Becoming John

The Making of a Passion Gospel

Kari Syreeni

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780567681041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this new analysis of the Gospel of John, Kari Syreeni argues that the gospel is a heavily reworked edition of an earlier Johannine work, and that the original did not include Jesus' passion. Syreeni theorizes that the original gospel ended at Chapter 12, with the notion of Jesus' disappearance from the world, and that the passion narrative was incorporated by a later editor freely using the existing gospels of Mark and Matthew. Syreeni suggests that the letters of John - written after the predecessor gospels but before the final edition - reveal a schism in the Johannine community that was caused by the majority faction's acceptance of Jesus' death and resurrection, as it was then recorded in the new gospel. By exploring the gospel's different means of legitimizing the passion story, such as the creation of the 'Beloved Disciple' to witness Jesus' passion, and the foreshadowing of the resurrection of Jesus in the miracle of Lazarus, Syreeni provides a bold and provocative case for a new understanding of John.

Chapter 1

Introduction: A passion for John

All scholarly voyages with John are different.¹ The present study is based on updated “travel notes” on my more than twelve years with this early Christian text. According to a winged saying, the Gospel of John is a pool in which small children can paddle and elephants can swim.² I have learned a harder lesson: John is a sea where children and elephants alike risk getting drowned. As long as the safe coast where I once started is still in the horizon, it might have been wise to turn back and head for the dry land, as many Johannine scholars have done.³ A withdrawal from behind the present Gospel back to its present shape would not be difficult to rationalize in terms of sober scholarship. However, for me, the depth and width of the Gospel is so much greater than its visible shape that I have not been able leave it totally unexplored. There is a passion for learning more, but after all years of exploration I feel committed to gather some of the findings, knowing that much more remains to be done.

The Hypothesis: A Passion Redaction of John

Much of the little I have learned thus far is included in the present book, which substantially reworks a number of articles published between 2003 and 2016. All these articles rest on a particular hypothesis about the making of John. In this chapter, I articulate the basic hypothesis and elucidate its background. Since the hypothesis implies that there was a Johannine predecessor which did not contain a passion story, a brief comparative look at the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas is motivated. A short discussion of the synoptic “passion gospels,” comparable to the final John, then follows. Finally, a few words about methods are in order.

In a nutshell, I suggest that the passion narrative, together with the passion-resurrection plot in its entirety, belongs to a late redaction of the Fourth Gospel. This passion-oriented redaction is so extensive and vital to the present form of the Gospel that I call it the becoming of John. At the same time, the contours of an extensive literary document are discernible in the main bulk of Jn 1–12. Not only a literary entity, the non-passion substratum is also a layer of tradition, which in a more fragmentary way is found in subsequent parts of John. While a precise reconstruction of John’s literary predecessor remains conjectural, there are enough signs of how the passion-oriented redaction has reinterpreted the older stratum. Several drastic shifts of meaning were occasioned by ever deepening reflections on the passion narrative’s consequences for the non-passion tradition. The present book argues for this general thesis by analyzing some of the most conspicuous literary and theological accents in this process of reinterpretation, and by recovering the profile of the early Johannine stratum.

Thus, I am not content with “letting John be John,”⁴ but try to see how John became the Gospel it is. Most of the observations on which my hypothesis rests have been made before several times, and often better, by other scholars, who however evaluate the data differently. Neither are the core elements of the hypothesis unprecedented. For example, the three-edition hypothesis proposed by Wilhelm Wilkens (1958) urged that it was only the heavily reworked final edition that turned the Fourth Gospel into a “Passion Gospel.”⁵ My hypothesis also resonates with the assumption of an underlying “Signs source” (but not Fortna’s “Signs Gospel”),⁶ particularly if one includes substantial discourse material in such a source, roughly adding Bultmann’s Offenbarungsreden to his Semeia-Quelle. The “Signs source” variant suggested by Jürgen Becker in his commentary on John is also interesting. This extensive Johannine source would have a chronological and geographical movement from John the Baptist and a Galilean period to Jesus’ rejection in Jerusalem—yet without a passion-resurrection narrative.⁷ I would not stress these aspects of the plot as much as Becker does; instead I find some key themes and temporal markers more important.⁸

More recently, John Dominic Crossan has sketched a still closer equivalent to the passion redaction hypothesis. In his The Birth of Christianity, Crossan offers the following vision:⁹

I consider that John’s Gospel developed over certain major stages. First, there was an independent collection of miracles and aphorisms that were creatively integrated so that the miracle-signs represented as physical events (bread, sight, etc.) what was announced by the aphorisms-dialogues as spiritual events (“I am the bread, light,” etc.). Second, pressure from groups accepting the synoptic gospels as the dominant Christian model resulted in the necessity of adding John the Baptist traditions at the start and passion-resurrection traditions at the end of a gospel which, left to itself, would have begun with that magnificent hymn at the start in John 1:1-18 (without the Baptist, of course) and concluded with that equally magnificent discourse at the end in John 14–17. Third, the pressure from groups accepting Peter as the dominant Christian leader necessitated the addition of John 21.

