John-History or reframing?

Faith & Science Conversation
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It certainly could but this raises a number of issues. Just to spitball some of them:

  1. Half of critics think John had direct literary dependence on Mark. Half doesn’t. Thus, if Mark is not Peter’s testimony and the author of Mark also did a little framing, many will ask why does an eyewitness to it all use non-eyewitness testimony in constructing a Gospel?

  2. Most of critical scholarship rejects traditional authorship. There are quite a few Gospels claiming to be from people they are not. Most of scholarship also rejects that Paul wrote all the letters in the NT attributed to him despite them claiming to be written by him explicitly. I think Bird and Wright actually settled for John the Elder, not Apostle John. Which brings up the next point.

  3. People with the same name were mixed up in antiquity by the Church. Could it have been a different John who may have been present for some of Jesus’ ministry but not all?

  4. Its very probable John had more than one author. Chapter 21, where the claim to authorship by a disciple resides, was a redacted second ending. John clearly ends at. 20. Did the first edition make any claim to authorship? If it was redacted the gloss in ch. 19 could be secondary as well. Many scholars point out that John clearly has two endings and some other material appears out of place in the text. It actually looks like some of it was mixed up. Christians in the early church up to the present times have been trying to figure this problem tout.

  5. Later followers in a Johannine community could write down a work and attribute it to John even after he died. Because he founded the community and they were based on his teachings and they were disciples of his, this was seen as a legitimate practice. Even if their beliefs evolved a little bit. They could keep the name. This could have happened with Matthew and Q explaining Papias’ otherwise problematic comments about GMatthew. But anyways, this complicates authorship a lot. We are clearly dealing with a community in this case.

  6. Most scholars recognize that while much of the material in John is historical or has one at its core, some of it actually looks earlier than some stuff in the synoptic gospels. GJohn shows a good awareness of historical things as well.

  7. is the beloved disciple a real person or a literary creation symbolizing the perfect follower of Jesus who doesn’t leave him even at the cross (IIRC taking this literally is in conflict with the Synoptics who say they all left him)?

  8. Most people think an eyewitness means it must be biographical. Most scholars feel internal contents show John is not that. Admittedly, it is not impossible for me to surmise an original follower of Jesus filled with the spirit, 50 years later in his old age, wrote a Gospel filled with history, mystery and midrash. To admit the latter is really to make the claim that all we can go by is external attestation which in several cases, makes mistakes in regards to the Gospels.

  9. The date of John (75-110), at least the final version, makes authorship by disciples in a community established by John more likely than the apostle himself.

  10. The external attestation is clearly in favor of John but there also seems to be a bit of uneasiness in some of them as well.

  11. Acts 4 names John uneducated and ordinary. Even without this reference we could surmise a Galilean fisherman could not read or wrote in Greek. He could have had someone write for him but many will find difficult seeing a poor, ordinary fishermen from Galilee dictating a work of art like the Gospel of John in Greek. Scholars would probably be able to determine if the Greek text was a direct translation of Aramaic dictation.

If I had to bet I would guess John establishes a community. After his death a disciple of his writes the Gospel. Then later, apologizing for mistaken eschatological predictions, John is redacted by another follower in the community.

No certainty but I think it accounts for a lot of the data.

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23

Interesting to consider. I suspect John as an old man was a lot different from John as a 20 something. He may have even learned a little Greek along the way. In any case, I relate a lot better in many respects to his gospel compared to the others, though they all have their strengths. Lately, Mark’s bluntness and abruptness has been intriguing. Christianity is ultimately a pretty mystical religion, something the western believers try to ignore.

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24

I don’t know when it was written down or by whom. It may have been found years later on a piece of worn out waxed tablet written with a bone by anyone and added whenever. IMO, there’s no question. That happened just as described.
For some fun, let’s say it is bogus. Just for fun. What would Jesus do if He was presented with the identical situation? You know and so do I.

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Thanks. I’m not what I used to be. Thank God.

