Peter Kirby

I wrote in a previous thread: "Looking at the Gospel of John, which makes the biggest claims in the New Testament, the sky high christology applied to a human Jesus seems to be a bitter pill to swallow for both outsiders and other Christians. See Gregory Riley's Resurrection Reconsidered for the Thomas polemic, the chapter on the Lubavitchers in Price's Deconstructing Jesus, and the anti-society reconstruction of John's community in Malina's Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel on John."

I'm not sure that you got my point--probably my fault for being terse--and I'm not sure whether my point is pro-mythicist or pro-historicist or neither.

The Jesus agnostic Robert Price probably illustrates the concept most graphically. Price writes:

"I believe we can postulate a scenario of development from a mortal, Jewish rabbi, to the status of a god underlying the Gospel of John. It will be helpful to compare the stages and factions involved in the hypothesized process with analogous factors in the recent case of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Lubavitcher movement in Hasidic Judaism. First, let us presuppose a historical Jesus pictured as a rabbi with halachic opinions sufficiently distinctive to have made him the center of a formal or informal school after his death. We would then be able to place the traditions culminating in the Gospel of John among the Jesus partisans in what Burton Mack calls the Synagogue Reform movement. Like Rabbi Schneerson, it would have been Jesus' charisma of holiness and piety, as well as his persuasive wisdom and legal rulings that led his disciples to identify him with the coming Messiah. Perhaps like Lubavitcher sectarians, they did not believe their master had already risen from the dead, but expected that he soon would, at the general resurrection of the just, when he would inherit his due messianic dignity. From this initial period of Johannine faith (as I will call the religion of the movement that ultimately produced the Gospel of John) we have the echo that some were willing to admit that Jesus was 'a teacher sent from God, for no one can do the signs that you do unless God is with him' (John 3:2). These 'signs,' or signifying miracles, might have functioned as what Gerd Theissen calls 'rule miracles.' This means Jesus might have been believed to have settled matters of scribal debate by resort to miracles (as in Mark 2:8-12). God must be on his side. . . . At this early stage, the Johannine Christians would have had a strong sense of group identity, and that would have included their heritage as Jews, as members of the synagogue. Their reformist activities, pursuing their halachic agenda, signify both a strong subgroup identity and a strong sense of belonging to the larger synagogue identity. Rather than splitting off, which would mean a high valuation of subgroup identity, they sought to influence a larger group for which they still felt proprietary responsibility. And yet, to use Mary Douglas's terms, the Johannine group would also have been considered 'low grid,' i.e. governed by a fairly loose set of codes, rules, taboos. The walls between them and other groups were not very high or thick. . . . Despite outsiders' predictions that upon the Rebbe's death the movement would fragment, it has not happened, though trouble has begun to brew with increasing tensions, sometimes actual fistfights, between Schneerson messianists and other Lubavitchers. And there have already been minor offshoots. . . . It is usually the stricter party that wants separation, and it is thus no surprise that the Johannine Christians might have eventually found themselves on the receiving end of excommunication. . . . The more similar two religious groups or subgroups are, the more accentuated their remaining differences become, even should those differences be fairly trivial. If the Christian claims for Jesus are the wedge of separation, we should expect that the claims for Jesus will become more and more controversial. Jesus will grow closer and closer to godhood. The more elevated his status, the greater the alienation between Jews and Christians, and in turn, the status of Jesus will climb yet higher. Accordingly, when the halachic issues are no longer paramount, the leftover issue is that of Jesus himself. What about that business about him as Messiah? Two new subgroups would have emerged at this point. The character Nicodemus represents those inclined to accept the halachic positions of the Johannine faction ([John 3:2]), but they are wary of messianic claims made on Jesus' behalf. The Nicodemus types would find their modern-day counterparts in one faction of Lubavitchers. Menachem Brodt, spokesman for the Lubavitcher organization Israel Habad, refers to the late Rabbi Schneerson as simply 'the rebbe,' not as the Messiah. He asked reporter Herb Keinon, 'Why do you make the connection between the rebbe and the Moshiah? First and foremost he is the rebbe.' Some are not so outspoken. Keinon says that the smallest of four factions in the movement is that which 'believe[s] the rebbe was a great man, but no Messiah.' . . . Joseph of