The prophecy dilemma for literary device theorists

 

The prophecy dilemma for literary device theorists

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

Recently Esteemed Husband and our friend Tom Gilson did a webinar for Apologetics Academy. I watched some of the livestream on Youtube. During such livestreams there is always some chat going on "on the side" in the comments, and this time a skeptic commentator was throwing in various questions, many of them irrelevant to what Tim and Tom were actually saying. One of his comments was something to this effect: Since the Gospel authors believed that Jesus fulfilled prophecy, wouldn't this have motivated them to invent things that never happened in order to be able to say that prophecy was fulfilled?

Since he is an outright skeptic, presumably he would have no qualms about saying that a Gospel author who did that was simply lying and was motivated by the desire to serve a religious cause by deceiving his audience. Still, one might ask him in that case why the evangelists believed in Jesus themselves, and in particular in his fulfillment of prophecy, if they knew that they had to invent things in order to "make" him fulfill prophecy. The skeptic would, one guesses, at that point have to fall back upon some generic statement to the effect that people, especially religious people, don't always think rationally about these things and may simultaneously believe in their religion and also believe that they are morally justified in lying to further it. Bart Ehrman has said this in so many words about early Christians. To my mind it is an unconvincing answer, particularly about the evangelists who were writing the very first memoirs of Jesus and claimed to have known him. At the founding of a religious movement, the distinction between "charlatan" and "sucker who listens to charlatan" is more stark and obvious, even to not-always-rational human beings. And if the evangelists were charlatans, their motivation is extremely difficult to figure out, given the initially low status and persecution of Christianity and the fact that they could have avoided much trouble for themselves had they not accepted and promoted Christianity.

But matters are difficult in a different way for the Christian literary device theorists whose work I am critiquing in my forthcoming books, The Mirror or the Mask and The Eye of the Beholder.

For the Christian scholar who holds that John or other evangelists sometimes tweak the facts or even invent things in order to make theological points emphatically does not want to say that the evangelists were deceivers. These scholars lean heavily on the word "genre" to help them to thread this needle. As Craig A. Evans says to Bart Ehrman, speaking of John's Gospel, "I object to saying it’s not historically accurate. Well, if something isn’t exactly historical, how is it not historically accurate? It’d be like saying, 'You mean the parable, the parable was a fiction Jesus told? It’s not historically accurate?'"

In other words, John's Gospel, like a parable, is not rightly judged by standards of historical accuracy at all. As Evans said later in response to a question from the audience, "And so the Johannine sayings, the distinctive ones, with a few exceptions, they’re the ones that look like, as I said earlier, a different genre altogether, something that only incidentally has historical material in it, but otherwise is a completely different type of literature..."

But the whole point of "another genre" is that the original audience itself is not led into thinking that these things really happened. Jesus' original audience didn't believe that the Prodigal Son was a real person, for example.

So if "genre" is to function in the way that the literary device theorists want it to function, the original audience is supposedly not misled by the ahistorical narrative, because they take the whole thing with enough grains of salt that they don't take all of the events to be historical, even when woven seamlessly into the rest of the document.

But consider the dilemma this creates concerning prophecy. I could choose here almost any prophecy that Jesus is said to fulfill, since the literary device theorists' method would mean that (as in a movie only "based on true events") we can put a question mark over almost anything in the narrative. The fact that the legs of the thieves were broken but that Jesus' legs were not, for example. Why should we take that to have really happened if John was wont to modify his narrative and add things for theological reasons? And the event is only singly attested. It is found only in John's Gospel.

Here are two things that actually are questioned by Christian, evangelical scholars: 1) That Jesus literally said, "I thirst" from the cross is questioned by Daniel B. Wallace and by Michael Licona. In his unpublished paper on the subject, Wallace expressly relates his questioning of the historicity of this event to the fulfillment of prophecy, though the exact connection in Wallace's mind is extremely obscure. It is apparently related to Wallace's strange idea that John would not want to record either Jesus making a literal expression of thirst (though it appears that John has done exactly that!) or his cry of, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" as in the Synoptics. So Wallace claims that, when John says that Jesus said, "I thirst" to fulfill Scripture, it is Psalm 22:1 that is fulfilled (where the Psalmist says, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"), but that John has made this fulfillment somewhat difficult to see by making up substitute words--namely, Jesus' expression of thirst. (Wallace, "Ipsissima Vox and the Seven Words from the Cross," unpublished, pp. 7-8. For some exact quotations, see here.) 2) Both Michael Licona and Craig Keener suggest that Jesus did not literally breathe out on his disciples and say, "Receive the Holy Spirit" as recorded in John 20:22. Keener is somewhat more ambivalent and unclear as to whether there might have been some real "encounter with the Spirit" that lies behind this passage, but he certainly calls its historicity into question. Yet at the same time, Keener insists that this breathing must, in John's Gospel, provide "fulfillment of [Jesus'] Paraclete promises" that Jesus has made earlier that he will send the Spirit. (Keener, commentary on John, p. 1200). In other words, maybe the event didn't happen at all, but John put it into his Gospel to fulfill Jesus' prophecies that he would send the Holy Spirit!

So this issue of prophetic fulfillment is not just something I am making up. It is a real and acute difficulty for literary device theorists.

Let's apply some analytical clarity to the matter. The evangelists narrate many supposed fulfillments of prophecy. For any given alleged fulfillment, there are the following possibilities:

The evangelist expected his readers to believe that the event happened.

The evangelist did not expect his readers to believe that the event happened.

At this point I fully expect some pedantic readers to point out that maybe the author thought some of his readers might be confused but most would not, to point out that "readers" and "audience" are not monolithic terms, and so forth. But unless we have some concept or other of what the majority of the original audience would have understood, what a typical member would have understood, and what the author expected them to understand, then we cannot talk about genre at all. In other words, such generalizations are needed for everyone in the discussion, and indeed literary device theorists desperately need such generalizations, for they are the ones telling us all that "the original audience" wouldn't have minded such-and-such, or would have expected these sorts of changes, and so forth. So take it that when I ask what the author thought his audience would believe, I am using some such category as "the majority of his audience," "the audience for which he desired to write," "the typical members of his audience." This would be similar to what we would mean if we talked about a movie "based on true events." We would point out that people who go to such movies, steeped in our own culture, are "supposed to" understand that some things have been factually changed, even if they don't know what those things are. While there might be some outliers, such as children or people who have never stopped to consider what a "movie version" really is, there is supposed to be a general consensus in the audience, on which the movie-makers can rely, that the movie is not entirely factual.