It is all very simple when we look at what happened back in the day. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! For behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: 11 Today in the city of David a Savior has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord! 12And this will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

If anyone, anyone, prays to Jesus earnestly, wholeheartedly, even if she doesn’t believe in him, and asks him to reveal himself to that person individually, He will. Simple. There’s a way to find out if that is true.

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The gist of the material is probably from the same time period as the Gospels. But yes, it wasn’t a part of John originally. But I think we had this discussion before.

Vinnie

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I came across a lot of this many years ago when training as a Reader (Lay minister and preacher) in the Church of England. Gospel authorship has indeed had of critical analysis applied that questions original authorship.

As far as G of John goes, I find it an interesting possibility that John the Apostle (or another John the Elder) while not writing the gospel himself gave to others his accounts of Jesus and that others wrote the gospel in his name and he gave them permission to publish it with his authority. They could also have used some other eye witness sources.

Often the gospel of John seems like a kind of interpretation of events as well as details that could come from eye witness. The long discourses from Jesus may be theological glosses on His words and intentions rather than actual records, although I guess many would not like that to be the case.

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Aye Vinnie. It just occurred to me that the synoptics and their Quelle - source - and their distinctives plus John are fragmentary when viewed horizontally. They each have an auctorial/editorial agenda and style; I’m just trying to make the PA work as genuine as the rest and they move closer to it and therefore it to them, still as an outlier, it didn’t suit the agenda of Q nor the distinctives of the synoptics? They’re all closer to the mean: as bad as each other! The writers must have known each other but won’t have settled in the same place after the fall of Jerusalem if not before. Peter and Mark in Antioch? Luke there or Troy? Thence to Thebes? But how did they get the Q material separately? They must have touched base in Jerusalem, Pella, Antioch? And Patmos - if there’s a connection with John the gospeller. Troas, Patmos, Antioch are all sailable. What is the logistical route net of these travelling salesmen?

@Ralphie. You, my friend, are absolutely right. Whether Jesus was real or not, it’s the kind of thing He would have done. Unless He was both : ) a merely human Jesus would have had to have been an unbelievable emotional, moral genius.

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There is no one like him. I love the story of the Gadarene and this one: Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of Him to the other side, while He dismissed the crowds. 23After He had sent them away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. When evening came, He was there alone,

I see him there as the blistering desert heat subsides and the sun sets, darkness descending silently in the dry air. Beads of sweat roll down his cheek. I am to his right and see his profile now. He peers out at the beautiful view and gazes upon everything He has made. The clear sky, the twinkling of the faint stars pushing their way into the evening, the huge bright orange orb setting swiftly now, the sounds of tired chidden racing each other home for dinner.
His is not big man. He is pure muscle, lean, bronzed, cooling down and content. The universe rests on his shoulders, the pains of every person on earth are his. There He is Klax: God. Sitting about 8 feet away from me. God. I see his eyes focusing, shifting, blinking. I see his chest rise and fall with each breath. He was just a man and He was GOD Almighty, right there, alone when evening came.

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For the PA, if we are not dealing with eyewitnesses who were with Jesus every step of the way, it is quite possible they didn’t hear about every incident or miracle or saying or parable of Jesus. We don’t know the exact provenance of these works, their author or their exact compositional history with any certainty besides maybe Marksn priority. Works traveled outside of their communities. Mark didn’t seem to know Q but he did have the pre-Marian passion narrative and a couple of collections of written materials are evident in parts (e.g. 2:1-3:6). Matthew didn’t know or at least use “L” and the same with Luke and “M”, assuming Q and that Luke just didn’t simply know Matthew and Mark. I don’t think it would have been uncommon for Matthew, possibly written in Antioch to have accessed Q. Mark certainly had to become popular and disseminate in order to be used independently by Matthew and Luke. That is why when dating them a minimum timeframe of 10 years is usually suggested to play it safe. Luke claims to have done research and knows of quite a few sources.