My hypothesis took shape independently of Crossan, but some of the similarities are striking. The first observation that pushed me toward a similar model was the summary nature of Jn 12:37-50, which looked very much like the end of a gospel, so much so as the beginning of ch. 13 seems to launch another story. The introduction of the Beloved Disciple in John 13 seemed to confirm that suspicion, and further analysis unearthed many more signs of a reinterpretation of Jn 1–12 in the rest of the Gospel. At the same time, the independent theological profile of Jn 1–12 was becoming clearer. Martinus de Boer’s Johannine Perspectives on the Death of Jesus (1996) nurtured my hypothesis at an early stage. His analysis was based on a multistage compositional model, advanced by J. L. Martyn and Raymond E. Brown, which opened a window into the historical progression of Johannine thought. Although this model assumed that the passion story was there in the earliest edition of John, de Boer concluded that in this edition “the death of Jesus is implicitly regarded as an embarrassment” and that “salvation had (or has) little, if anything to do with Jesus’ death.”¹⁰ If that is the case, I thought, why would the earliest form of the Johannine Gospel narrate Jesus’ death at all?

This was a question that I found, afterward, to resonate with Ernst Bammel’s discussion of the farewell section.¹¹ Bammel emphasized that, in distinction from Jewish farewell traditions, Jn 13–17 is marked by

the absence of a description of death and funeral. True, such an account can be found in John 18–19. There is, however, no doubt whatever that these chapters were written by a different hand nor is there any indication that the unit of chapter 13–17 was composed with the intention that it would be concluded by an account of the death of the speaker which then came to be replaced by the passion story we now find in the following chapters. What we actually encounter in the farewell discourse is, we are driven to say, a hint of the ascension rather than of a violent death.

My solution is more complex than Bammel’s. In the final Gospel, the farewell section betrays the same “hand” that added the subsequent chapters, but the main point is that Bammel discerned an earlier Johannine layer of tradition where Jesus’ departure was not conceptualized according to a death-resurrection pattern.

So it was a cumulative process that lies behind my hypothesis. However, I would not object if, for the sake of convenience, my redaction hypothesis is regarded as an elaboration of Crossan’s vision. I have problems with some points in Crossan’s hypothesis.¹² In essence, however, I endorse the idea that the passion stratum is secondary to the prologue and the main bulk of Jn 1–12, and that parts of the farewell scene in Jn 13–17 belong to the non-passion stratum. And just for sure, I doubt some of Crossan’s further suggestions about the earliest gospel sources .¹³

To have a vision is one thing. To prove it, or at least make it appear a plausible option, is another thing. Huge problems arise as soon as Crossan’s idea is fleshed out. The provenance of the Johannine passion and resurrection narrative, the making of the farewell section Jn 13–17 that bridges the first “book” of John and the passion-resurrection narrative, and the numerous anticipations of the passion plot in Jn 1–12 are among the toughest questions.

Whatever its faults or merits, the hypothesis owes a great deal to my coming from the field of synoptic studies. By way of comparison, Crossan might never have come to his ideas concerning John without his eagle-eye view on nascent Christianity and its literature. D. A. Carson once addressed the challenge of the “Balkanization” of Johannine studies.¹⁴ Although a passion redaction hypothesis is easily dismissed as one more idiosyncrasy that will soon “litter the graveyards of Johannine scholarship,”¹⁵ I hope to show that the considerations that led me to it are not based on partisan scholarship. Quite the contrary; the Johannine question cannot be divorced from the synoptic problem, and both should be seen in the larger context of the emerging and evolving gospel literature.

