Only one Jesus: The voice of the Master--evidence
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
In this post I will be laying out some parallels between the way that Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John and in the synoptic Gospels. I am not trying to make an absolutely sharp distinction between verbal and conceptual parallels. When a conceptual parallel is close enough it becomes a type of verbal parallel, and a distinction between verbal and conceptual parallels can become artificial if pressed too hard. My examples will all be chosen, however, to represent at least very close conceptual parallels in Jesus' speech, and several are definitely verbal parallels.
I am not, of course, implying that, in all of the places where a word is translated by the same English word, the same Greek word is used. For example, the word Jesus uses for "Come" in Matt. 11:28 is different from the word he uses when he says that all that the Father gives him will come to him in John 6:37. On the other hand, the same Greek word is used for "believe" when he tells Jairus to believe (Mark 5:36) and when he tells Martha that she will see the glory of God if she believes (John 11:40). Whether or not the same Greek word is used varies, but the parallels are there nonetheless and often quite striking.
Most or all of these were taken from the pages beginning here of Stanley Leathes, The Witness of St. John to Christ, 1870, drawn to my attention by Esteemed Husband. I'm very privileged to bring back to the attention of modern apologists these treasures of the past.
Leathes is by no means unaware of the alleged problem discussed in my previous post. The difference between "how Jesus talks" in the synoptic Gospels and in John is not some new discovery made in the 20th or 21st century. Here is Leathes's judicious comment after many pages of parallels--some of them undesigned coincidences, some of them parallels in the words of Jesus, some in the character portrait, etc.
When we bear in mind that the difference between the fourth Gospel and the others, both in style and subject-matter, is obvious, it is certainly remarkable that there are so many traces of similarity of teaching and identity of thought between them as are here shown....[I]t seems to me that we may fairly say that, great as is the apparent difference between the teaching of Christ in the fourth Gospel and His teaching in the others, there is after all a very real and substantial identity between them--an identity which is the more remarkable because it is to be discerned in spite of the difference, and is such as could not have been produced by any writer with the intention of giving to his work the appearance of being a true record of Christ’s teaching when compared with the earlier Gospels. The likeness, so far as it exists, is a genuine likeness, and can only be the result of adherence to truth; while the equally strong features of contrast must either be referred to the writer’s own mind, or else must be taken as evidence of a wider and more varied kind of teaching on the part of Christ than we have been prepared to accept. (320-321 The Witness of St. John to Christ, 1870)
I wish to warn the reader against accepting a "heads John loses, tails John loses" approach to such parallels. Unfortunately critics sometimes find any stick with which to beat the Gospel of John. If Jesus' speech in John is not similar in some respect to what we find in the synoptics, John's historicity is questioned: Jesus is "too different." But if Jesus speaks similarly in John to his speech in the synoptics, we are then told that John must have borrowed and "adapted" this speech from a common tradition with the synoptics and placed it (ahistorically) in a different context! Hence in neither case is John allowed the possibility of being an historical reporter. For example, consider John 12:27ff: Jesus muses with grief and horror about his coming suffering, wonders rhetorically if he should ask the Father to save him from this hour, and says that he was born into the world for this cause. This is obviously the same mind and the same agony as we find in the Garden of Gethsemane, only it is a record of a different occasion on which Jesus had these thoughts. But it is sometimes said to be a Johannine "version" of Jesus' agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, invented by John to replace the agony in the Garden, which for inexplicable reasons he decided not to include! Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel, pp. 181-182 mentions and rejects this view, while stating that it has "often" been claimed.
Such a method makes it impossible to notice the natural similarity between two historical portraits of the same person. If every similarity of concept and language, even when described in different contexts, is to be put down as drastic reworking of common source material, and every difference, even when not a contradiction, to be seen as a sign of ahistoricity on the part of the "odd man out," then we will blind ourselves to those natural overlaps of linguistic and conceptual style that occur when the same person is portrayed truthfully by different witnesses recounting different events.
A word on setting: While I am not closed to the idea that at least the Farewell Discourse in John chapters 14-17 may be in some measure a composite discourse (as some parts of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount are taken to be), the firmness of John's placement of some of this material on the night in which Jesus was betrayed, including various references to that particular time period (e.g., John 14:28ff) and to the group's movements (John 14:31, 18:1) is at least prima facie evidence that this material was given at some point on that evening. And in many other cases (see below) the placement of Jesus' words in a particular time, place, and incident in John is quite specific and unequivocal. As Richard Bauckham has remarked ("Historiographical Characteristics of the Gospel of John," p. 23), one of the distinctive things about John is that we always know where Jesus is. (This stands in contrast with certain sections of Luke that are more vague about Jesus' physical location.) This list gives us good reason to believe that Jesus used similar language on more than one separate occasion, with some recorded in the synoptics and some in John. This variation of occasion combined with similarity of thought and speech undermines the idea of a very different Jesus in John and the synoptics.
