The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic

John Shelby Spong

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062198167
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

John Shelby Spong, bestselling author and popular proponent of a modern, scholarly and authentic Christianity, argues that this last gospel to be written was misinterpreted by the framers of the fourth-century creeds to be a literal account of the life of Jesus when in fact it is a literary, interpretive retelling of the events in Jesus' life through the medium of fictional characters, from Nicodemus and Lazarus to the "Beloved Disciple." The Fourth Gospel was designed first to place Jesus into the context of the Jewish scriptures, then to place him into the worship patterns of the synagogue and finally to allow him to be viewed through the lens of a popular form of first-century Jewish mysticism.

The result of this intriguing study is not only to recapture the original message of this gospel, but also to provide us today with a radical new dimension to the claim that in the humanity of Jesus the reality of God has been met and engaged.

PART I

Introducing the Fourth Gospel

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Stage

Throughout most of my professional career I was not drawn to the Fourth Gospel; indeed I found it almost repellent. This gospel presented, I believed, a Jesus whose humanity was no longer intact. John’s Jesus claimed pre-existence—that is, he said he came to this earth from another life in another place. He was portrayed as possessing clairvoyance—that is, he knew about people’s lives and their pasts before he met them. He was even said to know what they were thinking while he was talking to them. The Jesus of John’s gospel also seemed to endure crucifixion without suffering. He displayed no anxiety about having to meet his destiny, no unwillingness “to drink this cup,” as he described it; indeed John has him state that this was the purpose for which he had been born.

The place where I experienced the most negative impact of the Fourth Gospel was in the role it played in the development of both the creeds and the imposed dogmas of the church. Because this book was thought to have spelled out “orthodox Christianity,” John’s gospel also helped to fuel such dreadful events in Christian history as heresy hunts and the Inquisition. As the centuries rolled by, John’s gospel seemed to make meaningful discourse on the nature of the Christ figure almost impossible. Every creed developed in church history appears to have been created primarily to falsify the Jesus experience by forcing that experience into time-bound and time-warped human words. The original creed of the Christian church was just three words: “Jesus is messiah.” I believe that this is still the best creed the Christian church has ever developed. When Christianity moved from a Jewish world, where the meaning of the word “messiah” was understood, into a Gentile world where that word was strange and unknown, “Jesus is messiah” became “Jesus is Lord.” That shift in turn opened Christianity to a very new and different understanding of Christology, that is of the person of Jesus. The next stage in creedal development grew out of baptismal formulas in the second and third centuries, which later evolved into what we call today the Apostles’ Creed, though I think it is fair to say that none of the actual apostles would have recognized it as expressing their understanding of Jesus.

Then came the more convoluted Nicene Creed adopted by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and still later its potential successor, the three-page attack on any deviation from “the catholic faith” known as the Athanasian Creed of the late fourth century, which, thank God, never found its way into corporate worship. These later creeds—the Apostles’, the Nicene and the Athanasian—all reflected both a three-tiered universe and Greek dualism, as they attempted to define Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation into human form of the theistic God who lived above the sky and later as the second person of “the divine and eternal Trinity.” It was the Fourth Gospel more than any other biblical source that Athanasius, the fourth-century “champion of orthodoxy,” quoted almost exclusively in these formative debates. Creeds, by definition, are always barrier-building vehicles. By this I mean that creeds are ecclesiastical attempts to draw the theological lines so firmly in the sand that it becomes easy to determine who is in and who is out, who are the “orthodox” believers and who are the “heretics.” The Nicene Creed defined Jesus over and over again in “loophole-closing rhetoric.” Listen to its repetitious words: Jesus is “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father, through whom all things were made.” It was “for us and for our salvation” that Jesus “came down from heaven.” In these definitions the finger of the debate points to and the vocabulary of the debate reveals the influence of the Fourth Gospel in every line. Those creedal connections served to dim my enthusiasm for this gospel, if for no other reason than that imposed orthodoxy is never real and never vital.

