is interested in. The Twelve were selected for a special role of leadership in the renewed Israel. That the beloved disciple was not called to that role is no reason why he should not have been someone to whom Jesus was close (as he was to the Bethany family, according to John) and in whom Jesus sometimes confided when he was in Jerusalem. The special value of the Gospel of John may be in part that it embodies a different perspective on Jesus, one from outside the circle of the Twelve (see further below: “Issues of Historicity”).

Chapter 2 is confined to one crucial aspect of the internal evidence. Against many who see the role of the beloved disciple in the Gospel as that of the ideal disciple, the one believing readers of the Gospel may emulate, I argue that very little of what is said about the beloved disciple can be read as a model of discipleship for others. Rather, it puts the beloved disciple in a unique position, as a disciple uniquely close to Jesus, present at key events in the story, a witness who proved especially perceptive, able to perceive the true meaning of what he saw and heard. In other words, he is portrayed as the ideal witness to Jesus and his history, and therefore as the disciple ideally qualified to write a gospel. The portrayal of the beloved disciple is designed to authenticate him as the author of the Gospel, gaining, in the course of the narrative, his readers’/hearers’ confidence that, despite the fact that for many of them he would be an obscure or even unknown disciple of Jesus, he really is qualified to bear his own special witness to Jesus. (I have taken my discussion of the beloved disciple a little further in my book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.)[16]

Genre

As Mark Stibbe remarked in 1994, “Discussion of the literary genre of the fourth gospel has been remarkably r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Gospel of John
• 3. The Beloved Disciple as Ideal Author
• 4. Historiographical Characteristics of the Gospel of John
• 5. The Audience of the Gospel of John
• 6. The Qumran Community and the Gospel of John
• 7. Nicodemus and the Gurion Family
• 8. The Bethany Family in John 11–12: History or Fiction?
• 9. Did Jesus Wash His Disciples’ Feet?
• 10. Jewish Messianism according to the Gospel of John
• 11. Monotheism and Christology in the Gospel of John
• 12. The Holiness of Jesus and His Disciples in the Gospel of John
• 13. The 153 Fish and the Unity of the Fourth Gospel
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Ancient Persons
• Index of Place Names
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings
• Notes