Now let us further suppose, to set up the dilemma, that the evangelist himself did not believe that the event happened. Suppose, for example, that John did not really think that Jesus literally stood on earth before his disciples, breathed out, and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit."

Then, not believing it himself, he either did or did not expect his readers, seeing that he narrated it, to believe it.

Suppose that he did expect them to believe that it happened. In that case, John is a deceiver. He wants his readers to think that Jesus did something at that time that in fact he himself believes that Jesus did not do. According to Keener, the idea is supposed to be to narrate the fulfillment of Jesus' promises about the Holy Spirit. (This, by the way, is a highly implausible theory, since Jesus' promises about the Holy Spirit in John make it clear that he himself will not be physically present when he sends the Holy Spirit. So in terms of the theology taught in John's Gospel itself, this would not even appear to be a fulfillment. But set that aside for now.) If John wanted his audience to believe that this happened and that the promises were fulfilled in this way, then he is knowingly misleading them, and the literary device theorist who accepts this option can no longer express outrage when we say that, on his theory, the evangelists were liars. One wonders in that case why we should think of a deliberately lying Gospel as divinely inspired at all.

On the other hand, suppose that John, believing that the event didn't happen, did not expect his readers to believe it either. In that case, what's the point? In that case, nobody in the situation thinks that there was a real-life action of Jesus that looked like this that fulfilled the prophecy in question. Is the function of the narrative then supposed to be like that of some known-to-be-apocryphal story? Does it just cause us to reflect on how great it is that the Holy Spirit exists?

And why, we might ask, should we then independently believe that we ourselves are empowered by the Spirit? If the narrative in John is just a bit of pious fiction and would have been accepted as such (or at least suspected to be such) by its original audience, what then is our evidence for our own empowerment by the Spirit? After all, Jesus' own words, especially in John, are often called into question by the same scholars. Did Jesus ever clearly promise to send the Holy Spirit at all?

Or take another prophecy--the one about Jesus' bones not being broken. As already noted, if John tended to add things to his narrative for theological reasons, and if he modified his crucifixion narrative in particular (per Wallace) by adding words that Jesus never said, and if John's "genre" is such that we should not assume that the events it appears to narrate in all sobriety really occurred, how confident should we be that the thieves' legs were broken but that Jesus' legs were not?

Then, once again: If John believed that these parts of the narrative did not occur, did he expect his readers and hearers to believe that they did? If so, then he is a deceiver. If not, and if he was right, then for all his readers could tell those parts of the narrative do not really fulfill any prophecy. Prophecy is fulfilled only if an event really happens that fulfills prophecy. No event in history, no fulfillment. If neither John nor his readers believed that there was a real fulfillment as described in the narrative (the thieves' legs were broken, but Jesus' legs were not), then the narrative does not show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy.

But the apostles were constantly preaching that Jesus fulfilled prophecy. Jesus' fulfillment of prophecy was very important to their message to their fellow Jews. And there is every reason to take the evangelists (some of whom almost certainly were apostles themselves) to be at one with the apostles in their attitude on this matter. Real prophetic fulfillment was central to the founding of Christianity as it originated in Judaism. Why would we think that John and his original audience would think that there was any point whatsoever in the narration of a pseudo-fulfillment grounded in made-up facts?

This argument, of course, is the same argument that I have made in other posts under the heading "Fake Points Don't Make Points." Here I am putting it into the form of a dilemma in order to encourage us to think clearly about the issues involved.

As Julius Africanus (Christian historian, circa A.D. 160-240) said about the alleged attempt to use fake points for religious purposes in Jesus' genealogies,

Nor shall an assertion of this kind prevail in the Church of Christ against the exact truth, so as that a lie should be contrived for the praise and glory of Christ. For who does not know that most holy word of the apostle also, who, when he was preaching and proclaiming the resurrection of our Saviour, and confidently affirming the truth, said with great fear, If any say that Christ is not risen, and we assert and have believed this, and both hope for and preach that very thing, we are false witnesses of God, in alleging that He raised up Christ, whom He raised not up? And if he who glorifies God the Father is thus afraid lest he should seem a false witness in narrating a marvellous fact, how should not he be justly afraid, who tries to establish the truth by a false statement, preparing an untrue opinion? For if the generations are different, and trace down no genuine seed to Joseph, and if all has been stated only with the view of establishing the position of Him who was to be born—to confirm the truth, namely, that He who was to be would be king and priest, there being at the same time no proof given, but the dignity of the words being brought down to a feeble hymn,—it is evident that no praise accrues to God from that, since it is a falsehood, but rather judgment returns on him who asserts it, because he vaunts an unreality as though it were reality.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on July 8, 2019 9:22 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Craig Evans) (Licona) (New Testament)

Teaching from fiction and teaching from fact II

 

Teaching from fiction and teaching from fact II

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

I've decided to add some further reflections on the topic of my last post.

It might be argued that a person of sufficient authority can teach something entirely new using fiction. If Jesus taught by way of a parable that the Gentiles are to be accepted into the people of God, while this would be a new teaching (hence, not recognized from our independent experience), we should accept it because of Jesus' teaching authority.

This is certainly true.

It's important to realize several things in that case:

1) If the truth in question is really new and does not resonate with our other knowledge, then it is the authority of the teacher that is doing all of the epistemic work. The fictional vehicle of his teaching does not add to the epistemic force of what is taught. It merely provides a memorable and vivid way of making the point. The fiction itself, then, is not teaching. Rather, the teacher is teaching, and he is using a made-up story for that purpose. We should believe what he teaches in direct proportion to the authority we are justified in giving his teaching, not in proportion to his skill as a story-teller. I argued in the previous post that fiction teaches by reminding. In other words, fiction by a "mere" fictional author teaches by causing us to meditate on and making vivid to us what we already know in another way. Here I add the qualification that fiction can be used by an authoritative teacher to teach without reminding--that is, to teach something new, just on his own credibility. But that is not a distinctive way in which fiction qua fiction teaches.

2) A good teacher (in both senses of the word) will not confuse his hearers about whether he is teaching using a fictional vehicle. Jesus never did. His parables are clearly marked out as such by their form, their non-specificity, and by introductory phrases such as "a certain man," and indeed the fact that the Gospels and his immediate audience explicitly identify them as parables makes it clear that there was no ambiguity in the original context about whether he was teaching using a fictional form or telling a literally true story. A teacher who presents fiction as if it is fact, blurring that line knowingly, undermines his own authority by calling into question his own moral compass.