I will always list below the apparent setting of each of the quotations given. If there are several synoptic Gospels that contain the same saying in what appears to be the same setting, I will quote only one while usually indicating the parallel passage(s) in the other synoptics. I will bold strikingly parallel phrases, but be sure to read the entire quotation and the notes to get the full impact. There are far more parallels than I list here. These are selected. I strongly encourage browsing Leathes for more.
These parallels show us the same mind, the same speaker, the same voice of the Master.
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Mark 13:13 "And you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved." Also Matt. 10:22 Apparent setting: Olivet Discourse during Passion Week, probably Tuesday evening
John 15:18-19 "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you." Apparent setting, Farewell Discourse on Thursday evening
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Matt. 10:23-25 "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household." Apparent setting: Commissioning of the twelve disciples for a mission to the villages
John 13:14-16 "Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him." Apparent setting: Thursday in Passion Week, spoken apropos of foot washing.
John 15:20 "Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also." Apparent setting: Thursday evening in Passion Week, Farewell Discourse. Notice here that the context, as in Matthew 10, is that of persecution, not that of mutual service. A reasonable conjecture, then, is that the saying that he is reminding them of is not his earlier saying that evening but rather his saying as recorded in Matthew apropos of persecution.
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Matthew 10:37-39 "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Apparent setting: Galilee, Commissioning of the twelve
Mark 8:34-35 "And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.'" Also in Matt. 16:24-25 Apparent setting: Galilee some time in the middle of Jesus' ministry, certainly prior to his final trip to Jerusalem
John 12:23-26 "And Jesus answered them, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.'" Apparent setting: Jerusalem during Passion Week, spoken in the presence of crowds
Extra note: Compare also Matt. 10:32 "So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven" with the statement in John "If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him." In the passage spoken in Passion Week in John, Jesus brings together the ideas of being willing to lose one's life and being "with him" both in his death and in gaining honor from the Father. Therefore, in these three passages we see that Jesus tended to repeat the saying about saving one's life and losing it (found twice in Matthew itself), the extremely close verbal parallel when those words are found again in John, and a set of interesting conceptual parallels among all three Gospels, combined in John specifically with Jesus' reflection on his near-approaching death. This is the kind of thing one would expect from witnesses of the same person who spoke in the same way at different times and places.
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Matt. 10:40 "Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me." Apparent setting: Commissioning of the twelve.
Luke 10:16 "The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me." Apparent setting: Commissioning of the seventy-two
Mark 9:37 "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me." Apparent setting: Controversy over who was the greatest, shortly after Jesus' transfiguration Also found in Matthew 18:5 (without the reference to the one who sent him) and almost identical to Mark in Luke 9:48
John 12:44-45 " And Jesus cried out and said, 'Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me.'" Apparent setting: Speaking to the crowds during Passion Week.
John 13:20 "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me." Apparent setting: Last Supper
The step-wise, parallel structure of speech is the same in most of these--from the first entity (the child, the disciple sent by Jesus) to Jesus himself and from Jesus to the Father who sent him. The John 12 passage has only Jesus and the Father in the structure, but John 13:20 has all three steps. The settings are all different and the actions required (receiving, believing, hearing, etc.) also vary. Notice, too, that we have multiple instances of this type of speech in different settings in the synoptics and also multiple instances in John. It was apparently a structure and set of concepts that Jesus was fond of.
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Matthew 11:28 "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Apparent setting: Not highly specific but may be shortly after messengers have come from John the Baptist. Hence, relatively early in Jesus' ministry. Note that this occurs just after the verses known as the "Johannine thunderbolt" (because they sound so Johannine but occur in the synoptics) but are not included in it. I will be discussing the "Johannine thunderbolt" in the next post.
John 6:35, 37 "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst....All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.'" Apparent setting: Capernaum synagogue, Bread of Life discourse. Uniquely Johannine discourse, the historicity of which is often questioned by critical scholars.
