“The message of John, I now maintain, is so different than the preceding gospels that it barely seems like the same religion.” From Steve Jones’s Gospels at odds?, a follow-up to his God centeredness, Christ centeredness, which I commented on the other day in Synoptic Christians versus John Christians: A Critique.
Two Different Religions?
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3 responses to “Two Different Religions?”
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I didn’t get to your earlier post due to a hectic weekend and those comments took some interesting turns of thier own so forgive me if I address that post and this post at the same time.
First, the distinction between John and the Synoptics for use as an historical source is long-standing. The bad boy of the Historical Jesus movement, Strauss, was if not the first certainly the most insistent that a) there arte fundamentally irreconcilable differences between John and the Synoptics and that b) in the search for the reconstruction of Jesus’ history one must go either with John or with the Synotpics. Subsequent scholarship has agreed both with him and with his choice–the Synoptics–certainly in terms of the overall framework. That having been said, some members of the second and third quests (like Norm Perrin, I believe) are more willing to accept certain fragmentary elements from the Johannine tradition.
For a long time the real hangup was that there was such a profound difference of view between John and the Synoptics (the two different religions thing you refer too). This is not news–Clement of Alexandria wrote on this quite early on and it has been passed through the Fathers accordingly. The standard line is that the Synoptics wrote concerning Christ’s humanity and John wrote about his divinity. Viz. Auggie writing in De Consensu 4.7:
These three evangelists, however, were for the most part engaged with those things which Christ did through the vehicle of the flesh of man, and after the temporal fashion. But John, on the other hand, had in view that true divinity of the Lord in which He is the Father’s equal, and directed his efforts above all to the setting forth of the divine nature in his Gospel in such a way as he believed to be adequate to men’s needs and notions. Therefore he is borne to loftier heights, in which he leaves the other three far behind him; so that, while in them you see men who have their conversation in a certain manner with the man Christ on earth, in him you perceive one who has passed beyond the cloud in which the whole earth is wrapped, and who has reached the liquid heaven from which, with clearest and steadiest mental eye, he is able to look upon God the Word, who was in the beginning with God, and by whom all things were made.
In the modern period, it was assumed that the difference was caused by an injection of Greek philosophy into the Gospel of John. And this is true–there is quite a bit of philosophical stuff going on there which is what you’re having so much of an issue with.
What you’re reading as physical science stuff is actually philosophical stuff relating to Stoic notions of cosmology. That is, you’re reading poetry as a technical manual and rejecting it because it doesn’t all seem to fit…
The Stoic notion was that there was a fundamental Pattern as in order or template that underlay the universe and made all of its parts hang together. And yes, the word for that in Stoic discourse just happened to be…Logos. Now, Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity saw some real promise in this notion (which was the cutting edge physical science of the day) and adapted accordingly. Thus, we have Aristoboulos and Philo, Hellenistic Jewish philosophers working out of Alexandruia arguing that the Logos is actually Torah. Essentially, they argue that Torah is hardwired into the essential foundation of the Universe. Christians took this in a quite predicatble direction insisting that, no, it just looked like Torah since it was the fulfillment of the Torah–Jesus. In particualr this is the root of Paul’s csomological mysticism in Ephesians and Colossians. See particularly Paul’s Christ-hymn in Eph 1. John’s prologue is part of this tradition that works itself into the Stoic framework and builds upon educated Jewish philosophical notions and church tradition coming from Pauline gentile circles. -
Derek writes: “… you’re reading poetry as a technical manual and rejecting it because it doesn’t all seem to fit…”
There’s much of John that I’d happily accept as poetic metaphor. Personally, I wouldn’t be overly troubled by, say:
* conjecturing that God’s cosmic plan included Jesus even before the Creation — we have no way to know whether that’s true, but if labeled as a conjecture it’s harmless enough;
* asserting that Jesus was so incredibly insightful, and that he had his life so together, that it was as though the Logos had taken flesh and dwelt among us — that’s at least an arguable proposition;
* claiming that Jesus was so in tune with the fundamental design of the universe that it was as though he and the Creator were one — ditto;
* calling Jesus “the son of God” in the same sense that he himself called peacemakers by that name, as well as calling others “sons of the devil”;
* using the phrase, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” as a catchy advertising slogan urging us to follow Jesus;
* “believing in Jesus,” in the sense that we put our trust in his teachings and, by implication, in him.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be enough for the “John Christians.” Maybe I’m setting up a strawman, but it seems to me that they want us to accept John as history, not poetry. -
Maybe I’m setting up a strawman, but it seems to me that they want us to accept John as history, not poetry.
Well… I would argue that historically and philosophically speaking the problem is with your either/or. Hellenistic science was fine using stories, especially mythic narratives. Actually–that’s one of the sources of allegorical exegesis; the Stoics and others used it to make sense out of passages in classical authoritative texts like Homer and Hesiod where the gods were acting in flagrantly scandalous or immoral ways. They decided that (brother and sister) Ares and Aphrodite couldn’t possibly be doing the deed behind Hephaistos’s back and thus the the gods should be understood in these cases as natural phenomena. This both protected the dignity of the gods and ground their cosmological specualtions within the accepted traditions.
As far as the Johannines go–you’re right; they assert the reality of these propositions rather than see them as metaphorical possibilities. (n.b.: Be careful of mental conflation. Jesus calling the peacemakers “Sons of God” is a specific Matthean redaction of a Q tradition.)
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