To elaborate further: Sometimes one gets the odd feeling (I have mentioned this in comments threads before) that literary device theorists want to make use of a theory of apostolic authority that is extreme and warped by its extremeness. Such a theory would hold that we must simply believe that an evangelist has such enormous teaching authority that his words must be treated as equivalent in authority to the words of Jesus, even if the evangelist made them up and put them into Jesus' mouth. Such a theory would hold that the evangelist did not in any way undermine that authority by deliberately writing in a way that confusingly mingled fact and fiction. This approach is extremely hard to sustain when, as in the case of Craig Evans, one speaks freely of "the Johannine community." Why in the world should we give the authority to teach us to the "Johannine community"--neither Jesus himself or a specific Apostle? Still more, why should we give them so much authority that we accept their teaching even when they make up stories that never happened and relate them as if they did happen and even when they place words in Jesus' mouth that he never uttered in any recognizable fashion whatsoever? But even if a theorist asserted that a Gospel was written by an Apostle, such a theory of Apostolic authority is simply not sustainable. It does not even follow from the strongest Catholic theory of the teaching magisterium.

Moreover, there is a very serious self-refutation issue involved in an attempt to give such authority to the evangelists. For what is the excuse supposed to be? Why, verses like the words of Jesus about sending the Paraclete to teach them (John 14:26). Or perhaps Jesus' statements that he would build his church and the power of binding and loosing (Matt. 16:19). Or, if you are Craig Evans, a wild eisegesis of Matthew 13:52 about old treasures and new treasures.

But these verses are themselves supposedly records of Jesus' teachings. If the argument that the evangelists had the authority to teach by fiction-dressed-as-fact and to invent words of Jesus that he never said and place them into his mouth rests upon words placed into Jesus' mouth in the Gospels, how do we know that Jesus said those things in any recognizable form as recorded? Of course, it is highly questionable that those verses mean that the evangelists had such authority. The text does not appear to be saying that at all. And an additional way that we can see that they don't mean that is because, if they did, the argument would refute itself. It wouldn't go back to a justified premise that Jesus actually recognizably said these things and that therefore we should accept this authority of the evangelists. That premise would be undermined by the conclusion--that they were "licensed" to extrapolate and then to state these extrapolations realistically as if they were uttered by Jesus.

So, while it is true that a highly authoritative teacher can use recognizable fiction as a vehicle for teaching an entirely new truth, in no way does this support the literary device theorists' views. The Gospel authors taught by writing down historical facts that showed what they wanted to convince their readers of--that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, that he was the Savior of the world, and so forth. If they had done otherwise, commingling fact and fiction to the confusion of the reader, they would not in so doing have been teaching with the authority of Christ, who gave them no such commission.

As Julius Africanus says,

Nor shall an assertion of this kind prevail in the Church of Christ against the exact truth, so as that a lie should be contrived for the praise and glory of Christ....For if...all has been stated only with the view of establishing the position of Him who was to be born—to confirm the truth, namely, that He who was to be would be king and priest, there being at the same time no proof given, but the dignity of the words being brought down to a feeble hymn,—it is evident that no praise accrues to God from that, since it is a falsehood, but rather judgment returns on him who asserts it, because he vaunts an unreality as though it were reality.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on November 15, 2018 4:14 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (new Testament)

The Myth of the Monologuing Jesus

 

The Myth of the Monologuing Jesus

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

Last Saturday, August 11, I did another webinar on Apologetics Academy covering much of the material that readers will have already seen in this series on John. Here on Youtube is the recording of that webinar, called "Only One Jesus."

I have also created a portal page including links to all of my (and Tim's) webinars on Apologetics Academy, so if you're looking for a particular one or just want to see what else I've done in that venue, have a look.

The webinar got slightly ahead of the detailed blog series in the interests of covering a wide variety of topics. One topic I covered there that I have only touched upon yet here is what I call the Myth of the Monologuing Jesus. This is the idea that in John, Jesus talks for much longer at a time than he does in the Synoptics; this is then taken to be a sign of (you guessed it) the relatively looser historicity of John. The so-called "long Johannine discourses" are treated as ipso facto evidence of John's greater willingness to put words in the mouth of Jesus.

As I mentioned in this post, in my debate with Craig Evans this April, he made an outright blunder when asserting the Myth of the Monologuing Jesus, as one can see in the transcript of the debate. Dr. Evans referred early on to the so-called "lengthy discourses" and to the "I am discourses." At a certain point, the host asked him to clarify:

Justin Brierley to Craig Evans, April, 2018: Just for all those who are not as familiar as you obviously are with these texts, could you just remind us what some of those statements are in that I Am discourse?

Dr. Evans was only too happy to oblige:

Craig A. Evans: Of course. In John’s Gospel, and this is one of the most distinctive features about John, is where Jesus just begins to speak at length, you have nothing like this in the Synoptics, in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. But in John, Jesus will say, “I Am the light of the world,” and he’ll go on and on and on for many verses…these are the “I am” discourses, and there’re about seven of them, and they’re very thematic, very theological…

It's rather interesting to see how many errors could be packed into such a short statement. First of all (discussion below), it is not true that Jesus appears to speak at length more in John than in the Synoptics. Second, in neither verse (John 8:12, John 9:5) where Jesus says "I am the light of the world" does he "go on and on and on for many verses." In John 8:12, not only does a dialogue immediately follow, it isn't even about the statement that Jesus is the light of the world, so that saying does not even introduce a theme of the dialogue! In John 9:5, he immediately heals a blind man, and the narrative of the miracle is what follows the saying.

Third, there are not seven places in John where Jesus utters an "I am" saying and then "goes on and on and on for many verses." The nearest thing to such a thing is one discourse in John 6 on his being the Bread of Life.

It would be difficult for Evans to have been more incorrect, on a sheerly factual level, in this statement about Jesus as a monologuing fellow in the Gospel of John.

It is sometimes noted that some Johannine scholars include Jesus' extended dialogues in the concept of "discourses" and that, once this is done, one gets more "discourses" in John than if one had limited oneself to places where Jesus is speaking alone. See the list of nine "Johannine discourses" on p. 2 here, for example, including Jesus' dialogue with Nicodemus and with the Samaritan woman as "discourses" and his dialogues on testimony and authority with the Jewish leaders in John 5 and John 8. This list, I would note, does not actually connect seven of the so-called "discourses" with "I am" sayings in any event, but only three, though "I am" sayings do occur at various points within the material listed as "discourses" (such as in the Farewell Discourse).