Per John, Jesus’ ministry lasted a few years unlike the synoptic gospels which suggest it lasted about one. Either way, Jesus would have done and said a lot of things we don’t now know about. You can fit most of the material in Mark into a few weeks, minus the traveling.

I think an argument could be made that Jesus was just too radical in the PA for this male-dominated society to accept this. If you think about it, early Christians debated over food laws, sabbath regulations and so forth. They never debated over adultery. So some of these radical statements aren’t so radical where we find them ca. 70-100CE and of course some still very much are. But Mark’s community, largely consisting of Gentiles would not find breaking the sabbath very radical. Yet in the 30s this would have been very radical in Jewish Palestine. The truth is Jesus may appear to have been too cavalier in his treatment of an adulterous woman. “It’s okay, just don’t sin anymore.” That is radical and scandalous in 30 and 130 AD. Remember, Jewish men could sleep with an unmarried woman. The problem with sleeping with a married woman was that you are violating another man’s property. This is the context for the PA. A male-dominated society with a high emphasis on purity and virginity. Jesus keeping company with unmarried woman would have been considered scandalous. Now he just forgives a woman who committed adultery like it was any other sin.

Augustine writes, “Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord’s act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if he who had said, Sin no more, had granted permission to sin.”

I don’t know if this exact form was original but a story exactly like it was known by Papias ca 110. It looks like there are two versions of it (Didascalia, Gospel of the Hebrews) but Papias puts something like the PA in the first century.

It is on far better grounds than people assume. One might think the criterion of dissimilarity would shine here granted how scandalous this would be to men the empire over. Once the NT became authoritative, scandalous or not, it was in God’s word and had to be accepted which is what we see a few centuries later.

Why didn’t Luke retain it if it was part of his special material? See footnote 66 for one possibility:

Vinnie

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31

An important distinction is appropriate. He never said “It is okay.” Far from it. He did however, deal with this situation like He does everything. He understood the dynamics. She was utterly humiliated. She paid the price for her deed one hundred fold by the spectacle of being caught in the act and presented as a trophy by hateful men to the only man who not only healed, but forgave sin. “Sin no more” isn’t soft treatment in light of everything she suffered and it is not the same as, “It’s okay, just don’t sin anymore.”
Christ is an expert in dealing with each of us just exactly as we deserve. He knows. He knows our insides. We judge the outsides.

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I never said Jesus said adultery was okay. I’m assuming Jesus didn’t say what he did to an unrepentant woman. You screwed up. It will be okay (aka you don’t need to be condemned to death over this). Don’t do it anymore (duh!).

Jesus just didn’t care about some of the Old Testament. He certainly didn’t treat it all as a divine, immutable statement from up on high.

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You meant to say He could be misunderstood by a male dominated culture to have given her a pass. But, that’s not what He did or implied and Luke didn’t omit this passage for fear He could/might be viewed that way. Augustine and others place too much significance onto this event. Luke has “little faith”? Or, he was an “enemy of the true faith”?
I think there is great danger in analyzing motives of NT authors without more (any) evidence. It is like an intellectual guessing game and it has and can lead to gross errors.
If a respected (is there such a thing?) “fundamentalist” authority on the NT acknowledged publicly an error along the lines of Ehrman’s synoptic misinterpretation, the media would be celebrating in the streets for a hundred years. The country would shut down. They wouldn’t let it go. Ehrman, OTOH, admits he made a mistake (an enormous, a huge, serious, terrible blunder), and this greatest of all modern day bible scholars doesn’t receive a beep in the press. In the meantime the damage done in the minds of many people on the fence, and others, to trust in the value of the NT, has caused some to turn away from pursuing a relationship with God.

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I feel we talk past one another a bit and I am not sure how mutually beneficial continued discussions between us may be. I am also noticing a very consistent theme with a significant part of your responses to me. They seem to include a large amount of text that is essentially a Red Herring. Something that has little to do with what you are quoting or what is actually under discussion.

