Read The Gospel of John and Christian Origins Online
Authors: John Ashton
Segovia makes a further admission:
My argument is not that I have unveiled the real meaning of the text (its actual structure, arrangement, and development) or discovered the intention of the author (whether real or intended), but that I can advance such a reading of the text in the light of the evidence, the textual features and constraints, that I find in it. . . . My proposed reading of the Gospel ultimately says as much about me as about the Gospel, if not more.
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In that case, one is tempted to say, why should we bother to read Segovia if what really interests us is the Gospel of John?
Some thirty years ago, in a half-dozen pages of a chapter entitled “The Community and Its Book” in the first edition of
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
, I set out clearly and concisely my own conclusions concerning the composition of the Gospel, conclusions repeated sixteen years later, with a few minor corrections, in the second edition. Nothing I have seen since in the work of those Johannine scholars, the large majority, who have abandoned traditional historical criticism,
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has persuaded me to change my mind. I will not repeat those conclusions in full, but, because the thesis of the present book is so intricately bound up with parts of this general theory, I will briefly summarize them before proceeding to some more detailed arguments.
1. Underlying the present text of the Gospel is what German scholars call a
Grundschrift
, often named a Signs Source, but which I prefer to think of as a missionary manifesto, written to promote faith in Jesus as the Messiah and as the prophet foretold by Moses.
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2. This manifesto was accepted by some members of a Jewish synagogue, but not by all. The disagreements that ensued between the traditionalists and the partisans of Jesus (the Jesus group) went on for a long time, culminating in a breakdown of communications and finally in the complete separation of the two parties.
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3. Many of the arguments that preceded the breakdown are remembered in controversy stories that figure importantly in the first edition of the Gospel, which also contained revelatory sayings and longer discourses of a prophetic nature.
4. The second edition of the Gospel contained a new introduction (the Prologue), an extra chapter (chapter 6), an expansion of the Farewell Discourse (chapters 15–17), and a different explanation of the decision to put Jesus to death (chapter 11), which led to the displacement of the temple episode to its present position in chapter 2.
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I will conclude with a thorough examination of the awkward conjunction between John 5 and 6, one of the two most significant problem spots justifying the conclusion that there must have been (at least) two editions of the Gospels.
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This problem has traditionally been seen as one of
order
. It has appeared to many students of the Gospel that chapter 6 should come not after chapter 5 but
before. This is how Bultmann states and solves the problem:
The present order of chs. 5 and 6 cannot be the original one. Since in 6.1 Jesus goes “to the other side” (πέραν) of the lake, he must have been at the lake-side beforehand; but in ch. 5 he is in Jerusalem. Thus ch. 6 has no connection with ch. 5. On the other hand it would follow on ch. 4 very well [because Jesus is in Galilee at the end of that chapter]. Correspondingly, 7.1 assumes that Jesus had been staying in Judaea (Jerusalem) up till then, and ch. 7 would thus link up with ch. 5. So the original order must have been 4, 6, 5, 7. This is confirmed by the fact that this order makes good sense of 4.44, which otherwise makes no sense at all, and also by the fact that 6.2 (τὰ σημεῖα . . . ἐπὶ τῶν ἀσθενούντων [“the signs he performed on those who were diseased”]) is now seen to be a reference back to the exemplary story of 4.46-54. It also enables us to see the chronological order which the Evangelist had in mind. The festival which was imminent in 6.4 has started in 5.1. Finally 7.1 states that Jesus left Judaea because the Jews wanted to kill him, which is appropriate only as a reference back to 5.18 provided ch. 5 immediately preceded ch. 7. Moreover the themes which are discussed in chs. 5 and 6 make the order 6, 5 more probable. Ch. 6 shows that the revelation is the κρίσις of man’s natural desire for life, ch. 5 that it is the κρίσις of his religion. In ch. 6 we have the dispute with the people, in ch. 5 with their leaders.
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Bultmann rightly sees that the primary difficulty is
contextual
. There can be no doubt, I think, that if the problems he highlights so effectively could be solved simply by rearranging the material his solution would work very well, and it is not surprising (as he himself says in a note) that he was not the first to propose it (nor the last). (It had been put forward in fact as early as the fourteenth century
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and is also the preferred solution of Rudolf Schnackenburg and Jürgen Becker.) But if one is relying on the dislocation hypothesis, it is too good to be true. For if the Gospel had in fact been composed not on a scroll but on a codex and its leaves had somehow become lost and jumbled up in the way the theory requires, then it becomes hard to credit that once they had been gathered together again the evangelist (or anyone else already acquainted with the material) would have reassembled them in the wrong order.
The synchronists, however, have a different problem, because they have to make sense of chapters 5 and 6 as they stand. How do they manage to do this? Dodd gets around the problem by ignoring it. He does, to be fair, discuss many of the other aporias (though never convincingly), but not this one. He correctly observes an important break between chapters 4 and 5, which starts with a journey to Jerusalem. But the difficult transition, as Bultmann notes, is between chapters 5 and 6, where without warning we suddenly find Jesus in Galilee again, at the lakeside. Dodd contents himself with observing that “the introductory sentences, vi.1-3, bring together motives which belong to the common substance of the Gospel tradition.”
