Only one Jesus: The voice of the Master--the alleged problem
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
This post inaugurates a sub-series within my series on the Gospel of John. This sub-series will investigate and respond to the claim that there is something suspicious about the similarities between the way that Jesus talks in John and the way that John writes (as narrator and in I John), on the one hand, and, on the other, the differences between the way that Jesus talks in John and the way that he talks in the synoptic Gospels.
These twin comparisons are used to support some rather radical theses. Leon Morris (Studies in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 265ff) points out that some scholars have used these claims about the way that Jesus talks to argue against authorship of John by an eyewitness.
Others, such as Craig Evans, use the alleged problem of the way Jesus talks to support a general doubt about the historicity of John's portrait of Jesus. Here is a quotation (podcast here, searchable transcript here) from the second half of his recent debate with me on the Unbelievable show:
And so, you have virtually nothing (I think there are a few verses in Matthew 11, which could be exceptional), virtually nothing in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that sounds like, and looks like, Jesus in the Gospel of John. So, we have to ask as historians, at this point, is there just some other Jesus we just didn't know about? Does Jesus simply just behave and talk very differently in some circumstances (maybe when he's down south, when he's in Samaria, Judea, in and out of Jerusalem and Bethany)? Or, is it a lot more due to the way the Evangelist chooses to write the story? And I opt with the latter.I think it is the same Jesus, and I think he is presented very differently . . . and I guess I’m counting votes: it's three to one. Matthew, Mark, and Luke present him a certain way; John presents him a very different way. And I suspect, given the parallels with Wisdom literature, for example, that John is presenting Jesus in a much more interpretive light.
These are quite strong statements about alleged discrepancy between the portraits of Jesus in John and the synoptic Gospels. Evans even implies that Jesus "behaves" very differently in John and the synoptics, with the implication that John's portrait of how Jesus behaves is historically questionable, a point to which my earlier posts on the unity of Jesus' personality in the Gospels are relevant. They are quite consonant with Evans's doubts in 2012 about the historicity of John, and I was glad (at last) for him to speak this relatively clearly in our encounter in 2018.
I countered, referring to material that I am now drawing out in this series, that the portrait of Jesus is actually clearly the same in John and the synoptics and that "we can tell that by reading them; that's not just something we believe by faith. That's actually right there in the text of the documents."
Evans was having none of it and replied,
Well, I think that's not a very realistic understanding of John. And that's the reason why the vast majority of scholars don't see it that way. John does present Jesus in a very different way. I agree that it's the same Jesus, but the portraits in John and the Synoptics are very different.
We should remember here that Evans's comments in 2012 strongly dehistoricized John's gospel in general terms. There he said that it was a "horse of another color altogether" from the synoptic Gospels. He agreed with Bart Ehrman's summary that it is "metaphorical" and hence should not be used as an historical source for the life of Jesus. And he expressly listed various "I am" statements (such as "I am the true vine") and said that these "derive from Jesus" but "not because he walked around and said them" but rather because they were the result of the reflections of the "community" upon Jesus' other, historical teaching.
Another usefully clear statement of the alleged problem of how Jesus talks in John and the synoptics comes from Michael Licona, at that time writing in defense of Evans when a part of Evans's 2012 comments had come to light.
In his commentary on John, [Craig] Keener said that “all” Johannine scholars acknowledge Johannine adaptation of the Jesus tradition. To see this in action, I recommend reading through the Synoptic Gospels several times in Greek. Then read John’s Gospel and 1 John several times in Greek. (One can also observe this in English but it is far clearer and even more striking in Greek.) One will observe a few items relevant to this discussion:Although the message is the same, the way Jesus “sounds” in John is very different than the way He “sounds” in the Synoptics.
The way Jesus “sounds” in John’s Gospel sounds very much like how John “sounds” in 1 John. That is, the grammar, vocabulary, and overall style of writing in both are strikingly similar.
Number 2 could be because John adjusted his style to be similar to his Master after spending much time with him. This would be similar to how some married couples adapt their laughs and expressions to one another over time. The other option and the one believed by most scholars is that John paraphrased Jesus using his own style. The reason scholars go with this latter view is because Jesus “sounds” so differently in John than in the Synoptics.
Licona says, referring to Craig Keener's commentary on John, that this is an argument that John "adapted" the "Jesus tradition," which is rather vague. The context in Licona's post is the argument that Jesus did not claim to be God "publicly and in such a clear manner as we find John reporting" but rather taught his own deity only "implicitly" as in the synoptics. (At that time Licona said that he was agnostic on this position but was merely explaining the arguments that "many scholars" think support it. More recently he has said that it is the position that he would accept "if a gun were put to his head." See around 9:30 here.)
The "adaptation," then, in view in that post of Licona's would, in the nature of the case, take the form of John's crafting scenes in which Jesus claims more clearly to be God than he does in the synoptic gospels. These scenes themselves occur nowhere in the synoptic gospels. In the Johannine scenes, Jesus' claims are intimately interwoven with surrounding dialogue, and the clarity of his claims is the reason for his nearly being stoned on two occasions. The misuse of the word "paraphrase" (Licona says this activity of John would be like a "modern paraphrase") obscures the degree of invention that would be involved.