If dialogues, even thematic dialogues, count as "discourses," then we also have such "discourses" in the Synoptic Gospels. Mark 10:35-45 then should be called, by the same standard, a "thematic Markan discourse" on the subject of servant leadership, when James and John come to Jesus desiring to be placed on his right and left hand. Matthew 16:13-20 is, on this odd definition of "discourse," a Matthean discourse on the subject of the identity of Jesus Christ (a rather "Johannine" theme, come to think of it). And perhaps the entirety of Matthew 22:15-46, in which various groups of Jesus' opponents ask him testing questions and he silences them, should be called a "discourse" on Jesus' authority and knowledge of the Scriptures.

There is something methodologically extremely dubious about inventing a special use of the term "discourse," applying it to John selectively, and then talking with astonishment about how many discourses we have in John!

Such a usage is confusing as well because some ancient authors did invent speeches (where this is used in the ordinary sense of a continuous speech by a single person), though others disapproved of this practice. The conflation of dialogues with speeches (in the ordinary sense) in John can then intersect with the idea that "making up speeches" was accepted in the "ancient world," so that, if people get the idea that John has more long speeches by Jesus than do the Synoptics, they may think it especially likely that John invented material.

Had Evans indeed intended any such highly confusing, potentially misleading, technical usage in answer to a question expressly designed by the host to clarify Evans's own meaning of the phrase "I am discourses" for a lay audience, he should of course have said so very explicitly so as not to be open to the charge of misleading.

But it's much worse than that: Evans expressly said something that locked himself out of claiming that he was using that technical meaning. For he expressly characterized the so-called "I am discourses" as places in which Jesus himself gives an "I am" saying and then Jesus himself "goes on and on and on for many verses," which simply is not an accurate description of dialogues.

To make it worse, several of both Jesus' actual discourses (in the non-technical sense) and his dialogues range over a variety of topics. The Farewell Discourse (the longest in John) certainly does, and the dialogue with the woman at the well does not stick to one theme either, partly because the woman herself changes the subject. So some of the dialogues/discourses/whatevers in John are not so "very thematic" as all that.

When seven discourses are listed in John (see here), this is done in such a strange way that it includes some things that are not discourses and excludes things that are (like the Farewell Discourse). And once again, only three begin with an "I am" saying.

Evans's own picture of the Johannine Jesus as a monologuist illustrates the danger of the ad hoc, just-for-John use of "discourses" to include dialogues. Apparently Prof. Evans was so carried away by his own terminology that he actually thought that all of the passages designated by scholars like himself by this eccentric use of "discourses" in the Gospel of John are indeed places where Jesus "goes on and on and on for many verses," which is not the case.

Making things even stranger and more muddled, when I suggested that he might be thinking of the Farewell Discourse (which contains a couple of "I am" sayings and the longest period of uninterrupted speech by Jesus in John, and hence is the second-best candidate for meeting his criteria), Evans expressly said that he was not speaking of the Farewell Discourse at all (search "Upper Room Discourse" here). Apparently it was only the ever-elusive "I am discourses" whose historicity he was questioning.

Evans's statements about lengthy discourses in John are impossible to salvage, from any angle.

But now let's zero in on the question of how long Jesus speaks, uninterrupted, in John and in the Synoptics. As it happens, we have data on that, and there are not more verses of recorded, uninterrupted speech by Jesus in John than in the Synoptics. As discussed by the Unitarian James Drummond (here), in An Inquiry into the Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (1903), Matthew wins the prize for the longest speeches by Jesus. Here is part of Drummond's data:

Passages containing more than 3 verses of Jesus' uninterrupted speech and less than 10:

16 in Matthew; 20 in John

More than 10 and less than 20:

8 in Matthew; 3 in John

More than 20:

4 in Matthew; 3 in John

To get more specific, the longest uninterrupted passages of Jesus’ speech are in Matthew: 93 verses (Olivet Discourse) and 107 verses (Sermon on the Mount). The longest uninterrupted segment in John is a portion of the Farewell Discourse: 52 verses. Notice, by the way, that this is only an uninterrupted portion of what is known as the Farewell Discourse. What is generally called by that name is not, in fact, several chapters of entirely uninterrupted speech by Jesus. There is dialogue interspersed at points (the end of chapter 13, 14:7ff, several places in chapter 16).

At one point, it seemed as if Evans might have thought that an answer to this point from Drummond arises from the fact that many scholars think that the Sermon on the Mount (for example) is composite. He said,

And I go back to what she said about the longer discourses in Matthew. The problem here is these discourses have been constructed out of disparate materials. And she mentioned the Sermon on the Mount, that's a great example of it. When you look at Luke, the parallel there, and it’s half a chapter, it's Luke 6:20-49, the so-called Sermon the Plain, and in Matthew it becomes three chapters, five, six and seven. And all critical scholars of the Synoptics, and I mean evangelicals, not just, you know, non-evangelicals, recognize this assembling, this constructing of these discourses out of materials.

As I pointed out at the time, if one wishes to raise the possibility that Matthew's Sermon on the Mount contains some composite elements (that it is in part a collection of sayings that Jesus said at different times), one might as well allow this possibility for, say, John's Farewell Discourse as well, since it covers a variety of topics. I'm more inclined toward the view that neither of them is (which is a distinctly minority view for the Sermon on the Mount, I acknowledge); the Farewell Discourse does have some more "time stamps" scattered throughout it than does the Sermon on the Mount.

One wonders in any event how in the world one would argue from the premise that the Sermon on the Mount is a composite and that none of the (actual) discourses in John is composite to the lesser historicity of the latter. How would such an argument even work, if one wanted to make it? If the Sermon on the Mount is composite, that hardly makes the sayings that go to make it up more likely to be recognizably historical, or to be founded on Matthew's reasonable belief that they are historical, than if it were not composite. And if some discourse or discourses in John are really to be understood as uttered all on a particular occasion, that does not raise the probability that they are more non-historical than the Sermon on the Mount or that John made them up as "extrapolations" of Jesus' other teaching. Why would any such thing follow? One could only try to get such an argument off the ground if Jesus were really inherently unlikely to talk for, say, the equivalent of 52 uninterrupted verses, which is certainly not true. If it were, I suppose that would be in turn an argument that the longest uninterrupted passage of Jesus' speaking in John is composite after all!

