Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (31 page)

The Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke—the
Synoptic Gospels, so called because they are so similar that their texts can be read in parallel columns—does not make himself central to his teaching. He is modest, even self-effacing, calling himself the “Son of Man”—a fellow human being—and only occasionally drawing attention to himself as having a special role, as when he prays so familiarly to God, his
Abba
, and when he tells his closest disciples that he is destined to suffer and die. In John’s Gospel, however, Jesus makes the claim that “the Father and I are one.” Whereas the Synoptic Jesus expects to be vindicated after his death, this hoped-for vindication may be little more than the hope of
resurrection expressed by Jewish saints, such as the seven brothers tortured to death in Second Maccabees; and Jesus’s “foresight” may be no more divinely prophetic than the foresight of any man who knows himself to have stirred up deadly political opposition. In John’s Gospel, Jesus “the light” is in the dark about nothing and knows at all moments where his life is headed and that his cross will be the beginning of his being “lifted up,” his cosmic exaltation. The theology of Jesus the New Adam (who initiates the New Creation, which is his Mystical Body, the Church) that Paul constructed
so carefully is elevated to new heights in John’s thought. Jesus is now seen to be “the Word” of God—that is, God’s meaning—present with God “in the beginning” and originally expressed in the
Creation of the universe and then in the
Incarnation, the taking-on-of-flesh of the human Jesus.

For the first time, Jesus is called, in this opening passage of John’s Gospel, “God” and
“only
son”; and the sound and the stately movement of this gospel, replete with repetitive and nearly interminable speeches delivered by Jesus, is so different from the pithy, anecdotal
Synoptics that it would be easy to exaggerate how odd John’s Gospel is. But these references may be slightly more ambiguous than might at first appear. Certainly, the phrase “as of a father’s only son,” though clearly intended as an assertion of Jesus’s unique sonship, is less bold than the later theological term “God’s Only-Begotten Son” will be.

More than this, there is a continuity between the earlier theologies of Paul and the Synoptics, on the one hand, and the more developed reflections of John, on the other. Whether earlier or later, Jesus is seen to be human—made of flesh—and not the ghostly apparition of the
Gnostics; he is raised from the dead and given supreme status over the universe; he is the culmination of all God’s purposes, his definitive revelation. But if God can so reveal himself in flesh, Jesus must be God’s
self
-revelation and, therefore,
of
God in a far more integral and essential sense than any previous (and
merely
human) prophet. It is this last thought that forms the bridge between the early theologies and the grand Christological assertions of the second century; it is John’s Gospel more than any other document of the New Testament that gives us a picture of this bridge as it is being built, almost a snapshot of this novel theology
in the process of construction. By the end of the first decade of the second century,
Ignatius of Antioch, one of the first of the great bishops, will speak without equivocation of “our God, Jesus Christ.”

Are we observing, in this theological development, the dismantling of
monotheism, Judaism’s most precious possession? Certainly
rabbinical Judaism in its articulated form would see it so. But, once again, we are throughout the course of the first century watching the two branches, rabbinical Judaism and Christianity, grow out of ancient Judaism—at first entwined, then gradually defining themselves against each other into separate entities. For Jews of the evolving rabbinical tradition, no modification of God’s Oneness is tolerable. For Christians, God’s Oneness is not denied but startlingly reaffirmed—and made more palpable—in Jesus, who can ultimately be understood only as
God incarnate: “I am,”
proclaims John’s Jesus, deliberately echoing the formula of God’s own self-descriptions in the Hebrew scriptures. As he declares his eternal existence, prior to all Jewish history, to the scandalized worshipers within the precincts of the Temple itself: “Before Abraham was,
I am.”
As he reminds Martha and Mary:
“I am
—the Resurrection and the Life.” As he teaches his disciples at the
Last Supper:

Who sees him sees the Father; who hears him hears the Father; who touches him touches the Father. As the author of
John’s Gospel will say elsewhere (in the first of the three Johannine letters): the ancient reality “that has existed from the beginning, that we have heard, that we have seen with our own eyes, that we have observed and touched with our own hands, the Word of Life—this is what we have to say.” In other words, Jesus himself is the Gospel.

The church that gave this gospel to the world followed its own peculiar path, its evolution unique within the scattered first-century Christian communities of Roman Eurasia. Its principal elder seems to have been a minor follower of Jesus, one whom the gospel never names but calls the “Disciple Whom Jesus Loved.” Despite the later attribution of this community’s gospel to the apostle John, the
Beloved Disciple is someone who was “known to the high priest” and therefore a resident of Jerusalem, not a provincial Galilean fisherman like the John who was called by Jesus, along with his brother James, from his father Zebedee’s fishing boats. The most reasonable way to look at the evolution of the Johannine corpus in the New Testament is to assume that John’s Gospel went through three stages: first, as the oral testimony of the Beloved Disciple to his followers; then, as the work of a writer who set down this testimony, now colored by later controveries within the Johannine community (or church of the Beloved Disciple); and, lastly, in the form in which we now have it, given by an editor who added some final touches and smoothed away many of the wrinkles that this course of development had left within the text.

