had been put into prison, but that in the Fourth Gospel their ministries overlap. The writer of the Fourth Gospel may well have used that arrangement to show John and Jesus in actual meeting and to show that John used these meetings to admit, and to urge others to admit, the supremacy of Jesus. It is carefully pointed out that John is not ‘that light’ (1:8). He is shown as quite definitely disclaiming all messianic aspirations (1:20ff., 3:28, 4:1, 10:41). It is not even permissible to think of him as the highest witness (5:36). There is no criticism at all of John the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel; but there is a rebuke to those who would give him a place which ought to belong to Jesus and to Jesus alone.
(b) A certain type of heresy which was very widely spread in the days when the Fourth Gospel was written is called by the general name of Gnosticism. Without some understanding of it, much of John’s greatness and much of his aim will be missed. The basic doctrine of Gnosticism was that matter is essentially evil and spirit is essentially good. The Gnostics went on to argue that on that basis God himself cannot touch matter and therefore did not create the world. What he did was to put out a series of emanations. Each of these emanations was further from him, until at last there was one so distant from him that it could touch matter. That emanation was the creator of the world.
By itself that idea is bad enough, but it was made worse by an addition. The Gnostics held that each emanation knew less and less about God, until there was a stage when the emanations were not only ignorant of God but actually hostile to him. So they finally came to the conclusion that the creator god was not only different from the real God, but was also quite ignorant of and actively hostile to him. Cerinthus, one of the leaders of the Gnostics, said that ‘the world was created, not by God, but by a certain power far separate from him, and far distant from that Power who is over the universe, and ignorant of the God who is over all’.
The Gnostics believed that God had nothing to do with the creating of the world. That is why John begins his gospel with the ringing statement: ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being’ (1:3). That is why John insists that ‘God so loved the world’ (3:16). In face of the Gnostics who so mistakenly spiritualized God into a being who could not possibly have anything to do with the world, John presented the Christian doctrine of the God who made the world and whose presence fills the world that he has made.
The beliefs of the Gnostics impinged on their ideas of Jesus.
(a) Some of the Gnostics held that Jesus was one of the emanations which had proceeded from God. They held that he was not in any real sense divine; that he was only a kind of demi-god who was more or less distant from the real God; that he was simply one of a chain of lesser beings between God and the world.
(b) Some of the Gnostics held that Jesus had no real body. A body is matter and God could not touch matter; therefore Jesus was a kind of phantom without real flesh and blood. They held, for instance, that when he stepped on the ground he left no footprint, for his body had neither weight nor substance. They could never have said: ‘The Word became flesh’ (John 1:14). St Augustine tells how he had read much in the work of the philosophers of his day; he had found much that was very like what was in the New Testament, but, he said: ‘ “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” I did not read there.’ That is why John in his First Letter insists that Jesus came in the flesh, and declares that anyone who denies that fact is moved by the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:3). This particular heresy is known as Docetism. Docetism comes from the Greek word dokein which means to seem; and the heresy is so called because it held that Jesus only seemed to be a man.
(c) Some Gnostics held a variation of that heresy. They held that Jesus was a man into whom the Spirit of God came at his baptism; that the Spirit remained with him throughout his life until the end; but since the Spirit of God could never suffer and die, it left him before he was crucified. They gave Jesus’ cry on the cross as: ‘My power, my power, why have you forsaken me?’ And in their books they told of people talking on the Mount of Olives to a form which looked exactly like Jesus while the man Jesus died on the cross.
So then the Gnostic heresies were expressed in two possible alternative beliefs. They believed either that Jesus was not really divine but simply one of a series of emanations from God, or that he was not in any sense human but a kind of phantom in the shape of a man. The Gnostic beliefs at one and the same time destroyed the real godhead and the real humanity of Jesus.
The Humanity of Jesus
The fact that John is out to correct both these Gnostic tendencies explains a curious paradoxical double emphasis in his gospel. On the one hand, there is no gospel which so uncompromisingly stresses the real humanity of Jesus. Jesus was angry with those who bought and sold in the Temple courts (2:15); he was physically tired as he sat by the well which was near Sychar in Samaria (4:6); his disciples offered him food in the way in which they would offer it to any hungry man (4:31); he had sympathy with those who were hungry and with those who were afraid (6:5, 20); he knew grief and he wept tears as any mourner might do (11:33, 35, 38); in the agony of the cross the cry of his parched lips was: ‘I am thirsty’ (19:28). The Fourth Gospel shows us a Jesus who was no shadowy, docetic figure; it shows us one who knew the weariness of an exhausted body and the wounds of a distressed mind and heart. It is the truly human Jesus whom the Fourth Gospel sets before us.
The Deity of Jesus
On the other hand, there is no gospel which sets before us such a view of the deity of Jesus.
(a) John stresses the preexistence of Jesus. ‘Before Abraham was,’ said Jesus, ‘I am’ (8:58). He talks of the glory which he had with the Father before the world was made (17:5). Again and again he speaks of his coming down from heaven (6:33–8). John saw in Jesus one who had always been, even before the world began.
(b) The Fourth Gospel stresses more than any of the others the omniscience of Jesus. It is John’s view that apparently miraculously Jesus knew the past record of the woman of Samaria (4:16–17); apparently without anyone telling him, he knew how long the man beside the healing pool had been ill (5:6); before he asked it, he knew the answer to the question he put to Philip (6:6); he knew that Judas would betray him (6:61–4); and he knew of the death of Lazarus before anyone told him of it (11:14). John saw in Jesus one who had a special and miraculous knowledge independent of anything which he might be told. He needed to ask no questions because he knew the answers.
(c) The Fourth Gospel stresses the fact, as John saw it, that Jesus always acted entirely on his own initiative and was not influenced by anyone else. It was not his mother’s request which moved him to the miracle at Cana in Galilee; it was his own personal decision (2:4); the urging of his brothers had nothing to do with the visit which he paid to Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles (7:10); no one took his life from him – no one could; he laid it down purely voluntarily (10:18, 19:11). As John saw it, Jesus had a divine independence from all human influence. He was self-determined.
To counter the Gnostics and their strange beliefs, John presents us with a Jesus who was undeniably human and who yet was undeniably divine.
The Author of the Fourth Gospel
We have seen that the aim of the writer of the Fourth Gospel was to present the Christian faith in such a way that it would commend itself to the Greek world to which Christianity had gone out, and also to combat the heresies and mistaken ideas which had arisen within the Church. We go on to ask: ‘Who is that writer?’ Tradition answers unanimously that the author was John the apostle. We shall see that beyond doubt the authority of John lies behind the gospel, although it may well be that its actual form and style of writing did not come from his hand. Let us, then, collect what we know about him.
He was the younger son of Zebedee, who possessed a fishing