Then, too, the Sermon on the Mount is not the only discourse that is longer than the longest uninterrupted passage in John (there is also the Olivet Discourse in Matthew), nor is the Sermon on the Mount the only discourse that participates in a pattern showing Matthew to have at least as many "long talking periods" from Jesus as John does. Are all four of Matthew's more-than-twenty-verse discourses composite? Matthew 23:1-36 (the Woes to the Pharisees) looks pretty continuous and thematic, just to mention one. To get Jesus "really" portrayed as talking longer overall in John than in Matthew one would have to argue that so many of Matthew's medium-to-long discourses are so obviously composite and so many of John's are clearly not supposed to be composite that, when all is said and done, we find significantly more long periods of Jesus' uninterrupted speech that don't appear to be composite in John than we do in Matthew. That would be a hard sell.

This is all highly conjectural in all different directions, and the most obvious, simple, relevant point is that Jesus does not talk longer, uninterrupted, in John than in the Synoptic Gospels. The uniquely Johannine monologuer is simply a myth of scholarship.

As I discussed in a previous post, it seems plausible that the Myth of the Monologuing Jesus in John got started from a sense that Jesus is more repetitious in John and sticks to one topic somewhat more in John than in the Synoptics--that is, that he speaks less aphoristically in John, even though this is not the same thing as his "going on and on and on for many verses" in John but not in the Synoptics.

I dealt with Jesus' repetitiousness already there and will not repeat all that I said. But I will quote a relevant comment by Richard Bauckham:

The way [the Synoptic Gospels] represent what Jesus said on such occasions is mostly by means of a collection of Jesus’ aphorisms and parables, sometimes with explicit thematic structuring of the material, sometimes more loosely grouped according to topic or catchword.

A point that historical Jesus scholars rarely make is that this cannot have been how Jesus actually taught. If Jesus did, as Mark represents (4.1), address the crowds from a boat on the lake of Galilee, he cannot have spoken merely the three parables Mark attributes to him on this occasion or even the larger collection of parables that Matthew provides. The issue here is not what Jesus said on a specific occasion, but the way in which Jesus generally taught. He must have taught in a much more discursive and expatiating way than the Synoptic Gospels attribute to him....Formally, [the] teaching or discourse material [in John] is quite varied, but it has in common the negative characteristic that it does not consist of collections of the kind of aphorisms and parables the Synoptics provide. Aphorisms and short parables, even sayings we also find in the Synoptics and sayings that would not have been out of place on the lips of Mark’s, Matthew’s or Luke’s Jesus, are found, but they are scattered through the discourse material and in many cases embedded in it. The main point to be made here is that, formally speaking, Johannine discourses and dialogues could well be regarded as more realistic than the typical Synoptic presentation of his teaching.("Historiographical Characteristics of the Gospel of John," pp. 31-32)

Good teachers and preachers do repeat themselves, and it's at least as likely that the Synoptic, relatively non-repetitious speaking of Jesus represents the simple elimination of circling repetition as that the more repetitious style of Jesus in John represents anything non-historical about John. And in any event, this does not result in a Jesus who "goes on and on and on" in John but not in the Synoptics.

So next time someone asks you, "But what about those long, long speeches by Jesus in John?" now you know to reject the Myth of the Monologuing Johannine Jesus, just as you can reject the Myth of the Sock Puppet Jesus.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on August 20, 2018 3:35 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Craig Evans) (Gospel of John) (New Testament)

The voice of the Master--More evidence

 

The voice of the Master--More evidence

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

In this post in my on-going John series, I'm going to talk about places where Jesus sounds distinctly "Johannine" in the synoptic Gospels or "synoptic" in the Gospel of John.

To be sure, there are differences of emphasis, but those differences are exaggerated by scholars, to such a point that Craig Evans says that "you have virtually nothing in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that sounds like and looks like Jesus in the Gospel of John" and that, if we took John's portrait to be just as literally historical as that of the synoptics, we would have to wonder "is there just some other Jesus we just didn't know about?" Of course, all of the posts in this series on John contribute to a rebuttal of Evans's statements. See especially here, here, here, here, and here.

Michael Licona has used the alleged great difference between the way Jesus talks in John and the synoptics to support the idea that John "adapted" the "traditions about Jesus" to such an extent as to change "My God, why have you forsaken me?" to "I thirst" on the cross (Why Are There Differences in the Gospels, p. 166), when the latter was not uttered in an historically recognizable fashion at all.

Mere differences of emphasis are, of course, a completely different matter. John and the synoptics may have recorded different statements by Jesus for reasons of theme and saliency to a particular author. Showing crossovers in Jesus' speech at precisely the points where the Gospels have been alleged to be most different is therefore relevant to the historicity of the gospels and, since John comes under such special doubt, to John in particular.

The Johannine Thunderbolt

A well-known pair of verses found in two of the synoptic Gospels (Matthew and Luke) in which Jesus talks like he does in John have become known as the "Johannine thunderbolt" (allegedly coming "out of a clear synoptic sky"). I will quote it from Matthew:

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." (Matt. 11:25-27)

The same verses occur in extremely closely similar language in Luke 10:21-22.

There is no doubt that these verses would be very much at home in the Gospel of John. Jesus refers in absolute terms to "the Father" and "the Son" as he does in John. He teaches explicitly that the Father has given him "all things" and that it is not possible to know the Father except through the Son--all themes dear to John's heart.

So well-known is this passage that even in his sweeping generalizations Craig Evans had to pause and acknowledge its existence, while downplaying it. (In his sentence on there being "virtually nothing" in the synoptic Gospels that sounds and looks like Jesus in John, he paused and added, "I think there are a few verses in Matthew 11, which could be exceptional.")

But to brush off the thunderbolt as "a few verses" is to miss an important point: Johannine language and themes are supposed to be the stamp of either one very particular mind or a group of minds (a sort of "Johannine committee") writing much later than the Gospel of Matthew was written--probably around the end of the first century. The hypothetical author(s) of the Gospel of John (that is, those hypothesized by critical scholars) would have been children (at most) at the time when the Gospel of Matthew was written, and there is every reason to believe that whoever authored John had nothing whatsoever to do with the writing of the Gospel of Matthew. So what is such language and what are such explicit themes doing in Matthew at all? Or, if for whatever reason one regards Luke as earlier, in Luke? Or, if one thinks that this overlap material (given that it is shared by Luke and Matthew but not Mark) comes from the hypothetical Q document, what is it doing in Q? How did it even get there, if such a way of thinking about Jesus is the product of a human mind or minds who were not involved in writing any of these documents?