That creedal system seemed to me to have locked Jesus into a pre-modern world, to have defined God as an invasive, miracle-working deity from outer space, and to have made the work of engaging the world in dialogue not only very difficult, but almost impossible. The discipline of theological study known as “apologetics” was meant to be the study of how we can recast the meaning found in the Jesus experience into the thought forms of contemporary society, but instead it has become the activity of defending ancient and dated formulations. This meant that throughout most of my career, both as a priest and as a bishop, I saw John’s gospel more as a problem in ministry than as an asset. So my tactic was to avoid it, if possible, to ignore it whenever I could not avoid it, and simply to resign myself to the reality that it was in the canon of scripture. Sometimes I walked around this gospel. At other times I attacked it or at least attacked those I thought misunderstood and/or misused its message. I certainly never wanted to spend much time on it. I was given a copy of Rudolf Bultmann’s commentary entitled The Gospel of John by a dear friend in early 1974. I placed it on a shelf and did not crack its cover until 2010, a period of thirty-six years! For one who thinks of himself as intellectually curious, that is quite a record.

A number of things challenged this understanding near the end of my active career. One was disillusionment with the perspective known as salvation or atonement theology. Atonement theology concentrates on human depravity and weakness and portrays God as a “divine rescuer” on whom we are totally dependent. Most people, while not using those words, would recognize atonement theology as the primary way they have learned to think about Christianity. It is present in most liturgical forms used in the majority of churches. Later in this book, when it is appropriate to do so, I will spell out the origins, the development and the power of this pattern of thinking and relate it to its own scriptural sources. I will also show why it has collapsed under the onslaught of the expanding knowledge of the Western world, which has caused the concept of God employed in its theological understanding to become both “homeless”—that is, without a place to live above the sky—and “unemployed”—that is, without any work to do in a post-age-of-miracles world.

As I became aware of the bankruptcy of this dominant way of understanding the Christian story in the latter years of my professional career and as my writing turned to trying to formulate what I called “A New Christianity for a New World,” several things happened which nudged my mind open and invited me to look at the Fourth Gospel in a new way.

First, I began to see John’s gospel increasingly as a Jewish book. It was not, as scholars in the early twentieth century had begun to assert, primarily a Gnostic work, a text influenced by Hellenism, nor even a book shaped by Philo, a first-century Jewish philosopher who tried to merge Jerusalem with Athens. Rather, it was, as I began to discover, an authentically Palestinian-Jewish book. Having in an earlier book developed an understanding of Mark, Matthew and Luke as liturgical works shaped by the worship life of the synagogue and organized around the liturgical year of Jewish festivals and fast days,* I now wondered if I could find a similar background clue that might unravel John for me. I then came across a 1960 book written by Aileen Guilding entitled The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship: A Study of the Relation of St. John’s Gospel to the Ancient Jewish Lectionary System.* As I devoured that book, it created a new window into John’s gospel for me. Still, however, I did not know what to do with the pre-existent divine claims made for Jesus, or with John’s ideas of Jesus being the word of God enfleshed and thus one who shared in the oneness of God.

Next I began to work on my book that was published in 2009 under the title Eternal Life: A New Vision—Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell, which plunged me into a study of the origins of life. I read astrophysics and biology. I traveled to remote places in the world, including the Amazon Rain Forest, the Galapagos Islands, Kruger Park (the world’s largest game preserve, located in South Africa), and the Great Barrier Reef in northern Queensland, Australia, to examine life in a variety of forms. In each of these settings, my agenda was to study every manifestation of life—plant life, insect life, animal life, even single-cell life. I studied the development of consciousness, then of self-consciousness and finally opened myself to the possibility of there being something called a universal consciousness. I began to rethink and ultimately to dismiss the theistic definition of God and started moving away from an understanding of God as “a being” to an understanding of God as “Being itself,” or as Paul Tillich, the formative theologian of my early training, would say, as “the Ground of Being.”