Arimethea . . . on the other hand represents thsoe in the synagogue who do accept Jesus as Messiah but fear to say so publicly as these claims become more controversial. These, too, have their counterpart in the Lubavitchre movement . . . The Gospel of John contains stories designed to encourage both subgroups to go all the way to public confession of Jesus as Messiah. In John chapter 3, Nicodemus no sooner makes his affirmation of faith in Jesus as a divinely commissioned teacher than the Johannine Jesus brings him up short, sweeping his confession aside contemptuously, demanding the rebirth of baptism . . . The man born blind and healed by Jesus at the Pool of Siloam in John chapter 9 is upheld as the example for the Joseph of Arimathea types. Despite threats of excommunication from the synagogue . . ., they are encouraged to take a stand. In the face of opposition, itself perhaps sparked by increasingly strong claims for Jesus, the Johannine group had strengthened their distinctive group identity, their allegiance to Jesus taking priority to their loyalty to the synagogue (now that push had come to shove), and their grid factor had risen: Faith in Jesus as Messiah had become paramount. . . . [Schneerson Messianists are excluded from orthodox Judaism.] . . . It is only once the Johannine Christians had been excommunicated from the synagogue that they developed their doctrine of Jesus as the true vine of Israel (John 15:1 ff), the true Hanukkah light (8:12), the true door through which the flock enters the divine presence . . . The Johannine 'spiritualization' of Judaism originated in the same way: a sour grapes theology. Deprived of the rituals and sacraments of the Jewish community, they created spiritualized counterparts. Thus free of the theological restraint of Judaism, Christology could rise higher and higher, to measure the widening gap between the Johannine sect and Judaism, partly due to new, non-Jewish influences hitherto shunned. . . . The same fears, and the same alarm at the reality once it appeared, must also have led to the falling away of a group from within the Johannine movement itself. Many found the assimilation, e.g., of the Mystery Religion sacrament of divine flesh and blood, outrageous to Jewish sensibilities, including theirs. And as we might expect, the more controversial this sacrament became among the Johannine sectarians themselves, the more exaggerated it became in importance, just as Jesus' own messianic role was the more magnified the more it became a bone of contention between Jews and Johannine Christians. The result is that the eucharist became needful for salvation. . . . Those with the Johannine community who would not brook the new influences packed up and left (for Judaism? for another Johannine or other Christian faction?). They were bade good riddance by their erstwhile compatriots. The heavenly Father must enver have truly drawn them to him anyway ('No one can come to me unless the Father draw him,' John 6:44). They were never really members of Jesus' flock anyway, and were thus incapable of hearing his voice (John 10:26-27). These developments led to the next stage, where God was pictured no longer as loving the world but as sending his son to redeem his elect out of the world. The sectarian walls were rising. . . . In January 1998 David Berger, an Orthodox rabbi, charged that for the Lubavitch mainstream, 'The Lubavitcher rebbe is becoming God.' He pointed to Lubavitch writings calling Rabbi Schneerson the 'Essence and Being of God enclothed in a body, omniscient and omnipotent.' Another proclaimed of the rebbe that 'his entire essence is divinity alone.' Sure enough, Berger then called for the excommunication of any Lubavitchers who espoused such views. . . . Coincident with this further spiritualization there emerged yet another new phase in the evolution of the Johannine movement and its Christology. Itinerant Johannine prophets (of whom we read in the Johannine Epistles: 'Many false prophets have gone out into the world,' 1 John 4:1), speaking, as they suppose, by the afflatus of the Paraclete (John 16:12-13), were receiving new Gnostic and docetic revelations, denying 'that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh' (1 John 4:2). These new teachings tended twoard the concomitant emphases on the only apparent reality of the fleshly form of Jesus and the need for ascetical mortification of the flesh by the Christian. In both cases 'the flesh counts for nothing.' As Stevan L. Davies has seen, the apocryphal Acts of John enshrines the legendary aretalogies of these docetic, ascetic Johannine itinerants, and the mini-gospel contained in this document ('John's Preaching of the Gospel') is the most explicitly docetic account of the life and death of Jesus in all surviving Christian texts. In it we read that Jesus left no footprints in the sand, appeared differently to different people at the same moment, only pretended to eat, was alternately intangible or hard as steel, and appeared to John in a cave on the Mount of Olives during the crucifixion, denying his identity with the form on the cross!" (Deconstructing Jesus, pp. 228-237)