One a priori obstacle to the passion redaction hypothesis may be the scholarly tradition of speaking of “John and the Synoptics.” This served well in the nineteenth century, but should be considered a bad habit in modern scholarship. As a conceptual model, it tends to regard the individual Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke as a single entity against which the “fourth” Gospel is interpreted. I will deal with the “John and the Synoptics” issue in the next chapter, but one of its unhappy consequences must be mentioned. Apparently, for all their differences, John has one thing in common with “the Synoptics”: the passion narrative. However, if we go behind the final Gospels and assume the two-source theory, things are different. Before Mark, the passion story was in all likelihood not connected to other Jesus material, which may have partly existed as short collections. And about the same time Mark wrote the first passion gospel, there was another—now lost—model for a gospel without a passion story: the Q Gospel.¹⁶ A few generations later, the Gospel of Thomas provided another example. To imagine what a non-passion gospel may have looked like, a glance at Q and Thomas will be helpful.

Q and Thomas—Non-Passion Gospels

Coming originally from Matthean studies, I am convinced that the two-source theory is the best overall solution to the relationship between the first three canonical Gospels. More precisely, the two-source theory works best when it comes to Matthew. It may be more in need of auxiliary hypotheses in the case of Luke, whose reference to “many” predecessors (Lk. 1:1) is likely more than a figure of speech. The whole truth in the matter is probably much more complicated than the rough version of the two-source theory suggests, but for our immediate concern it suffices to reaffirm Markan priority and the existence of the Q Gospel.

The two-source theory hardly needs an apology among critical scholars; it is still the default position, though it is not unchallenged. However, I take Q as a written gospel with a distinctive literary and theological shape more seriously than some mainstream exegetes. As Crossan notes, “There is a growing difference between those who regard the Q Gospel as a major gospel text and those who accept its existence and contents but not its significance and implications.”¹⁷ A comfortable way of accepting the hypothesis in theory but rejecting it in practice is the slippery use of the designation ‘Q’ to refer both to the common non-Markan material in Matthew and Luke and to the hypothetical, reconstructed Q text, and additionally, to an amorphous Q tradition. That such usage obscures the distinctiveness of Q as a literary product, albeit a hypothetical one, is as plain as is the opposite mistake of succumbing to the illusion that, thanks to the earlier reconstructions and more recently the efforts of the International Q Project, we now have the very Q text in original Greek (with accents and all) before our eyes. What I presuppose is just the results of genuine Q research. However, there is another, more sophisticated strategy that seemingly addresses the specifics of modern Q research and commends a measure of caution (which is always needed), while in fact serving to undermine the whole enterprise.

James Dunn’s dealing with Q in his magisterial Jesus Remembered provides a sharp critique of the first strategy and, regrettably, an erudite example of the latter.¹⁸ Dunn n otes initially that Q “still remains a persuasive working hypothesis for the substantial majority,” a majority among which he counts himself. He then stresses the uncertainties of the reconstruction of Q, questioning whether Matthew and Luke really preserved most of Q, and stressing the substantial variation (from nearly 100 percent to around 8 percent) in verbal agreement between Matthew’s and Luke’s Q renderings, concluding that “the confidence in the existence [sic] of ‘Q’, based as heavily as the hypothesis is on the passages towards the 100% end of the scale, must inevitably be weaker in regard to passages towards the 8% of the scale.”¹⁹ The variation is interesting indeed, but most scholars would say that the 100 percent passages provide the argument for the existence of Q, while the 8 percent passages show the difficulties with reconstructing its precise contents and wording. Dunn’s discussion coheres with the question mark in the subtitle of the section (“A Q Document?”). The second question mark hangs over the existence of a Q community, and the annihilating conclusion runs as follows: “While the hypothesis that Q represents teaching material of/for one or several communities is entirely plausible, the further hypotheses that there were distinctively ‘Q communities’, in effect isolated from other early Christian communities, depends on deductions which go well beyond what the data of Q itself indicate.”²⁰ It is an effective m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: A PASSION FOR JOHN
• Chapter 2 JOHN AMONG THE GOSPELS: REJECTING FALSE DICHOTOMIES
• Chapter 3 IN THE BEGINNING: THE SCOPE OF THE JOHANNINE PROLOGUE
• Chapter 4 THE BELOVED DISCIPLE: LEGITIMATING THE PASSION STORY
• Chapter 5 THE GREATEST SIGN: HOW LAZARUS’ LIFE TURNS INTO JESUS’ DEATH
• Chapter 6 REMEMBERING THE NEW PAST: THE PASSION STORYLINE IN JOHN 1–12
• Chapter 7 THE BRIDEGROOM’S DAY: TRACING THE PRE-PASSION JOHN
• Chapter 8 A LONG FAREWELL: THE WATERSHED IN JOHANNINE THEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
• Chapter 9 THE WOUNDS OF THE CRUCIFIED: UNDERSTANDING THE JOHANNINE TRAUMA
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright