[Oe List ...] 8/05/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXXII: Introducing the Johannine Material

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Thursday August 05, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXXII:
Introducing the Johannine Material

The last series of books that I will consider to complete our study of the Bible's origins is referred to as "The Johannine Literature." It consists of five books: the Gospel of John, the three epistles, I, II and III John, and the Revelation of John. There was a time when people generally assumed that these five books were the products of the same author. That point of view has long been abandoned in academic circles. There are connections that bind the Johannine material together to be sure. I John and the Gospel of John are quite similar in content, style and word usage, sufficient to cause some scholars to assume common authorship. Others suggest that the author of the first epistle of John was writing a treatise on the gospel from which he quoted liberally and that this accounts for the similarities. There are more questions about II and III John, the texts of which claim as their author one who was known as "The Elder." Almost no one today believes that the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John are products of the same person.
There appears to have been a school of Christian thought near the end of the first century organized around a man known as John the Elder, who himself may have been a disciple of John Zebedee, which opens us to the possibility that these five books are the products of different members of that Johannine School. If that is so, it would account for the similarity found in these works as well as for the obvious differences. Although one can only be speculative about first century authors, this proposition makes more sense to me than anything else and I have adopted it until further study offers a better possibility.
Without doubt the crown jewel of the Johannine literature in the Bible is the Gospel of John, frequently called the "Fourth Gospel" in academic circles. It is clearly the last of the gospels to be written. It is dramatically different from the first three, Mark, Matthew and Luke, which are known as the "synoptic gospels" and are deeply interdependent and bound together. John's gospel, however, has exercised a disproportionate influence on the development of the Christian creeds and the doctrines that define "orthodoxy" in the western Christian Church. It is probably the favorite of most people who sit in the pews of our churches if they had to choose a favorite. It contains many passages with which church people are familiar. The Prologue, a hymn of praise to the "Logos," translated as "word" in most English Bibles, has been the most frequently used part of the New Testament in Christian liturgies. Passages from John are the assigned reading in almost every Christian funeral — "In my Father's house are many mansions" being the most familiar funeral line.
The Fourth Gospel has created unforgettable characters that dot the landscape of the Christian imagination. One thinks of doubting Thomas, the Samaritan woman by the well, Lazarus who was raised from the dead, Mary Magdalene, alone and weeping at the tomb on Easter Day, Nicodemus who comes to Jesus by night, and the man born blind who is the hero of a long and detailed narrative. All of these figures are made vivid in our imaginations through the literary genius of the author of the Fourth Gospel. With the exception of Mary Magdalene, they are not mentioned in any other gospel, and she stands out in John in a way quite different from the synoptic accounts.
Was the author of the Fourth Gospel familiar with the earlier gospels? Certainly there was a common body of tradition from which each of the gospel writers drew. We know that both Matthew and Luke incorporated great portions of Mark into their work. John certainly reveals a familiarity with the story line followed by the synoptics. All four gospels begin with the story of the adult Jesus in the presence of the figure of John the Baptist. In Mark, Matthew and Luke, John actually baptizes Jesus. John introduces John the Baptist in the proper place, but then only has him point to Jesus as the one who must increase as he decreases, but John never baptizes Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. All of the gospels conclude their narratives with a triumphal entry that we associate today with the Palm Sunday procession. The passion story of each has the account of a betrayal, arrest, crucifixion and resurrection. In Mark, Matthew and Luke, however, the only time Jesus journeyed from G alilee to Jerusalem was at the time of the crucifixion, while in John Jesus goes back and forth between Galilee and Jerusalem on several occasions. Mark, Matthew and Luke treat the public ministry of Jesus as something that is told over a one-year period. John suggests that the public ministry of Jesus was up to three years in duration. We can find references that appear to point to a rather specific connection between Mark and Luke and the Fourth Gospel that suggests a possible dependence on these two as sources for John's writing, but that is harder to do with Matthew.
Yet despite all these similarities and connections, there are some very real differences between John and the other three gospels. There is no story in John of Jesus' miraculous or "virgin birth." On two occasions, in chapters 1 and 5, John's gospel refers to Jesus as "the son of Joseph." Jesus delivers no parables in John. The teaching of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel comes in long, somewhat convoluted theological discourses. John records no agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, but rather has Jesus walk resolutely toward his crucifixion, which he expects to be his moment of glorification. The "High Priestly prayer" in John, chapter 17, appears to be John's version of Jesus' prayer "Let this cup pass from me" found in the synoptics. There is no account of the Last Supper in John; instead we read the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. John denies that the Last Supper was the Passover, while the earlier three gospels claimed that it was. John is the only gos pel writer who places the mother of Jesus at the foot of the cross to watch the crucifixion. She is simply not present in the other gospels, a fact that renders most of Mel Gibson's motion picture, "The Passion of Christ," to be almost biblically illiterate and that also calls into question the accuracy of most of the piety of the ages that revolve around the Virgin Mary. Miracles present in the three synoptic gospels are turned into "signs" in John. The resurrection of Jesus in John is quite physical, sufficient to have Thomas be invited to touch the print of the nails in Jesus' hands and feet and to thrust his hand into the wound in Jesus' side, a wound that only John describes. In these details John is closer to Luke, whose resurrected Jesus asked the disciples to handle him because ghosts do not have flesh. This put John, however, into opposition with Paul, Mark and possibly Matthew, all of whom suggest that the risen Christ represents a new dimension of life and ev en of consciousness that transcends the realm of the physical. Indeed, the differences between the Fourth Gospel and the earlier three are so significant that a harmonization of the gospel tradition into a single theology of Jesus is almost impossible. In common language, Mark presents us with a fully human Jesus upon whom God's Spirit was poured at his baptism, making him a God-infused, but still human life, while John suggests that Jesus was the pre-existent word of God, enfleshed in the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Mark can cry from the cross, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" The Jesus of John ends his life with the pronouncement, "It is finished," which replicates the original creation story and portrays Jesus as the author of the New Creation. For John, Jesus is never separated from God: "The Father and I are one," John's Jesus says.
When the Fellows at the Jesus Seminar were doing their work aimed at determining the authenticity of the words of Jesus recorded in the four gospels, they came to and published their conclusion, that only 16% of the words attributed to Jesus in the entire gospel tradition were actually spoken by him, which of course means that 84% were not. It is of interest to note that none of the words attributed to Jesus by John were deemed to be in the 16% that they claimed represented the authentic words of the Jesus of history. Yet, even if that judgment is correct (and as one fellow in the Jesus Seminar, I find no reason to argue with that conclusion) I still concur in the opinion that John's gospel captures the essence of the Jesus experience more profoundly than any other part of the New Testament. That experience, however, simply cannot be contained within the boundaries of literalized human words. So I think of John as the least literal, but the most profoundly true of the fo ur canonical gospel writers. I will return to this claim in subsequent columns to put more flesh on its bare bones.
I doubt if there is any biblical book about which we could say that we have in the present, surviving text of that book the exact words the original author actually wrote. Things hand copied over a number of centuries lend themselves to the probability of having words edited, added and even deleted. The Gospel of John is no different. There are three textual conclusions about John that have gained wide, almost universal support. One is that chapters five and six need to be reversed. In their present order, they make no contextual sense. The second is that the beautiful story in chapter eight of Jesus standing between the woman taken in the act of adultery and her accusers is not and never was part of the original text of John's gospel. The third is that chapter 21 is an appendix, an epilogue that was added later to the gospel and was not part of the original. I assume the truth of these three textual insights.
With this introduction, I will turn now to look at John's gospel then I will move on to John's epistles and finally I will close this study with a look at the book the Revelation of John So stay tuned. 

– John Shelby Spong
 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Bert Knapp from Granbury, Texas, writes:
I have just finished reading your latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision. I believe the thought you stated, but I have been afraid and almost ashamed to admit it. I am 81 years old and my journey of faith has involved many changes. I certainly enjoy reading your weekly columns and look forward each week to reading your latest series on "The Origins of the New Testament." After reading your book, however, I am curious about your position on prayer. I will appreciate receiving your thoughts.
A grateful reader.
Bert Knapp from Granbury, Texas, writes:
I have just finished reading your latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision. I believe the thought you stated, but I have been afraid and almost ashamed to admit it. I am 81 years old and my journey of faith has involved many changes. I certainly enjoy reading your weekly columns and look forward each week to reading your latest series on "The Origins of the New Testament." After reading your book, however, I am curious about your position on prayer. I will appreciate receiving your thoughts.
A grateful reader.



Dear Bert,
Congratulations on reaching your 81st birthday. You are just a little ahead of me!
Thank you for your comments on my book and columns.
I think about prayer frequently. I write about it seldom. I can, however, refer you to two places. The first is in my first book, "Honest Prayer," originally published in 1973, but now back in print through St. Johan's Press in Haworth, New Jersey. It is a book that was inspired by conversations I had with a woman in the mountain town of Pearisburg, Virginia, named Cornelia Newton, who was in her early forties, married to a doctor and the mother of three young children. She was dying of an incurable malignancy. It is what I all "early Spong," that is, it represented my early attempts to make sense out of life's tragedies. I do not today disagree with anything I said there, but over the years I have moved beyond where I was when that book was written, not so much to a different place, but to a deeper place. In 2002, I dedicated two chapters to the subject of prayer in a book entitled, A New Christianity for a New World. That reflects much more my present understanding of prayer, but it is ever changing and ever growing.
To respond quickly, the way one thinks about prayer is determined almost 100% by how one understands the meaning of God. For most people, God is an external, supernatural presence, who can come to our aid, setting aside the laws of the universe to accomplish a divinely inspired purpose. It is that concept of God which, I believe, distorts human life again and again. That understanding presents us with a parent God who keeps us in the status of being perpetual, spiritual children. This is also an immoral God who has the power to influence events in the world and yet seldom uses it. This is a God who had the power to stop tragedy, but instead allows such things as the Holocaust, the Bubonic Plague, the devastation of hurricanes and Tsunamis and who even is said to use sickness to punish sinners. That definition of God results in a chaotic world run by a capricious, but not necessarily a loving, deity. I believe that this God has died in light of a new understanding o f the universe brought about by Galileo and by our understanding of how the universe operates developed for us by Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur and many others. That idea of God is little more than a wish fulfillment deity, a supernatural being who lives above the sky ready to spring into action whenever we ask this God to do so. Such a God definition is no longer viable or believable. I do not believe in a God who will plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in response to our prayers.
For many people, this recognition represents the end of religion. If the supernatural deity cannot come to our aid then why should we bother with religion at all? For me, however, this is nothing more than the recognition that we must find a new way to think about God and thus a new understanding of what it means to pray. To chart that new possibility is a major piece of why I wrote Eternal Life: A New Vision. It also requires a new Christology, which I sought to develop in my book, Jesus for the Non-Religious.
To say it briefly, prayer becomes something you are, not something you do. Your life and consciousness become the channel through which the meaning of God flows into human life. Prayer becomes the activity of opening your life to this deeper presence, this transcendent power we call God. Petition becomes the way you share life and love with others. Intercession becomes your willingness to be involved in causes of justice that help to build a world in which all people can live fully, love wastefully and be all they can be. Thanksgiving becomes the constant awareness of the way God changes lives. Meditation and contemplation become the means of spiritual growth and the development of a God consciousness and the praying person becomes deeply aware that God works through his or her life constantly. I think it is a beautiful vision. I am still living into it.
I hope this helps.


– John Shelby Spong






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