A very simple explanation is that the whole idea of a "Johannine Jesus" is wrong. The real Jesus, let us consider for a moment, really did talk like this about himself and his Father at times. The "Johannine thunderbolt" is a witness to this in the synoptic Gospels, while the author of the Gospel of John picked out and emphasized more of the places where Jesus talks this way than the synoptic Gospels did. Thus the mind behind this language is Jesus' mind, not that of an author or redactor or a person engaging in theological reflection. I suggest that this hypothesis needs to be taken very seriously.

But that's not all.

Bearing witness

Perhaps no word and concept are more important to the author of John than witness. The Greek verb for bearing witness or testifying and the related noun for testimony, in all sorts of forms, appear over and over again in the Gospel of John, both in Jesus' mouth and in the narrator's voice.

In fact, it could in some cases be a matter of normal paraphrase (as distinct from invention falsely being called "paraphrase") if John used one of these words as a synonym in a context where Jesus recognizably said something like this. For example, suppose (just as a thought experiment) that in talking to Pilate Jesus said that he was born into the world "to proclaim the truth" instead of "to bear witness to the truth" (John 18:37) and John paraphrased "proclaim" as "bear witness." That would be a normal, minor paraphrase, and the saying would still be entirely recognizable.

There is no question of the fact that these words and their related concepts come up much more often in the Gospel of John than in the synoptic Gospels, and they are found in I John as well. In fact, in a complete reversal of the usual use of this emphasis in John, Leon Morris argues that this emphasis upon bearing true witness pushes against the idea that John felt free to put words into Jesus' mouth on the basis of his own theological extrapolation:

With this we should take John's stress on witness. He uses the noun [marturia] fourteen times...and the verb [martureó] thirty-three times....Obviously this is another of his characteristic concepts....This emphasis on witness is noteworthy. Witness is a legal term. It points to valid testimony, to that which will carry conviction in a court of law. It is incompatible with hearsay or with a romantic elaboration of a theological kind based on the barest minimum of fact. At the very least, John's habitual use of the category of witness shows that he is quite confident that his facts cannot be controverted....The confident appeal to witness is John's own. (Studies in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 121-122)

It is therefore interesting to find that this same concept and even language does appear in other authors, most notably Luke. In the preface to his Gospel, Luke uses the term autoptai--eyewitnesses--to describe those who have told of Jesus' life from the beginning:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus...Luke 1:1-13

The noun form of the word "witnesses" (related to our word "martyr") whose cognates are so prevalent in John is also prevalent in Acts. It is used in the words of Jesus himself when he tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit will empower them to be his witnesses: "you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8). Peter says that Jesus rose from the dead, "and of that we all are witnesses" (Acts 2:32). He repeats the same point, using the same word, in Acts 3:15, Acts 5:32, and Acts 10:39. Paul uses the same term to express the same concept concerning the apostles in Acts 13:31.

Backing up to the words, of Jesus, in Luke 24, Jesus uses the same term:

Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Luke 24:45-49

I wrote here about an undesigned coincidence between Luke and John based on a remark by Richard Bauckham. That coincidence concerns this same notion of testimony or bearing witness: Jesus in John tells the disciples, "When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning." John 15:26-27. The verb for "bear witness" is martyreite--a cognate of the word for "witnesses" used so frequently in Acts and used by Jesus in a similar context in Luke.

As noted by Richard Bauckham, it seems that the disciples in Acts 1 are applying the words of Jesus when they come to elect a replacement for Judas. And as I noted in the earlier post, this point is especially relevant if those words were uttered at the Last Supper and they are remembering them only a few weeks later, after Jesus' ascension, as they wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

The prevalence of this notion of witnesses in the early church is well-explained if it was, in fact, a term used by Jesus for the disciples, as attested both by Luke and by John. To be sure, John reports far more instances where Jesus uses this term. John also reports that Jesus refers to more persons who bear witness: The Father bears witness to Jesus (John 5:31); the Spirit bears witness to him (15:26); Jesus himself testifies of what he knows and has seen (3:11). But once again, this could easily be a matter of thematic emphasis by way of selection, not a matter of a special "Johannine adaptation of the Jesus tradition" whereby John made Jesus say things that he did not say in an historically recognizable fashion.

Jesus was sent by the Father

The theme of Jesus being sent by the Father vies with the theme of testimony and witness for being John's favorite. If we (incorrectly) took John to be indicating the percentage of times that Jesus addressed certain themes, we would come to the conclusion that Jesus scarcely ever opened his mouth without mentioning that he was sent by the Father. But this would be a mistake. We should never take any evangelist to be claiming to give us a representative sample of Jesus' teaching and thematic emphases. It is undeniable that Jesus mentions more often in John that the Father has sent him than he does in the synoptic Gospels (e.g., John 5:23-24, 30, John 6:29, 44, John 20:21, and others), but it does not follow that John portrays "a Jesus" who referred to this fact with a frequency of m/n times when he spoke while the synoptics portray "a Jesus" who referred to it on fewer occasions.

But once again, the theme is by no means absent in the synoptics. In the previous post I already noted three verses in which this theme appears when Jesus makes a three-fold step-wise structure: Whoever receives or rejects the disciples (or a child) receives or rejects Jesus, and whoever does that receives or rejects the one who sent him. These are in Matt. 10:40, Luke 10:16, and Mark 9:37, all in apparently different contexts. In Luke 4:43, Jesus says that he was sent to preach the kingdom of God. In Matthew 15:24 he emphasizes that he was sent to the lost sheep of Israel. And in the parable of the wicked tenants in Matt. 21, Mark 12, and Luke 20, the owner of the vineyard at last sends his son, who is killed by the tenants. Luke 20:13 even uses the phrase "beloved son." And Luke 4:18 shows Jesus quoting the Old Testament and saying that he was sent to preach deliverance to the captives.

The difference, then, is one of frequency and emphasis, not one of a Jesus who speaks and acts so differently in the synoptics that we cannot see that he is the same except in a few exceptional verses in Matthew 11.

"Kingdom of God" vs. "eternal life"

It is often said that John substitutes "eternal life" for "kingdom of God" in his Gospel, so that "eternal life" is considered a type of "Johannine idiom." Here I want to write very precisely. One can easily imagine scenarios in which substituting "eternal life" for "kingdom of God" would be a matter of minor, normal paraphrase rather than a matter of radically "adapting the Jesus tradition" or invention under the guise of "paraphrase" such as is being pressed upon us. This would depend of course upon context, but it is fairly easy to imagine contexts in which, if Jesus said to someone, "You will inherit the kingdom of God" and John rendered this as, "You will inherit eternal life" this would be a recognizable paraphrase, well within the bounds of ordinary substitution of a synonym.