A similar development may be assumed for the three New Testament letters attributed to a John who calls himself
hos presbyteros
, “the Elder.”
²
The
Greek
presbyteros
, or “presbyter,” turns, after centuries of elided pronunciation, into the English “priest,” meaning originally not a hierarch who offers sacrifice (like a pagan priest) but an older resident who dispenses wisdom to a community. Whether this John the Elder is to be identified with the Beloved Disciple or with the writer who subsequently set down the Beloved Disciple’s testimony is still argued by scholars. But it seems most prudent to assume that both the gospel and the letters are substantially the work of the same writer, a man who was known in his day as John the Elder, who wrote at the turn of the century as the faithful disciple and successor of the now-dead Beloved Disciple and that this writer’s work, at least in the case of his gospel, was then revised by a final editor.

Whoever the Beloved Disciple was—that is, the Johannine church’s original eyewitness—he had a sharp eye and a keen ear, for he picked up on details ignored by the other evangelists. In many of Jesus’s encounters, the dialogue has the quick, prickly humor of Greek theatrical comedy. After
Philip is called by Jesus, he runs into
Nathaniel (to be identified perhaps with the
Bartholomew of the Synoptic tradition) and exclaims:

As sneering
Nathaniel ambles along with
Philip in Jesus’s direction, Jesus, observing his approach, remarks:

Not long after this encounter, John shows us Jesus sitting alone and exhausted under the noonday sun as it beats down on
Jacob’s Well, a source of water in Samaritan country ascribed by tradition to Jacob, also known as Israel, one of the primeval patriarchs of Genesis. A Samaritan woman approaches with a jar for drawing water. No pious Jewish male would acknowledge an unknown or unrelated woman, and no self-respecting Jew would address a Samaritan of either sex. But Jesus breaks through the conventions and shocks the woman by asking her:

At this point, Jesus’s disciples arrive from town with provisions and are unnerved to find Jesus in conversation with such a person, a person who has just been told more about the coming Time, free of conventional restrictions, than they have been able to comprehend. The Samaritan goes off to tell her neighbors about their extraordinary visitor, shouting, “Come and see a man who has just told me everything I’ve ever done! Could he be the Messiah?” John tells us: “Many Samaritans of that town believed in him on the strength of the woman’s words.… So, when [they] approached him, they begged him to stay with them. He stayed for two days, and many more
came to believe on the strength of his own words, and then they said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe just because of what you told us. Having heard him ourselves, we know he is truly the savior of the world.’ ”

Did any of this really happen? There is probably a substrate of oral testimony here, a memory kept in the Johannine community of Jesus’s unusual encounter with a woman at a well in Samaria, a woman who was neither sharp nor sainted but who found Jesus to be completely unusual and who somehow glommed onto things the disciples were still puzzling out. But the discussion about “Living Water” presumes an already elaborated theology of grace that is hard to credit as having emerged full-blown during Jesus’s lifetime—or anytime before the last third of the century. More than this, the dialogue—I have inserted the pauses but believe they reflect the author’s intention in depicting the Samaritan’s confusion—is too polished to have been handed down from memory. So we can identify in this dialogue, as in many passages of John, two or three lightly concealed levels of theological and dramatic development that have gone into the construction of the finished product.

In this dialogue, as in the one with Nathaniel, Jesus possesses some of the ease and humor of the Synoptic Jesus surely, but he is now all-knowing, which he is never shown to be in Mark and Matthew, and of which there are but occasional flashes in Luke. But in addition to these marks of divinity, interjected no doubt by
John the Elder, there runs throughout the narrative continuing evidence of Jesus’s humanity, almost certainly the original contribution of the Beloved Disciple himself; and these details prevent Jesus from ever seeming an unfeeling, otherworldly phantom. Toward the end of his life,
for instance, he weeps for the loss of his dead friend
Lazarus, brother to Martha and Mary (and whom he eventually raises from the dead), while the bystanders exclaim, “See how much he loved him!”

After the raising of Lazarus, the brother and sisters hold a dinner of celebration at which
Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus. This is a separate incident from the one that only Luke reports of the prostitute who anoints and weeps over Jesus’s feet during the dinner at the home of
Simon the Pharisee. The anointing described by John is also to be found in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, but what is especially intriguing is that John provides convincingly authentic details that are lacking in the work of the “earlier” evangelists. Only John mentions that “the whole house was filled with the fragrance” of the pure nard that Mary broke open for this anointing. And whereas Mark and Matthew mention that “some” of the diners complained about the extravagance of Mary’s gesture, only John puts the objection on the lips of
Judas, who says: “Why was this ointment not sold? It was worth three hundred pieces of silver and the money might have been given to the poor”—the predictably pinched complaint of the instinctively ungenerous Puritan who has his own agenda, an agenda that will lead him to sell out Jesus for only thirty pieces of silver. John then comments: “He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief.” These two details—the fragrance that filled the house and the devious response of Judas—point to a perceptive eyewitness as the basis for this most concrete of the three evangelical accounts of this incident.