I’m also not sure why you appear to portray a proponent of historical criticism changing his mind on an issue as if it’s a major event or some sort of decisive victory for apologists or Christians. It’s a meaningless needle in a haystack. A good critical scholar always follows evidence and changes his or her mind many times on different issues. They don’t claim their inherited traditions were dictated by God and thus are absolutely true and must be defended as inerrant at all costs.

You can post however you want, but for me personally, I am only really interested in arguments. It would be great to me if you could simply quote Ehrman’s arguments that Mark calls Jesus God. Or that the other synoptic authors do as well. As far as I know, Mark views Jesus as God Son, he has his authority but is not fully equal with God on an ontological level. He just has that authority as his representative on earth. I would love to see actual evidence to the contrary. Can you provide it as opposed to making a bad and irrelevant argument about what the media would or wouldn’t do in regard to Bart changing his mind on an issue? Is this some sort of victim mentality? The media and Biblical critics are all out to get us? Have you stopped to consider that it may be the Christian’s failure to change and accept what everyone else knows that is creating the problem? That we are the Church arguing for geocentrism on many issues.

I think you are completely misinterpreting what Bart has say as a quote from him will show. But even if Bart changed his mind and thinks the synoptic authors think Jesus is God, he is not arguing or accepting that their beliefs are true. He believes the exact opposite in fact. If all he did was change his mind on an interpretive issue, why make a mountain out of a molehill? He doesn’t believe what you think he does.

I’m not interested in sensationalistic headlines but the meat of this issues. I’ve read several books by Ehrman, watched numerous debates with him, have his NT intro, peruse his mailing list articles and personal blog and am currently watching his Great Courses Intro to the NT from my local library. I am somewhat familiar with work. Have you actually read his full comments on this? Or are you just going by headlines and a quote without careful unpacking of it?

It is true he claims Jesus is viewed as on par with God in the synoptic Gospels. But he does not believe Jesus is portrayed as God as you do. He thinks they present an adoptionist Christology. Much much lower than John’s. They don’t suppose a pre-existence or an incarnation of Jesus. God merely descended on Jesus at his Baptism (or maybe virginal conception). That is not remotely close to modern Christian doctrine. The church deemed adoptionist views heresy. Bart believes the synoptic Gospels teach something no orthodox Christians does and all of them would decisively disagree with him on it. He also thinks Luke’s text was changed to remove an adoptionist Christology and like Fitzmyer and many other competent exegetes, thinks the infancy narrative was added to Luke in a second edition. Here is what he actually thinks:

<<<It still think it is true that the Synoptic Gospels do not portray Jesus as a pre-existent being who has become incarnate and is and always has been “equal” with God the way John does. They do not have an incarnational Christology lurking somewhere behind them. What they do have, however, is an exaltation Christology, in which either (a) Jesus was understood to have been exalted to a divine status at his baptism, as in Mark and the original form of Luke (which began with ch. 3, before chs. 1-2 were tacked on in a second edition); or (b) Jesus came into existence as the Son of God because God was the one who made his mother pregnant, as in the second edition of Luke that started with chs. 1-2 and probably in the Gospel of Matthew.>>>

Jesus was exalted to a divine status at his baptism. That’s not “fully God/fully man.” Bart does not agree with you. Many critical scholars think the synoptic Gospels have adoptionist Christogies. This is not new news or a big deal.

Vinnie

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35

I believe it is.

“Until a year ago I would have said – and frequently did say, in the classroom, in public lectures, and in my writings – that Jesus is portrayed as God in the Gospel of John but not, definitely not, in the other Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.” B. Ehrman
Now, he admits he was wrong. Of course, we are free to weight his change of mind as we see fit. I think it would be best if you read his arguments. I believed he was wrong all along. To me, it was obvious He was God in each Gospel. To be frank, I really cannot begin to understand how he could not see that. My argument is that once God, always God. He always was and always will be. Being baptized meant nothing in terms of who He was. Nothing. A waste of time to try to divide him up, to me.

