Interpreting the Gospel of John

A Practical Guide

Gary M. Burge

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801048845
• eBook ISBN: 9781441242556
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This tried and true classroom favorite by respected New Testament scholar Gary Burge has been praised for its usefulness. The expanded second edition has been revised throughout to take account of current scholarship and introduces software tools that have become available since the original edition was published. Combining original insight with how-to guidance, this textbook helps students interpret the Gospel of John and apply it in teaching and preaching.

Part
1
Before You Begin

I enjoy museums. How easy it is to wander through them wondering if you’ve missed some great exhibit hidden down a long hallway or barely understood what’s behind the display case. One of my favorites is the British Museum in London (on Great Russell Street). Here are housed some of the greatest treasures of the world, from the famed Rosetta Stone to the astounding Assyrian Lion Hunt frieze, which was removed from Ashurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh (in modern Iraq). One year I went to see the Elgin Marbles—sculpted marble reliefs taken from the fifth-century-BC Greek Parthenon from 1802 to 1812 by British adventurer Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin. (This deft “borrowing” took place while Bruce was Britain’s ambassador to Greece and while Athens was under the heel of the Turkish Ottomans.) They are magnificent (and I might add that the Greeks would like them returned). Just to look at their beauty is alone worth a visit.

But that year I happened on a unique opportunity. A specialist in ancient Greek history was giving a tour. He worked at the museum, was clearly a scholar, and he was very skilled at taking groups through the exhibit. I joined his small entourage of followers and discovered something that I didn’t want to admit. For all these years, I really didn’t know what I was looking at when I saw these priceless reliefs. But now, here was a scholar who could provide background and context to these walls of ancient art. And this information was inaccessible to the average person.

This is true of any academic discipline that we might explore for the first time. Simply having some background and context for it can make all the difference in our understanding. So I’ve learned my lesson. This year I visited the wonderful Getty Villa in Malibu, California. J. Paul Getty inherited millions of oil dollars by the time he was nineteen, and he spent a great deal of his life collecting Roman and Greek artifacts. About seventy-five years ago he decided to have architects and archaeologists build a reconstruction of a first-century Roman villa (modeled on one found at Herculaneum) on hills overlooking the Pacific so that he might display his collection of forty-four thousand objects. Today visiting the villa is free, and it has become an internationally recognized center for the study of classical civilization. While there, you’re free to wander about the villa and its gardens, or you can take a tour. I always take the tours.

Background and context—this is precisely what we need when we examine a piece of literature from the ancient world. And this is no less true when we study the Fourth Gospel. This is an ancient document, some two thousand years old. It comes to us in an ancient language, in some places its manuscript has seen alternations that show up in the many papyrus copies that we possess, and it describes events and scenes that are truly foreign to us. For generations, scholars have worked to interpret this Gospel—there is an entire “history of research” on it—and we have made solid progress in deciphering many of its mysteries.

The first task here is to establish some background and context for the Gospel of John. We’ll begin with a discussion of the scholarly conversations that have followed this Gospel (chap. 1). Then follows an inquiry about its authorship and possible origins among the followers of Jesus (chap. 2). Next comes an analysis of its literary forms so that we might understand how it is organized and how its stories interact with each other (chap. 3). Finally, we’ll explore some of its stylistic features (chap. 4) so that our reading of it will be more sophisticated and insightful. In the end, we want to be accurate and thoughtful interpreters of this beautiful Gospel—not unlike a visitor to the British Museum who sees the Elgin Marbles for the first time. If we don’t understand the meaning of a centaur, it will be hard to appreciate why one appeared on the walls of the Parthenon. Similarly, if we don’t understand the contextual nuances of the Gospel of John, much of its more refined meanings will be lost to us.

1
History of Interpretation

My first exposure to Johannine1 studies came in the autumn of 1972 at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. As an undergraduate exchange student, I was taking a course on the Gospels with a French Jesuit scholar. At one point he remarked that the New Testament nowhere gives evidence that Jesus went to Samaria. I eagerly offered the story of the Samaritan woman in John 4, whereupon he said, “Ah, yes, but that account appears in the Fourth Gospel, and as everyone knows, John is not historically trustworthy.” Confronted by what seemed an irrefutable scholarly argument, I retreated.

Today those same arguments are routinely put forward in colleges and seminaries. For example, in 1996 Maurice Casey published Is John’s Gospel True? and asserted the same thing, that the Fourth Gospel holds virtually no historical information that can contribute to a “life of Christ.”2 This point of view is common and appears frequently in scholarly circles.

When scholars reconstruct the life of Jesus, they constantly measure the quality of their sources. Is the Fourth Gospel a reliable source for the life of Jesus? On the one hand, we could answer with a statement of faith (“It’s in the scriptures, isn’t it?”), but such confession means little in the wider arenas of academic discussion, where faith has limited weight. On the other hand, knowing what has been said about this gospel—the history of its interpretation—equips us to address these academic challenges head on. Had I done so in 1972, I would have learned that my professor was completely out of step with current Johannine scholarship.

A considerable body of New Testament literature is traditionally attributed to John: a Gospel, three letters, and the book of Revelation. A host of noncanonical writings also lays claim to his name. The legend-filled Acts of John provides a fictional biography of the apostle, written in the early third century. The Syriac History of John portrays the apostle as a magic-working evangelist. Gnostic3 sources such as the Gospel of Philip quote fragments of Johannine-style sayings, while others provide accounts of John’s contact with Jesus, missions, and martyrdom.4 This apocryphal literature may be set aside with ease; the biblical Johannine material has aroused more debate.