Whew! I believe that this is the most compelling section of Price's book and the most convincing sociological explanation for the formation of the fourth gospel that I have come across.

The picture painted by Price is somewhat corroborated by the studies of Riley and Malina. Both the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas have been argued to have a Syrian origin on independent grounds (though there is no consensus). The apostle Thomas gets three lines in the Gospel of John, more than the zero in the synoptics but not very flattering.

John 11:16
Thomas therefore, called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him.

John 14:5
Thomas says to him, Lord, we know not where thou goest, and how can we know the way?

John 20:27-28
Then he says to Thomas, Bring thy finger here and see my hands; and bring thy hand and put it into my side; and be not unbelieving, but believing. Thomas answered and said to him, My Lord and my God.

The first line is sarcasm about the ability of Jesus to bring life, and the second line is skepticism about what Jesus is going to do and how to follow him where he will go (which is, to John, heaven). The famous "Doubting Thomas" scene has only Didymus disbelieving in the resurrection because he didn't see proof, yet in the end Thomas is converted to Johannine Christianity and to make the only disciple's unequivocal declaration of the deity of Christ (cf. Domitian's "dominus et deus noster"). In this way, the character of Thomas as a disbeliever in the resurrection and divinity of Jesus is subverted to win him over for the sectarian's side, just as Price detects something similar with Nicodemus.

And what do we find in the Gospel of Thomas? We find Jesus saying "I am not your master" (Thomas 13), and as for the resurrection, "What you await has come, but you do not know it." (Thomas 51) The later stages of John, perhaps under an ecclesiastical redactor, show an eschatological belief in wane (particularly chapter 21 on the beloved disciple), but the bulk of John doesn't have the apocalyptic speculation that can be found in the synoptic gospels, which ties John to the same general milieu of Thomasine Christianity. Yet the Gospel of John in its present form does see the resurrection as being in the future (John 6:40), while the Gospel of Thomas sees the secret of life as getting back to primordial moment of creation when the two were one (Thomas 22, cf. Genesis 1:26). This diachronic analysis shows a reaction of the Gospel of John over against the Gospel of Thomas.

A synchronic exegesis of the Gospel of John is made by Malina in Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel on John. I will not go into depth, but Malina presents the Johannine community also as a high group anti-society, which developed its own special language, applied to Jesus and the sacraments, in order to maintain identity over against the world.

This discourse suggests to me that the Johannine community is not making high christological claims for Jesus as a conservative trend of fulfilling the Pauline program, but rather in ideological warfare against Jews and Christians whose disagreements developed along the prime differential, the person and significance of Jesus. If half of what I have presented above is true, then the Johannine community has not historicized a god but deified a man, a man for whom different claims were made by Thomasines and synagogue. Intertwined is the debate over eschatology and sacramentalism, which are late in the Johannine development.

best,
Peter Kirby

Vorkosigan

I thought this was one of the best parts of Price's book. Excellent points.

Vorkosigan

Peter Kirby

Does anyone have comments on the thesis that the Johannine community developed from and conflicted with people with lower christologies of Jesus? Or that the cause of the development was not to make Jesus attractive to outsiders, or to preserve the Pauline dogma, but high-group sociological formation in distinguishing and discrediting rival beliefs?

best,
Peter Kirby

Vorkosigan

Yes, I was wondering about our discussion of Theophilus the other day. Do you suppose his GJOHN had Jesus in it? He seems to be aware of a GJohn that had no narrative. Is there any way to demonstrate from the text that the gospel is a narrative with discourses added, rather than a discourse gospel with a narrative spliced into it? The latter would explain the title; it was originally a discourse from John the Baptist...

Vorkosigan

Peter Kirby

Since there is no manuscript evidence, the best way to tell would be a combination of redaction criticism and stylometry. On any hypothesis, what you have to do is to figure out who made the additions, why the additions took the form they did, and why the additions were placed where they were. Quite significant are the "aporia" or literary disjunctions and puzzlements in the text that show narrative seams. After you've worked out a theory, it can be submitted to a testing of the grammatical and lexical features to see if the different alleged strata appear to be from different and consistent hands. I haven't seen this worked out from the perspective that the discourses came first and that the signs that they appear to comment upon were inserted. However, there is a voluminous literature from R. T. Fortna, W. Nicol, Von Wahlde, Howard M. Teeple, D. Moody Smith, and others explaining the hypothesis that a propaganda piece, showing that about seven miracles of Jesus proved his superiority, served as the basis for the main edition of the fourth gospel. The leading alternative contender is that the Gospel of John drew its entire narrative framework from the Gospel of Mark directly (e.g. Thomas Brodie). When I've revisited the works on the source-criticism of John, I may do a write-up for the web.

best,
Peter Kirby

Peter Kirby

Excuse me, the Johannine community, at least at one stage, is not "high grid" but "high group, low grid." This is seen by the minimal ecclesiology and distinctly charismatic or pneumatic content in the fourth gospel. Raymond Brown writes, "The ecclesiology of this heritage is distinguished by its emphasis on the relation of the individual Christian to Jesus Christ. I do not mean that John anticipates the individualism of the American frontier preaching, embodied in the slogan 'Jesus is my personal savior,' which somehow passes as biblical! The OT and Jewish roots of John (and of the NT in general) are too strong for that--in Christ God saved a people. That the fourth evangelist thought collectively is shown by the vine and branches symbolism of chap. 15 and by the shepherd and flock symbolism of chap. 10. Nevertheless, within this collective presupposition, there is an unparalleled concentration on the relation of the individual believer to Jesus. Another aspect of Johannine ecclesiology is the dwelling of the Paraclete-Spirit in the believer, and this aspect carries over into the Epistles of John." (The Churches the Apostles Left Behind, pp. 84-85)

Price writes: "At this early stage, the Johannine Christians would have had a strong sense of group identity, and that would have included their heritage as Jews, as members of the synagogue. Their reformist activities, pursuing their halachic agenda, signify both a strong subgroup identity and a strong sense of belonging to the larger synagogue identity. Rather than splitting off, which would mean a higher valuation of subgroup identity, they sought to influence a larger group for which they still felt proprietary responsibility. And yet, to use Mary Douglas's terms, the Johannine group would still have been considered 'low grid,' i.e. governed by a fairly loose set of codes, rules, taboos. The walls between them and other groups were not very high or thick. Movement between the Johannine Jewish Christians and outsiders was still readily possible." (p. 230)

I don't believe that the Johannine community ever became "high grid" in the sense of a chain-of-command heirarchical authoritarian structure, except perhaps when absorbed into the nascent catholic church. Rather, they built up their walls against the synagogue and Jesus movements by developing the importance of believing in the divinity and resurrection of the man who came down from heaven.

There's an online discussion in another context that lays out the terminology.

best,
Peter Kirby

CJD

My comments are quite simple, really. I think Price is a class-A 'mirror-reader' of the text. I wouldn't waste time on him. Malina, on the other hand, I enjoy. Nonetheless, I take Malina with a grain of salt. Why? Because at best socio-linguistic models are projections of our minds, so that in the end they are less than adequate descriptors of the Johannine community. What's more, Malina also suffers from 'mirror-reading' (though not as obnoxiously as Price). Textual criticism would be better served if the critic would spend more time reading and engaging what is in the actual text, instead of reading into it what is not there at all.