At the same time, we should not hastily conclude that John went through and systematically, self-consciously changed all the instances where he wanted to recount a scene and remembered (or in some other way knew) that Jesus said "kingdom of God" into "eternal life" just because he liked that phrase better or wanted to make some subtle theological point. While even this would not be anything like the kind of distortion that is present in the faux "paraphrases" I have highlighted being advocated by critical scholars, there is some prima facie case that, if Jesus in John often uses the phrase "eternal life," it was a phrase that Jesus used on most or even all of those occasions. And a self-conscious substitution on multiple occasions is a strong psychological thesis. There needs to be some reason to think it to be true, given John's record as a good reporter.

The interesting thing here is that these are not occasions where we can actually compare the same sayings of Jesus in John and the synoptics. Rather, precisely because of John's tendency to record unique material, "eternal life" occurs in this unique Johannine material. This greatly weakens the case for any kind of systematic substitution. That case appears to rest entirely on statistics--the much greater number of appearances of "eternal life" in John vs. "kingdom of God" in Mark and Luke.

The only passages where John uses "eternal life" that critics might even think are recounting an incident found in the synoptics are John 6:68 (Peter's confession that Jesus has "the words of eternal life") and John 12:25 (where Jesus says "whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life...will keep it for eternal life" noted in the previous post). While the context of these verses indicates that they actually recount unique incidents not found in the synoptics, for the argument here it does not matter anyway, since "kingdom of God" (or as it would probably be in Matthew if it occurred, "kingdom of heaven") does not occur anyway in the synoptic passages in a way that is parallel to John's use of "eternal life" (Matt. 16:13-20, 24-28, Mark 8:34-38, Luke 9:23-27).

Contrast here the parallels between, e.g., Matthew 3:2 and Mark 1:15; Luke 6:20 and Matthew 5:3, where an argument can be made that Matthew is recording the same saying as the other Gospel but repeatedly uses "kingdom of heaven" instead of "kingdom of God." This is conjectured to have been done in deference to Jewish sensibilities within his audience. At least in those cases it is actually possible to look at what appear to be parallel phrases in the same incident.

As a brief but important digression, I want to bring up the fact that NT scholars are far too prone to psychologize the evangelists and attribute complex motives to them for deliberate changes. A variation is never allowed to be just a variation. Hence, it isn't that Mark left out Jesus' exception clause "except for fornication" concerning divorce just because he didn't know about it. Rather, Matthew has to have added it in order to extrapolate on what he thinks Jesus really meant and put it into his mouth. Mark doesn't leave out the good thief just because nobody happened to mention him to Mark. Rather, he is conjectured to have suppressed the good thief to emphasize Jesus' forsakenness "by all." Matthew doesn't record "this is my beloved Son" instead of Mark's "You are my beloved Son" simply because he or his human sources remembered the Father's words with slight variation, as in all normal human memory. Rather, Matthew has to have deliberately changed the words (which he got from Mark) in order to make the Father's words "more personal" for the reader. These are just a few of the many real examples of over-complication and unjustified psychologizing that I could cite from (evangelical) NT scholarship. The problem is not that the differences are so great as to fall outside the bounds of normal variation in human testimony, including normal paraphrase. The problem, rather, is that the theories in question are far more deliberate than the evidence warrants, that the notion of burden of proof has been lost, and that the evangelists are unjustifiedly seen as writing far more literary compositions than testimonial compositions. Therefore, before we conclude that John systematically substitutes "eternal life" for "kingdom of God," we should ask why we should think that, and mere statistical frequency isn't sufficient in material that is different anyway.

Richard Bauckham, in whom the tendency to complex theories in NT studies is not entirely absent, believes that John does substitute "eternal life" for "kingdom of God," but only after a certain point in his Gospel. He acknowledges ("The Johannine Jesus and the Synoptic Jesus," p. 6) quite openly that "kingdom of God" appears in John in chapter 3, the conversation with Nicodemus. In vs. 3, Jesus says that unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. In vs. 5, he reiterates the point, again using "kingdom of God."

Perhaps even more interesting, the phrase "eternal life" occurs in the synoptic Gospels themselves, sometimes on the lips of Jesus and sometimes on the lips of other people. (And for what it's worth, the Greek is the same as well: Jesus and others speak of inheriting or receiving zōēn aiōnion in the synoptics as well as in John.) In Mark 10:29-30, Jesus promises that anyone who has left earthly blessings, including family, for his sake will receive in the world to come "eternal life." In Matt. 25:46, the parable of the sheep and the goats, the righteous enter into "eternal life."

The rich young ruler asks Jesus what he must do to inherit "eternal life" (Mark 10:17), and so (perhaps less sincerely) does a lawyer while testing Jesus in Luke 10:25, just before the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Perhaps the best Gospel note of all (this mentioned by Bauckham), in Mark 9:43-47, the phrase "enter into life" is used in verses 43 and 45 in a series of parallels (where Jesus is teaching that it is better to gain eternity with one hand, eye, etc., than to go to hell with both), while in vs. 47 Jesus uses "enter the kingdom of God" with apparently the very same meaning! So "Mark's Jesus" himself uses "life" and "kingdom of God" interchangeably in this passage.

The theory that John substitutes the "Johannine" phrase "eternal life" for the synoptic "kingdom of God" is also contraindicated by the fact that "eternal life" is found in Paul's epistles (Galatians 6:8, Rom. 6:23) long before John was written.

Bauckham concludes that John "can be seen as selecting and developing this aspect of the kingdom of God," which is fine as far as it goes. What he could have said, more robustly, is that the data call into question the entire hypothesis that John did any sort of systematic, self-conscious, or theological substitution of "eternal life" for "kingdom of God" in the words of Jesus that he records. After all, if the phrase "eternal life" or its Aramaic equivalent was used even by people other than Jesus at the time for a desirable end-state, then it was a known idiom and not a specially Johannine one, and John may simply be recording unique occasions on which Jesus used it. Or, if he occasionally substituted it as a synonym in normal paraphrase (which we could not know in the nature of the case when we do not have other accounts of these incidents), he can be presumed to do so un-systematically and without any theological intent. This is all the more plausible if Jesus himself used them interchangeably at times, as indicated in Mark 9.