The Early Period

In the early church the Fourth Gospel held the highest place of honor. Since it was thought to originate with the “Beloved Disciple,” who was one of the closest to Jesus, it was esteemed to be the most valuable Gospel. Further, John’s Gospel offered a depth of insight unparalleled in the Synoptic5 Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).

Unfortunately, the heretics loved this Gospel as well. A second-century gnostic writing from Egypt, the Gospel of Truth, shows extensive Johannine parallels. The first commentary on John’s Gospel of which we are aware was written by Heracleon (c. 170–80), the most famous disciple of Valentinus, who founded the Valentinian gnostic sect. In fact, all of the earliest commentaries on John were gnostic. The charismatic leader Montanus even went so far as to claim to be the promised Paraclete or comforter described in John 14–16! For many years, scholars believed that the Fourth Gospel was only cautiously received by orthodox leaders because of this gnostic interest. Some have argued that many leaders openly opposed it. But today this view has been successfully challenged by Charles Hill in two important recent monographs.6 From the mid-second century right through the third century, compelling evidence shows that the Fourth Gospel was known and used as a part of the church’s authoritative roster of Gospels.

Irenaeus (c. 175) and some other early church leaders saw that John’s incarnational theology could be used to devise the sort of heresies being spawned in gnostic circles. When Arians depicted Jesus as a created being who was fully subordinate to the Father, and therefore much like humans, Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea (325) looked to the Fourth Gospel’s doctrine of Christ (or Christology) as an uncompromising affirmation of Jesus’s divinity.7

This high respect continued through medieval Christendom. From Augustine (354–430) to Aquinas (1224–74) and beyond, John provided the portrait of a Jesus who directly revealed the Father. Mysticism and sacramentalism likewise found in John the language and symbolic images that they enjoyed. Commentaries from this period abound.

All of this came to an abrupt end during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this period all of the gospels came under skeptical scrutiny as European universities rejected supernatural religion. In 1778 the lecture notes of the German scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) were published. These notes denied Jesus’s claim to messiahship, argued that the gospels were later fabrications, and urged the implausibility of the resurrection. Scholars launched a brave quest to find the real Jesus of history, a rationalistic history dictated by Enlightenment standards.

Three questions were continually at issue for over 150 years after Reimarus:

1. Is the supernatural admissible as genuine history?
2. What are the relative merits of the Gospels?
3. What is the essence of Jesus’s message?

This third question was laden with nuances. Did Jesus preach about an ultimate crisis or catastrophe for Judaism and the world, with himself at the center (eschatology)? Did Jesus anticipate, understand, and interpret his own death? Indeed, did Jesus even claim to be the Son of God or the Messiah?

John’s gospel again enjoyed some favor among those who rejected orthodoxy because it contained fewer miracles and reported that Jesus gave lengthy, Socratic-like discourses. Karl Hase (1800–1890) argued that the Johannine miracle stories seemed more authentic and less prone to embellishment. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) embraced John fully in lectures given in 1832 and published in 1864. John is an eyewitness, Schleiermacher maintained, who gives us a Jesus of depth and substance. John offered something that resonated in the nineteenth-century liberal soul. John was sublime and offered a religious feeling that fit the era well.

But critical objections were soon to follow. In 1835 David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74) forced the Johannine question in his influential The Life of Christ. Strauss believed that each gospel writer promoted a preconceived theological portrait of Jesus, rendering the gospel presentations unhistorical. He believed this to be especially true of John. This gospel was inferior because it served a literary schema and was influenced by second-century dogmas. Strauss pointed to John’s baptismal narrative (1:29–34), the calling of the first disciples (1:35–51), and especially the absence of any mention of Jesus’s “Gethsemane struggle” to show that the Fourth Gospel was the conscious result of “devotional, but unhistorical embellishment.”8 He even showed how the language of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel was John’s own language by comparing it with the Johannine Epistles! Strauss compelled New Testament scholars to choose between John and the synoptics on the grounds that their differences were utterly irreconcilable.

At Germany’s Tübingen University Strauss had studied with Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860).9 It was Baur who propelled Strauss into biblical criticism, and it was Baur who sealed the fate of John among scholars for years to come. Baur and what came to be known as the Tübingen school drew deeply from the well of Hegelian philosophy.

Georg Hegel (1770–1831) asserted that the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis fueled all of history. In this process, major movements (thesis) are often met with opposition (antithesis), and their conflict eventually results in a synthesis. For better or worse, Baur applied this sweeping framework to early Christianity. Judaism and Hellenism had intermingled to produce Christianity. Baur went to exaggerated lengths to emphasize how Jewish elements in the church (symbolized by Peter) opposed Greek interests (symbolized by Paul), resulting in a consensus—what he called “early Catholicism” (which referred to a uniform, organized Christian order). He elaborately organized the New Testament documents around this process: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and Galatians were Paul’s Gentile Christian salvos; Matthew and the book of Revelation were the Jewish Christian responses; Acts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: Before You Begin
• Part 2: Strategies for Interpretation
• Part 3: Preaching and Teaching from the Fourth Gospel
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Notes
• Back Cover