John 7:37 "On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, 'If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.'" Apparent setting: Feast of Booths, Jerusalem
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Luke 16:29-31 "But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’” Setting: Parable of the rich man and Lazarus (not found in John); part of a long segment of collected parables in Luke without other apparent time indicators
John 5:45-47 "Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" Apparent setting: An unspecified feast in Jerusalem, discourse to the people on the authority of the Son, unique to John
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Matt. 7:7 "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." Apparent setting: Sermon on the mount
John 16:24 "Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full." Apparent setting: Farewell discourse on the night of the Last Supper
For similar statements by Jesus on prayer, compare also Mark 11:24/Matt. 21:22; John 14:13-14; John 15:7. John evidently learned the lesson well and repeats it in his epistles, I John 3:22; I John 5:14-15. I gave the two verses in full above because of the striking verbal parallel "ask, and you shall receive."
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Matt. 18:14 "So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." Apparent setting: Moral of the parable of the lost sheep, not found in John
John 6:39 "And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day." Apparent setting: Bread of Life discourse, unique to John
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Mark 5:39-40 "And when he had entered, he said to them, Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.' And they laughed at him." Also Matt. 9:24; Luke 8:52 Setting: Raising of Jairus's daughter
John 11:11-13 "After saying these things, he said to them, 'Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.' The disciples said to him, 'Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.' Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep." Setting: Death and raising of Lazarus
Note that in both of these cases, Jesus' use of "sleep" to refer to death is not understood by others. While the term was presumably used as a euphemism at that time (the Apostle Paul uses it in this way), both the synoptics and John show it as not so very common that it is immediately understood. Yet it is Jesus' idiom in both, though in different deaths.
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Mark 5:36 "But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, 'Do not fear, only believe.'" Also Luke 8:50 Setting: Raising of Jairus's daughter
Mark 9:23 "All things are possible to him who believes." Setting: Spoken to the father of a demoniac boy, just before healing him
John 11:40 "Jesus said to her [Martha], 'Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?'" Setting: Raising of Lazarus, after Jesus has said to open the grave and Martha has demurred on the grounds that it will stink. Note: The earlier place to which he seems to be alluding is his conclusion, "Do you believe this?" after identifying himself as the resurrection and the life in vss. 25-26. Asking the relatives of a sick or dead person if they believe and telling them to believe appears to have been one of Jesus' motifs.
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Mark 10:38 "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" Also found in Matt. 20:22 Apparent setting: Spoken to James and John in response to their request to sit on his right and left hands. Appears to be after Jesus has left Galilee for the last time but prior to Passion Week.
Mark 14:36 "And he said, 'Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me.'" Also in Matt. 26:39, 42 (He prays the same thing twice); Luke 22:42 Setting: Garden of Gethsemane prayer
John 18:11 "So Jesus said to Peter, 'Put the sword into the sheath; the cup which the Father has given Me, shall I not drink it?'" Setting: Garden of Gethsemane after the arresting officers arrive and Peter has cut off the ear of one of the servants.
Note: I give the connection between Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane and his words to Peter as an undesigned coincidence in Hidden in Plain View. Jesus has already prayed (though not recorded in John) that the Father might let "the cup" pass from him. The arrival of Judas and the arresting soldiers shows Jesus that the Father has actually given him "the cup." Hence, he states that the Father has given him "the cup" and that he must drink it (not recorded in the synoptics) in telling Peter to put up his sword. This is the only use of the language of "the cup" to describe Jesus' death in John, and it fits perfectly with the record of his prayer in the synoptics.
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Mark 14:36 "And he said, 'Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.'" Also Matt. 26:39; Luke 22:42 Setting: Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane
John 5:30 "I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me." Apparent setting: Jerusalem, earlier festival, spoken to the crowds after the healing at the pool of Bethesda, unique to John
John 6:38 "For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me." Apparent setting: Capernaum synagogue, Bread of Life discourse, unique to John
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See also this post which discusses what I call Jesus' "conceptual punning" concerning different Sabbath controversies in the synoptics and John.
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These are not all of the parallels by any means. I will be discussing a few more in the next post; quite a few parallels of personality and behavior were discussed in earlier posts in this series, and there are more still. It is a rich vein to explore. My next post will concern specifically language that has been thought of as specially "Johannine" or "synoptic." I will argue there that this is far more a matter of emphasis and selection than anything else.
The wealth of evidence for the voice of the Master in both John and the synoptic Gospels means that we do not merely assert or take it by faith that we are seeing the same Jesus in all four Gospels. Rather, the portraits overlap and intersect in precisely the ways that we would expect them to do when different witnesses watch and truthfully record the actions and words of the same overwhelming one Person.
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