*edited to add: All that said, I do think Johannine Christology is emphasized as it is because of the task of distinguishing and discrediting rival beliefs. But it does not follow (nor has it been convincingly shown) that Johannine Christology diverges from that of the other apostles'.

Regards,

CJD

Peter Kirby

I would be interested in detailed and serious examination of the proposed explanation (abductive argument), not generalized disclaimers that we can't try to reconstruct social history from texts because what we might find might not agree with what we already believe to be the case. What is this nonsense about trying to preserve the idea that the apostles always agreed on christology? Where does even a single verse in the Gospels even claim that the apostles always and from the start agreed on the significance of Jesus? I don't think that even an orthodox Christian would have to hold that every follower of Jesus recognized him to be the incarnate Word from day one.

So far the response has been a bit underwhelming. I think that this is significant and compelling biblical criticism & history and deserves more attention than all those "errancy" etc. threads that develop over 5 pages. Is social history from texts based on cross-cultural anthropology really so boring? No way--whether a verse in Leviticus contradicts Ezekiel is dry as dust irrelevance! Let's have good times with some discussion here, please!

best,
Peter Kirby

CJD

Hello, Peter Kirby. You had better enjoy being a student while you can. The time and effort required to respond adequately is not something in my experience of the 'working world' I can do all that easily. I agree, this thread is by far more interesting and "deserves more attention than all those "errancy" etc. threads that develop over 5 pages." But you're in a typical internet forum where brainless bickering is status quo.

Yikes! That's not what I meant at all. I was merely articulating my disdain for criticism that blatantly reads into the text what is not there. I find "social history from texts based on cross-cultural anthropology" a fascinating and informative methodology. But not the best one (in that the cultures being crossed in Price's case are separated by too many years). Can our understanding of the text be heightened by Price's speculative methodology? Sure. But IMO there is a lot of shtuff to sift through.

This is not what I meant here. I am not a Christian solipsist, where I close myself off from the Bride and execavate the Scriptures as I see fit. Doctrine develops, and where it corresponds with the whole of the canonical Scriptures, it is then affirmed and defended. I am thinking, for example, of the great ecumenical creeds of the past. This is why I would expect Arius to face less judgment than a modern-day Arius. Also, supposed contradictions in the text are indeed "dry as dust irrelevance." Hopefully this thread will generate some interesting responses. Sorry for getting so off-topic.

Regards,

CJD

Peter Kirby

OK, you are not criticizing Price for trying to get at social history but for doing so in a way that is not necessitated by what the text says.

I guess we can start with the argument that I formulated almost all on my own, once given the hint.

The first line is sarcasm about the ability of Jesus to bring life, and the second line is skepticism about what Jesus is going to do and how to follow him where he will go (which is, to John, heaven). The famous "Doubting Thomas" scene has only Didymus disbelieving in the resurrection because he didn't see proof, yet in the end Thomas is converted to Johannine Christianity and to make the only disciple's unequivocal declaration of the deity of Christ (cf. Domitian's "dominus et deus noster"). In this way, the character of Thomas as a disbeliever in the resurrection and divinity of Jesus is subverted to win him over for the sectarian's side, just as Price detects something similar with Nicodemus.

And what do we find in the Gospel of Thomas? We find Jesus saying "I am not your master" (Thomas 13), and as for the resurrection, "What you await has come, but you do not know it." (Thomas 51) The later stages of John, perhaps under an ecclesiastical redactor, show an eschatological belief in wane (particularly chapter 21 on the beloved disciple), but the bulk of John doesn't have the apocalyptic speculation that can be found in the synoptic gospels, which ties John to the same general milieu of Thomasine Christianity. Yet the Gospel of John in its present form does see the resurrection as being in the future (John 6:40), while the Gospel of Thomas sees the secret of life as getting back to primordial moment of creation when the two were one (Thomas 22, cf. Genesis 1:26). This diachronic analysis shows a reaction of the Gospel of John over against the Gospel of Thomas.

Do you agree that GJohn is interacting with Thomasine views?

best,
Peter Kirby