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Not a word about the sudden shift of location, nor about the difficulties that have induced many commentators to transpose chapters 5 and 6.
A solution from the literary critical or narratological camp has been proposed by Mark Stibbe. Following up an observation that the plot, characterization, and vocabulary of the Gospel seem designed to evoke a sense of elusiveness, mystery, excitement, and suspense, he continues by quoting a remark of H. E. Edwards concerning the itinerary of chapters 5 and 6: “It is as if you were reading a letter from a friend in which he was telling you about salmon fishing in Scotland, and then, as you turn the page, the letter went on, ‘After this I went over London Bridge.’”
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“It is not impossible,” comments Stibbe, “that the author intended this sequence in order to heighten the sense of Jesus’ ability to move about so quickly and so elusively.” Not impossible, perhaps, but surely not very likely. Is this, I wonder, one of those simple solutions to the aporias of the kind favored by Bauckham and Segovia?
Craig Keener disposes of the difficulty toward the beginning of his exegesis of chapter 5:
To keep the Gospel’s geography neater, some have argued that chs. 5 and 6 have been transposed, but this approach does not take into account what John simply assumes, namely major chronological as well as geographical gaps (e.g. 7:2; 10:22; 11:55). While such transposition is conceivable for pages in a codex, it is difficult to conceive such an accident for the earliest version, on scrolls;
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and no manuscripts attest the alleged transposition. It is possible that 6:28-29 depends on the prior description of the works of Father and Son in 5:20, 36. Further, . . . the closing paragraph of ch. 5 presents Jesus as one greater than Moses, which becomes a central theme in ch. 6. ‘After these things’ (μετὰ ταῦτα) is a common chronological transition device.
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Since “the major chronological as well as geographical gaps” are among the Gospel’s salient aporias,
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to assume that John assumes them, in an otherwise continuous narrative, is to beg the question. It comes as no surprise to find that Keener, like all partisans of synchronicity, gets around many of the Gospel’s aporias (in his case 14:31 as well as 7:2 and 10:22) by ignoring them.
Nevertheless his concluding observation concerning the presentation of Jesus as one greater than Moses is worth following up. A similar comment is made by Andrew Lincoln, for whom the transposition theory “may well be over-concerned with geographical issues at the expense of thematic links.”
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Peder Borgen has a short study of John 6 in which, after excusing himself from the task of dealing with the relationship of that chapter with chapter 5, he observes that “the final part of the discourse in 5:19-47 might serve as the thematic background of ch. 6: Jn 6.31-58 serves as an illustration of the searching of the Scriptures mentioned in Jn 5.39-40. The phrase ἐραυνᾶτε τὰς γραφάς in Jn 5.39 is even a Greek equivalent of the technical term for performing a midrashic exegesis.”
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Borgen follows this observation up with further arguments to the same effect but fails to note that Barnabas Lindars had made exactly the same point in 1972 in support of his suggestion that chapter 6 is
a later insertion
.
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Unwilling to consider how this chapter follows on from what precedes, Borgen sidesteps the real difficulty: if the evangelist wished to illustrate his point about Jesus as the fulfillment of Scripture, why nevertheless did he not add a verse or two in explanation of his sudden return to Galilee?
Unlike Martin Hengel, not one of these authors—Bultmann, Dodd, Stibbe, Keener, Borgen—even considers the possibility that the Gospel was not composed at a single sitting but over a period of years. Yet it is surely much more likely that the evangelist
added
an extra chapter at this point without taking the trouble to make the adjustments that a smooth transition would require than that he neglected to provide a link while engaged in the process of a continuous composition.
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Elsewhere in his Gospel, when Jesus moves from one place to another the evangelist says so.
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Why not here? The Gospel records in 6:1 that Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee but says not a word about how he got to Galilee in the first place. Why not? Lindars’s answer, elegant and economic (and effectively supported by Borgen) is surely the best of the many solutions on offer. If it has not been considered seriously by subsequent commentators this can only be because they have not entertained the proposal that the composition of the Gospel was interrupted, perhaps more than once, while the Jesus group was experiencing major changes in its relationship with the synagogue.
It should be observed that the relationship between Jesus and “the Jews” is very different in chapters 5 and 6. As happens so often, internal dissension is accompanied by a slackening of hostility toward enemies from without. The implacably resentful persecutors of the previous chapter have given way to groups of people divided among themselves. Jesus’ interlocutors, though often referred to by the vague term
crowd
,
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continue nevertheless to be called οἱ ’Ιουδαῖοι (6:4, 41, 52). In this chapter, however, their “grumbling” (γογγυσμός, v. 41) is prompted more by bewilderment than by a real antagonism. The best explanation of this change of attitude is that the two chapters represent different periods of the community’s relationship with “the Jews.”