From here I began to look anew at mysticism, at claims of new dimensions of consciousness achieved in the mystical experience and more specifically at forms of Jewish mysticism present in the first century. With that background, quite suddenly John’s gospel began to unfold before me as a work of Jewish mysticism and the Jesus of John’s gospel suddenly became not a visitor from another realm, but a person in whom a new God consciousness had emerged. Now, seen from that new perspective, the claim of oneness with the Father was not incarnational language, but mystical language. Such Johannine statements as, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” as well as the “I AM” sayings by which John’s gospel has Jesus claim the name of God for himself, and even the purpose of John’s Jesus to bring to life a new wholeness, all became provocative new doorways into what this gospel might actually mean.

So, armed with those insights from multiple sources, I entered upon a study of John’s gospel that consumed over five years. It was one of the richer learning experiences of my entire life. Other than the daily newspaper and books that I had agreed to endorse or review, I read nothing in those years but Fourth Gospel materials. I have now read almost every recognized major commentary on John’s gospel that is available in English from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have roamed through learned biblical and theological journals for articles on John published over the last century. Even at that I have only scratched the surface of what is available.

I have no pretensions about this book. It is not a new commentary. Learned commentaries abound, but those for whom I write are not going to read them. Bultmann’s commentary never translates the Greek text, for example, making it a real struggle even for one like me who has a background in Greek. Without that background it would be impossible. Raymond Brown’s commentary, The Gospel According to John, is in two volumes totaling over eleven hundred pages, all in very small print and with copious notes. Urban von Wahlde’s commentary is in three volumes, containing over two thousand pages, and deeply repetitious. Several commentaries from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were written in two columns; set up like encyclopedias or dictionaries, they do not encourage readers to look at more than brief passages. My readers want meaning, not technical facts nor excessive knowledge of the various elemental stages in the development of John’s book. So I have read the commentaries for them and have tried to distill the meaning. John’s gospel is about life—expanded life, abundant life, and ultimately eternal life—but not in the typical manner that these words have been understood religiously. I see a new paradigm arising in Christianity and I try to speak to that paradigm and to ground it in the tradition by breaking open the Fourth Gospel to a new interpretive process. I found the Fourth Gospel a book to be lived as much as it was a volume to be mastered.

To get to this place, however, given the way in which the Bible is understood in the religious culture of our world, will not be a simple task. So much superstition has been laid on the texts of the Bible and so many of the fears of men and women have been invested in this book as people seek a certainty in the Bible, which neither life nor religion can ever provide, that genuine biblical knowledge is hard to attain. Both of these must be set aside before biblical understanding can be gained. This setting aside, however, is not easily accomplished. It will cause traditionally religious people to feel threatened, attacked and even angry and they will resist these pages with a vengeance, that will even express itself in the character assassination of those whom they perceive have done this to them. Meanwhile, those people, who have long ago dismissed most traditional religious categories as irrelevant to their lives, are not motivated to enter a study that is this complex, because they do not think the conclusions they might reach will be worth the effort. Both of these groups I want to urge to persevere and journey with me as I seek to lay the groundwork for a new way to look at Christianity and a new way to read the gospel of John. I can assure you that for me the reward has been worth the labor. I can only hope that this will also be so for my readers.

Those who define themselves in traditional religious language may well be scandalized by this book, even as those who think of themselves as members of the “Church Alumni Association” may well be intrigued, as both groups learn in these pages that the gospel of John was written in different layers by different authors over a period of about thirty years. It, therefore, cannot contain in any sense the literal “words of God.” They will also learn that none of the sayings attributed to Jesus in this gospel was in all probability ever spoken by the Jesus of history. They will learn that none of the miracles, called “signs” in this book, and attributed to Jesus, ever actually happened. They will learn that most of the characters who populate the pages of this gospel are literary or fictionalized creations of the author and were never real people who ever lived. They will learn that the language of an external deity entering into the flesh of our physical existence, which shapes the way most people both understand Christianity and the way they read this gospel, is not even close to what the writer of this gospel intended.

