early Christianity is the key to an understanding of the origins and the purpose of According to John. Up until the middle of the twentieth century critical scholarship more or less took for granted that this gospel had been written in the second century by a Christian who wished to make Christianity understandable to a Hellenistic audience. With this in mind the author had left out the apocalyptic message of Jesus and transposed the message of Jesus into a Hellenistic key. According to this view, the gospel was the culmination of a straight line of theological development which began with the Synoptic gospels, was developed by Paul in his letters and reached its climax in According to John. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, made it clear that Judaism, and even the apocalyptic sectarian community at Qumran, was thoroughly Hellenized by Jesus’ time. The then popular distinctions between Hebraic and Hellenistic thought and between Palestinian and Diaspora Judaism were severely modified by the new evidence. The old model for understanding the oral traditions about Jesus, which classified them by determining whether they came from a Jewish-Palestinian-Aramaic speaking, a Jewish-Palestinian-Greek speaking, a Jewish-Greek-speaking-Diaspora, or a Gentile-Greek speaking environment, has been thoroughly rejected. Most scholars now agree that According to John was not written by a disciple of Jesus on the basis of his participation in the story, or by a late author who sat down to write a gospel to attract Hellenists to Christ using oral traditions that circulated in a Gentile-Greek speaking environment.
It seems most likely that the writing now known as According to John took shape in a Christian community within Judaism that over time revised and added materials to its foundational document. What we have is an in-house document that served to give meaning to the significant experiences in the life of this community. The members of this community had belonged previously to Jewish groups in the periphery and did not belong to what eventually became mainstream Christianity. They developed their own way of understanding the significance of Jesus’ life and an internal vocabulary with which to express it. This accounts for its highly evocative but simple language. It echoes as it bounces off the walls.
The Christians who produced this gospel were an enclosed community distinct from the main currents of the early Christian movement. Their “jargon” resonated clearly among them. To read According to John requires being aware that, as Louis J. Martyn explained brilliantly some forty years ago, it contains simultaneously two stories. Obviously we are reading about the life of Jesus, but at the same time we are reading about the experience of a community of Christians with a singular history. It appears that most of its members had been thrown out of a synagogue and they are having heated debates both with members of the synagogue from which they had been expelled and with other Christians who do not share their view of Jesus. While telling the story of Jesus these Christians were also explaining to themselves the meaning of what was happening to them. In other words they told the story of Jesus to understand what they were experiencing. By telling the story of Jesus they were establishing the meaning of their lives. Thus, for example, the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus, where Jesus speaks in the first person singular, is suddenly interrupted by the words: “we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen; but you (plural) do not receive our testimony” (3:11). This is clearly a declaration being made by the Johannine community some decades after the death of Jesus.
As Raymond E. Brown has most effectively explained, the community apparently started with former disciples of John the Baptist and other Jews from the fringes together with Samaritans. Quite likely it also counted among its members relatives of Jesus, more specifically, his mother. Its geographical location is now impossible to determine. Probably it resided in a locality where Gentile God-fearers, that is Gentiles attracted to Judaism, were numerous, and some of them also joined the group.
As a community on the fringes it had tensions with both Jewish and Christian communities. The Jewish synagogue to which most of its members had been attached decided to expel them on account of their claims of divinity for Jesus. This claim was a direct challenge to Judaism’s only doctrine: God is one. Expulsion from the synagogue was a traumatic experience for these Johannine Christians. When push came to shove, some who had been attracted to Jesus, but who were anxious about retaining their social position, decided not to make their faith in Jesus public. They feared the social and economic consequences of expulsion from the synagogue (12:42 – 43) and became disciples “of the night” like Nicodemus (3:1; 7:50; 19:39), or “secret disciples” like Joseph of Arimathea (19:38).
The text now contains vitriolic arguments against the Jews who refused to believe that Jesus was the One Sent by the Father to reveal eternal life to humanity. The animosity between the Johannine and the Rabbinic communities created by the expulsion of the Christians from the synagogue produced strong charges against the Jews. In the meditations that follow I write “the Jews” with quotation marks to alert the reader that the reference is one made by a particular Christian community in the midst of a fierce struggle with Jews who toward the end of the first century had disowned them. “The Jews,” much to the confusion of these Christians, had refused to believe the claims of divinity which they were making for Jesus. This portrayal of the Jews does not fit the Jews who were the contemporaries of Jesus, or Jews in general. All historical reconstructions of the life of Jesus and of his death agree that he was put to death by the Romans. The evidence also indicates that Christians continued to worship at the temple and considered themselves good Jews after the crucifixion. Unlike the apostle Paul, who considered himself a Jew and was proud of it throughout his life, the Johannine Christians eventually broke their ties to Judaism and the law. Thus, while According to John presupposes thorough knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, it presents Jesus as one who is the superior alternative to the law and consigns the law to “the Jews.”
It appears, then, that According to John was an internal document in which the members of the Johannine community interpreted their own experiences as Jews in the light of what they knew about the life of Jesus according to the oral traditions available to them. As such, the gospel is a document which aims to build up the faith of the members of a community that understands its own history in light of the story of Jesus and has adapted the traditions about Jesus to make sense of their own experience. Like the other three gospels, the fourth gospel was written anonymously. All four gospels were given identifying titles when they were collected and published together early in the second century. The ancient manuscripts and modern critical editions of the text of the New Testament name the fourth gospel as According to John (KATA IOANNEN). By adopting this tradition I wish to indicate the artificiality of the title. I will refer to the one who describes or explains what took place as “the narrator.” As has been noted the gospel took shape over a period of about fifty years with several hands adding to and editing the story. There were, therefore, several anonymous narrators.
That the gospel functioned as an internal document of a sectarian community is evident also by the way it is written. The story of Jesus is not told so as to lead the reader step by step to an understanding of Jesus as the One Sent from heaven by the Father to bring life to humanity. Readers do not have to wait until the end of the story to receive the momentous disclosure of the significance of Jesus’ mission. Instead, it is presupposed that they already know how the story ends. From the very beginning readers must have a good grasp of the symbolic universe of the gospel. They must know the different levels of meaning in which the vocabulary works. Thy must know the echo chamber within which the gospel’s language resonates. This outstanding characteristic of According to John is clear evidence of its sociological positioning. The language is almost a dialect shared by the members of the sect.
This means that the connections between the stories which are found in both According to John and the Synoptic Gospels are not to be read as attempts on the part of this gospel to correct or improve the Synoptic accounts. The connection is to be seen at the level of the oral traditions that were developed along different trajectories in different Christian communities facing different circumstances. It also means that attempts to reconstruct a “historical Jesus” by harmonizing the accounts of the four gospels do not in fact reconstruct the life of Jesus with any historical accuracy. The harmonization of the gospel accounts only succeeds in creating a fifth narrative according to the predilection of people with theological views that are favored