Children of Light

The theme of light and darkness is certainly important to John (think of the prologue to the Gospel alone), as it also is to the Apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 4:6, I Thess. 5:4-7, etc.). But it has apparently been a critical confusion to think that the phrase "sons of light" (or "children of light") is distinctively Johannine. Leathes notes (p. 317) that it is "thought to be a specially Johannine phrase." The illusion may arise from the fact that light is so important for John and also that "children" as a form of address is thought to be Johannine (see next section), though the Greek terms used by Jesus to address his disciples as "children" are not the same as the term used in the one and only occurrence of "children of light" in any event.

The bottom line for this one is that any claim that it is "Johannine" is just false. "Children of light" (the Greek is actually "sons of light") occurs precisely one time each in the synoptics and in John. In John 12:36, Jesus urges the people to believe in the light before it is too late, that they might be the sons of light. In Luke 16:8, at the culmination of the parable of the unjust steward, Jesus remarks that the children of this world are more shrewd than the sons of light. And that's it. The phrase "children of light" (using the Greek for "children" rather than "sons") appears in Paul's epistles as well (Ephesians 5:8), urging his readers to walk as children of light. And "sons of light" appears in I Thess. 5:5, making a similar point. Such a phrase can thus be said to be at least as Pauline as it is Johannine, if not more so, and there is no particular reason to think that John's single record of Jesus' use of it in 12:36 is a Johannine adaptation.

"Children" in direct address

To address one's followers as "children" is fairly naturally thought of as "Johannine" because it is used in that way many times in I John. On p. 403 of his commentary on John's Gospel, Craig Keener refers to this usage as a "typically Johannine idiom for teacher-disciple affection," though he carefully qualifies that statement elsewhere (p. 921).

John calls the recipients of his epistle "children" or "little children" (using a diminutive form of the noun) in direct address over and over again, and it is one notable feature of the tone of the epistle. (He addresses them as "teknia," little children, in I John 2:12, 2:18, 2:28, 3:7, 3:18, 4:4, 5:21, and as "paidia," children, in I John 2:13, 18.)

In that sense, it is not illegitimate to think of such usages as "Johannine." But it is important not to be confused by the profusion of the usage in I John into thinking that Jesus himself in the Gospel of John uses such a mode of address to his disciples especially often. In fact, he does not. He addresses them as "teknia" (little children) only once, and as "paidia" only once, and that's it.

In John 13:33, Jesus uses "little children" to introduce the statement that he will not be with them much longer, in the lead-in to the new commandment that they love one another. (It may be significant, though I do not want to lean on it too much, that Judas leaves just before Jesus addresses the other disciples with this term.) In John 21:5, after his resurrection, Jesus calls from the shore to the seven fishermen, "Children, do you have any fish?" The question is not without humor, since presumably Jesus knows that they have caught nothing. The term "paidia" there may be approximately equivalent to "boys" or "lads."

These are the only uses of these forms of address in John, and it is entirely possible that John himself picked up the term from Jesus and uses it far more than Jesus himself did, though again we must be careful not to assume that either John's or the synoptics' numbers of use are statistically representative. Jesus might have used such a form of address either more or less than he does in either John or the synoptics.

For he does address his disciples as "children" once in the synoptics (as he does so twice in John--hardly a significant difference in frequency). In Mark 10:24, after the rich young ruler has walked away, Jesus calls his disciples "tekna" when stressing how difficult it is for those who are too attached to their riches to enter the kingdom. Keener mentions that the specific form "teknia" (often translated "little children") appears this way only in Johannine literature in the Bible, but he states that "the diminutive had lost most of its force by this period, hence the difference...is insubstantial" (p. 921, footnote 238). He also notes that Paul addresses his recipients using "tekna" in Galatians 4:19. (Paul, being a bit of a dramatist, continues with a metaphor: "My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you...")

The two instances in which Jesus calls his disciples "children" or "little children" in John, then, do not constitute any significant evidence for the "adaptation of the Jesus tradition" by the author of the Gospel. There is not even a significant difference between the number of such uses in John in the synoptic Gospels, and John's own frequent use of the term in his epistle should not be read back into the Gospel.

The instances of Jesus "sounding like John" and "sounding different than he does in the synoptics" that I have examined here fall into one of two categories: 1) The difference is a purely statistical one of emphasis. Jesus does also use the allegedly "Johannine" theme or language in the synoptics or uses the allegedly "synoptic" terminology in John, but merely with different frequencies. (And in some cases the allegedly "Johannine" phraseology is also found in Paul.) The statistical difference between John and the synoptics can readily be explained by different thematic emphasis in John rather than by an alteration of the portrait of Jesus by John. 2) There is not even a significant statistical difference, and the perception that a phrase or usage is notably distinctive of John's Gospel is an illusion.

All of this may seem all too obvious to those who have never been influenced by critical scholarship. As reader Joe Lightfoot pointed out here, if four different people followed one of us around for three years, each one might record such different sayings--real, historical things we actually said--that an historian centuries later would say that one portrait or other must have been a highly "interpretive" and "dramatic" (aka partially fictionalized) adaptation of the facts. But real people are multi-faceted, and all the more so the Son of God. And real, honest recorders focus on different themes and usages.

Unfortunately the full relevance of this point is not as obvious as it should be to scholars when it comes to the Gospels, and the pathologies of critical scholarship are beginning to have an effect upon practical apologetics work. Just one effect of the hesitance about John is the unwillingness to use Jesus' words in John to support his deity. "Let's do it from Mark instead," we are told, "since scholars question John so much." In this way we tie one hand, and more than one hand, behind our backs. The question mark hanging over John affects debates as well, since Bart Ehrman is very fond of challenging John. Will anyone stand up to him and rebut him directly, rather than conceding that John is a "horse of another color altogether"?

We would be immeasurably impoverished if we did not have the Gospel of John, and we need to admit openly that to put John into a more "interpreted" and less historical category than the synoptic Gospels is in itself to take away the Gospel for many important purposes. Why would we do that lightly? Instead of deferring to scholarship, let us examine the alleged scholarly basis for the question mark over John. And when we see that that basis is unsound, let us erase the question mark.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on July 9, 2018 11:30 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Craig Evans) (Gospel of John) (Licona) (New Testament)

Only one Jesus: The voice of the Master--the alleged problem

 

Only one Jesus: The voice of the Master--the alleged problem

by Lydia McGrew

(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.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on July 2, 2018 9:05 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Craig Evans) (Gospel of John) (Licona) (New Testament) (new testament)