With these words of both introduction to my methods and warning about my conclusions, I now invite you to turn the pages, read on and walk deeply into the background of what we call the gospel of John.

CHAPTER 2

John: One Gospel, More Than One Author

The Fourth Gospel has been traditionally read and understood by most people as if it were the work of a single author. That assumption, however, is not shared by the vast majority of Johannine scholars. They tend to see this gospel as a book that went through a series of editorial revisions by different authors over a period of years until it reached the stage of development in which we have it today. To support their theories, these scholars point to contradictions in the body of the gospel itself, places in the text that give us the impression of forced unity and places where editorial additions appear not to have been woven into the text seamlessly. For example, in some parts of this gospel we find what scholars call a “low Christology.” By this they mean that in portions of the Johannine text the life of Jesus is seen and described primarily in terms of well-known Jewish messianic images: the new Moses, the new Elijah, the prophet of whom Moses spoke. While all of these images point to an extraordinary life, none of them necessarily claims for Jesus a divine status. There are, however, other passages in this gospel that reveal what scholars call a “high Christology.” By this they mean that the life of Jesus is seen and portrayed primarily in divine, supernatural terms. Jesus is frequently pictured as claiming a special and unique relationship with God that borders on complete identification. Clairvoyance is also attributed to Jesus in several episodes. In still other places the claim is made for Jesus having known pre-existent or pre-earthly life, prior to his birth into this world.

In this gospel alone, countless numbers of times Jesus is made to employ the divine name “I AM” as if it were his own. The opening prologue makes claims for both his pre-existence and his divine nature: “The word was with God and the word was God” (John 1:1), and “the word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

One might argue that each of these claims, the low Christology and the high Christology, is true, and in some sense that is what creedal Christianity sought to express with its assertion that Jesus was both “fully human” and “fully divine.” That, however, is a dualistic theological idea that came to dominance about three hundred or so years after the crucifixion of Jesus and could hardly have reflected the thought of a person living in the latter half of the first century, when John’s gospel was written.

Scholars have become quite convinced that they see behind the present form of John’s gospel earlier sources that were incorporated into the final text. One of the postulated pre-Johannine sources is called the Book of Signs, and much of the material in chapters 2 through 11 of John’s gospel is believed by these scholars to reflect this source. If that premise is true, and no less a scholar than Rudolf Bultmann makes a strong case for it, we need to recognize that this would account for the material beginning with the story of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana of Galilee and concluding with the story of Jesus raising from the dead a man named Lazarus. That represents just under half of this gospel.

Clues that lead these scholars to the conclusion that the Book of Signs was originally a separate source are found in that part of the gospel narrative itself. The text of John’s gospel refers to the water into wine story as “the first of the signs” that Jesus did in order to “manifest his glory” (John 2:11). In response to this sign we are told in the text that the disciples “believed in him.” Later references speak of Jesus’ “second sign,” but admittedly the numbering gets a bit vague by the time we arrive at the last sign, the Lazarus story in chapter 11.

In this proposed “independent” signs book, a sign is depicted as a mighty act, done quite publicly, that points to something even bigger and more important. At the same time, as we shall note later in this book, the signs accounts are filled with strange references, enigmatic words, unusual actions and dramatically drawn characters, all of which appear to mitigate against these signs ever having been understood as literal events that occurred inside the normal flow of history. Stories that the synoptic gospels portray as miracles with no great hesitancy are much more obscure in John. The word “sign” stands for this obscurity.

Another aspect of this Johannine strangeness is found in the dramatically heightened imagery of the signs related in the Fourth Gospel. It is as if these signs were exaggerated for a purpose that is not readily understandable. There is no question that there are some things about these signs that are quite different and distinct from the ...