I have described why I think the bias of the media is important.

I have read a great deal of Bart’s work. It is terribly flawed. Terribly, brutally. It is built on incorrect assumptions and by the time he’s done, he’s way, way off. It is a shame. And, he’s inconsistent. The NT contains the essential truths he believed in when he was born again. He left his faith over the evil in the world, not because of his views on scripture. The world has been evil for a long time, so leaving over the evil is difficult to understand. I mentioned this: he and Metzger agree on all the fundamental content of Christianity as depicted in the NT.

God never adopted Jesus. He does adopt us through Christ, though. As gentile/Christians, we are grafted into the Olive Tree of the historic chosen people of God.

“11 Don’t forget that you Gentiles used to be outsiders. You were called “uncircumcised heathens” by the Jews, who were proud of their circumcision, even though it affected only their bodies and not their hearts. 12 In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. 13 But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ.”
Ephesians 2:19
19 So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family.
Ephesians 3:6
6 And this is God’s plan: Both Gentiles and Jews who believe the Good News share equally in the riches inherited by God’s children. Both are part of the same body, and both enjoy the promise of blessings because they belong to Christ Jesus.
Romans 11:17-24
17 But some of these branches from Abraham’s tree—some of the people of Israel—have been broken off. And you Gentiles, who were branches from a wild olive tree, have been grafted in. So now you also receive the blessing God has promised Abraham and his children, sharing in the rich nourishment from the root of God’s special olive tree."

God cannot adopt his own son, can He?

Antony Flew left atheism because he intended to follow the evidence all along, despite what his fellow atheists expected of him. We all should do the same.

I love the transition Malcolm Muggeridge went through and the love he felt for Mother Teresa. Buckley interviews him several times on Firing Line. Well worth a look. Wonderfully educated, brilliant, fascinating man. He says, “The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.” Lust is destroying the lives of hundreds of millions people. It is a killer, a spiritual death penalty, particularly among the most committed Christians. It is a nightmare, a real Freddy Kreuger, a master of seduction and betrayal, all in exchange for the fool’s gold of some elusive high that remains out of reach forever.

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Any more non-commercial details anywhere on what Ehrman meant seven years ago?

Thought not.

Nowhere in the synoptics does Jesus claim to be (very) God. One doesn’t need to pay Bart to find that out.

Oh look. No change there then. None at all.

PS @Ralphie - there is nothing to fear from being rational and faithful. Although it is a fearful experience : )

37

Thanks again on the PA. This second iteration has made moved it in from the pale for me; misogyny, gynophobia as identified by dear old Augustine, which I was aware of, does explain its exclusion.

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If He wasn’t God, who was He?

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I want to believe He was Ralphie. And the NT reflects that a rock landed in the Jewish lagoon of the Greco-Roman sea and the impact is still with us. But if He wasn’t God, he was the greatest man who ever lived anyway. He was counter-cultural, totally inclusive, radical, revolutionary, pacifist; he honoured women, children, the disabled, the sick, the poor, foreigners; the other, spoke truth to power and that we all abuse our privilege; we all are found wanting in all our power dynamics. There is no comparable person in all of history. If He wasn’t God, there is no God. If there is, then He proves it in Christ.

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I’m pretty sure he wasn’t Ralphie.

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None of the gospels are history in the modern academic sense. The purpose of these texts is not that of a text of history. Nor is it biography. But that does not mean there are no historical or biographical elements in them. Much of the purpose of these texts is to relate both the teachings and the events of Jesus’ ministry. And especially in John more than the other three, there is an addition of theological explanation – it is one of the things that makes this gospel so important to Christianity. Do I see any convincing reason to think that the events in the gospel did not happen? No. But then my interest in the text is not that of an historian. I am not an historian and the things about which an historian is usually obsessed do not greatly interest me. Furthermore I consider claims to objectivity in history such that it can or should be distinguished from “reframing” to be rather dubious.

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