In passing, I should comment on the odd use of Keener: Licona invokes Craig Keener's name here for the claim that John "adapts" the "Jesus tradition," in the context of a post defending Evans for his 2012 remarks on the "I am" sayings. Licona goes so far as to say dramatically that, if evangelicals were to "clean house" in light of concerns about Evans's statements, Keener would "find himself out on the street," though he does not say clearly why he thinks so. Though I no doubt have many disagreements with Keener concerning the Gospel of John, I have been unable to find anywhere where Keener rejects the recognizable historicity of Jesus' unique Johannine claims to deity. In the full comment that Licona mentions from Keener's commentary, Keener says merely this: "[A]ll scholars acknowledge some adaptation and conformity with Johannine idiom." (Commentary on John, p. 52) The emphasis on "some" is original in Keener, indicating the range of possible viewpoints from a minimal degree of idiomatic rewording onward. This brief comment is parenthetical within a paragraph whose emphasis is upon historicity and the possibility (which Keener apparently takes seriously) that the author, or at least the person whose testimony lies significantly behind the Gospel, was an eyewitness. Just two sentences before this parenthetical remark, Keener says,
But if the author of the fourth Gospel, its tradition or its nucleus were himself an eyewitness--a view very much disputed in recent years but consonant with the claims of the Gospels itself...--independence from the Synoptic tradition would not call into question its essential reliability; indeed, it could (in the documentary sense) make the Fourth Gospel a step closer to the historical Jesus than the Synoptics are. If [presumably meaning “even if”] the Fourth Gospel was not dictated by but nevertheless depends on an eyewitness, its basic claims concerning events remain at least on an historical par with the Synoptics. (p. 52)
Keener's emphasis there is on the importance of the question of authorship to the issue of historicity.
Keener has a long discussion of speech material in John (Commentary pp. 53-80), which in my opinion does cast an unnecessary degree of question upon the historicity of the things Jesus says in John yet does not draw any clear conclusions about specific passages. Moreover, Keener is cautious and ambivalent in his conclusion of that section, saying only that "disentangling history and theology in the Fourth Gospel's discourses by traditional critical methodologies is a particularly difficult task and one that is in most cases unhelpfully speculative." (p. 80)
While I consider Keener to be far too quick to think that John "narrates theologically" and have argued against several of his specific claims to that effect, as of now I do not have sufficient reason to believe that he agrees with the position Licona is explaining in his post and some reason to think the contrary. Keener's wording in the portions of his commentary on John chapters 8 and 10 does not include a rousing defense of the recognizable historicity of the scenes, but he appears at least cautiously optimistic on the point. See, e.g., his reference on p. 772 to "some evidence, though not coercive" that "Before Abraham was, I am" was attributed to Jesus prior to John's Gospel. On p. 301 he alludes to the theory that John was "quite interpretive, even more than we argued in our chapter on the discourses," thus making a distinction between the view he views himself as taking in the earlier chapter and a looser view that someone could take.
I would of course be disappointed if I were to discover that Keener does take the position under discussion in Licona's post. Nor am I saying that such a thing is beyond the realm of possibility. But until and unless there is further evidence to that effect, it is important to point out that he does not seem to have endorsed it.
Aside from Keener, specifically, it is certainly not the case that all scholars agree that the unique Johannine scenes in which Jesus indicates his deity most clearly did not literally occur in an historically recognizable fashion. Craig Blomberg, for example, offers an unambiguous historical defense of these scenes and sayings in The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel (pp. 159-160, 163-164). He also specifically defends the substantial historicity of the Bread of Life discourse (pp. 122-127) and much other such unique Johannine material.
The dismissals of John's historical portrait of Jesus discussed here are extremely strong conclusions to draw from the alleged problem of how Jesus speaks in John, and they are not by any means endorsed by all evangelical scholars (even if we restrict ourselves to those who happen to be alive right now), but that alleged problem has indeed frequently been used to draw such strong conclusions.
To make the argument (and the response I will be giving in the next few posts) clearer, I note in particular Licona's statement that scholars reject the explanation that John himself learned to talk/write like Jesus on the grounds that Jesus speaks too differently in John from the way that he speaks in the synoptic Gospels. This allegedly calls the historicity of the voice of Jesus in John into question in a way that cannot be answered by hypothesizing that John developed a mode of writing (or dictating) that resembled Jesus' mode of speech. Licona expands upon this argument in an endnote in Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?, making an analogy to major differences in accent:
I have read John’s Gospel and 1 John many times in their original language, Greek. It is clear to me, at least, that the vocabulary and style of both strongly suggest that the same person composed them. If I am correct, one must choose either that John conformed his language to sound like Jesus in his letter or that John has recast Jesus’s teachings in his own words. Since Jesus in John’s Gospel teaches with an idiom that differs from how he sounds in the Synoptics about as much as British English differs idiomatically from the English of North Americans living in the Deep South, the latter option seems more plausible. (endnote 13, p. 239)
Once again, it is important to remember that "recasting Jesus' teachings in his own words" does not always mean something as minimal as it might appear to mean. Licona applies this concept elsewhere to what (on the argument there) would have to involve the substantial invention of sayings, dialogue, etc. Certainly Evans 2012 was arguing for substantial invention on the part of the "Johannine community" to show that "he is for us the way, the truth, the life, the true vine. He is the bread of life, and so on. And so that gets presented in a very creative, dramatic, and metaphorical way, in what we now call the Gospel of John." And Evans 2018 says, in no small part based on this argument about how Jesus sounds, that the portrait of Jesus in John is "very different" from that in the synoptic Gospels and that there is "virtually nothing in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that sounds like, and looks like, Jesus in the Gospel of John."
So it is important to examine this question of whether Jesus in John really "speaks so differently" from Jesus in the synoptics and what the "Johannine" manner of Jesus' speech does and does not imply.
Having laid out the alleged problem and given quotes from critics in this post, I will use the next several posts to lay out some interesting and surprising positive evidence of continuity between Jesus' manner of speaking in John and the synoptic Gospels.
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