THE JESUS STORY CONTINUES!

THE FOURTH GOSPEL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 7, 2015

What makes the “Jesus Story,” told through the gospels, so compelling is not its historical authenticity; nor the question of Jesus’ divinity; not even the validity of Christianity as believers insist as the true faith.   What makes the story so compelling is its humanness.  It is the people in this drama, otherwise conceivably invented or composites of people of the time, that are so enchantingly real to the mind and imagination, including Jesus himself.

Much has been made here, as have scholars over the centuries, as to the contrasts and contradictions between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of St. John, or the Fourth Gospel.  For me, this makes these accounts vibrate with energy and élan. 

Likewise, reading Romans one can imagine the trepidation of Paul as these Letters were written to a congregation over which he had no apostolic authority.  He stressed as he engaged them that he was merely going to Rome in transit to Spain via Rome.  It was his principle, he claimed, not to evangelize where others had worked, when that is precisely what he was doing.   

Paul was going to a church that he had not founded.  Given his disposition, he meant to present his writings to the Roman Christians and to test his theological views in a systematic way, which he did.  His mission was to show how God’s plan for the salvation of mankind was equally a Gentile as well as a Jewish opportunity.  More specifically, since this was a Gentile audience, his Letters to the Romans were directed at showing how the coming of Jesus the Messiah had made it possible for Gentiles to also become heirs to God’s promises. 

Paul was a bold charismatic actor with enemies many among the Jerusalem Christians, yet he walked boldly into their midst seemingly to recognize a lack of leadership and to know he would eventually prevail.

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If a person in the 21^st century can get past his self-consciousness of not being a biblical much less theological scholar, and can read the “Jesus Story” as if a mirror of people in his current own century, this story can be entertaining and enlightening.  For example, Vladimir Putin of Russia early apparently recognizes the vacuum created in the West due to its ambivalence in Western leadership, has taken residence in that vacuum as Paul did in the first century.  Human beings, not mythic characters, write man’s story, now as then.

We are discussing here the Synoptic Gospels and the Fourth Gospel as if they were assigned by a publisher and written with an agreed upon due date.  That was not the case at all.  Someone had to recognize the significance of the Jesus story and act.

Irenaeus, the Bishop of Asia Minor, is alleged to have requested John in his old age to write a gospel in response to the Jewish Christian groups who were then deemed heretical. 

The Fourth Gospel is believed to have been written near the end of the first century, probably in Epheus in Roman Asia.  The reputation of John the Apostle was strong in Asia and his work circulating well there as had the previous gospels.  It was Irenaeus who decreed that all four gospels be bundled together as one and treated as the Scripture for the new religion. 

Although Irenaeus proposed that all Christians accept Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as orthodox, and only these four gospels, he regarded John’s Fourth Gospel as the primary gospel due to its high Christology, that is, its theology relating to the person, nature and role of Christ in Christian theology.  St. Jerome translated John into its official Latin form, replacing the various older translations.

The Fourth Gospel would come to influence impressionist painters, Renaissance artists, and classical art, literature and other depictions of Jesus in Greek, Jewish and European history.

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The Fourth Gospel is designed to teach theology through narrative means and is very biographical, but can we trust the information it contains?

The prologue is intended to identify Jesus as the eternal Logos (Word) of God.  Thus John asserts, without making Jesus God, an innate superiority to all divine messengers whether angels or prophets. 

The narrative of the prologue of this gospel begins with verse, and consists of two parts.  The first part relates to Jesus’ public ministry from John the Baptist recognizing him as “the Lamb of God” to raising Lazarus from the dead and Jesus’ final public teaching.  In this first part, John emphasizes seven of Jesus’ miracles always treating them as “signs.”   

These “signs” are interspersed long dialogues and discourses including several “I am” saying.  The miracles conclude with that of Lazarus.  In the Fourth Gospel, it is this last miracle, and not the temple incident of the moneychangers that prompts authorities to have Jesus executed.   

The second part presents Jesus in dialogue with his immediate followers and gives an account of his Passion and Crucifixion and of his appearances to the disciples after his Resurrection. 

This section opens with an account of the Last Supper that differs significantly with the Synoptic Gospels.  Here Jesus washes the disciples’ feet instead of ushering in a new covenant with the Eucharist.  The feet washing served as a Christian initiation ritual rather than a baptism.  Jesus declares his unity with the Father and promises to send the Parclete (Holy Spirit), explaining that he is the “true vine” and must die before the Holy Spirit can come.

The Fourth Gospel then records Jesus’ arrest, trial, execution, and resurrection appearances, including “Doubting Thomas.”  Significantly, John does not have Jesus claim to be the Son of God or the Messiah before the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate.  The Sanhedrin is the name given in the Mishnah (Torah oral writings) to the council of seventy-one Jewish sages who constituted the Supreme Court and legislative body in Judea during the Roman period.

Stained glass portrait of St. John

(author of Fourth Gospel of John)

Though the three Synoptic Gospels share a considerable amount of text fully 90 percent of the Fourth Gospel is unique.  The Synoptic Gospels describe much more of Jesus’ life, miracles, parables and exorcisms.  The Fourth Gospel is notable for its effect on later Christianity.

A scholar in Christology sees this gospel as portraying Jesus Christ as “a brief manifestation of the eternal Word,” whose immortal spirit remains ever present with believing Christians.  The book presents Jesus as the divine Son of God, but subordinate to Him.  In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus speaks often about the Kingdom of God, his own divine role however is obscure.  In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus talks openly about his divine role, that he is the way, the truth and the life, echoing the statement, “I am.”

Scholars doubt that the historical Jesus actually made these sweeping claims, and interpret John 12:44 (“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me.”) as meaning that Jesus expressly denied being God.

Jesus baptism by John the Baptist is not explicitly mentioned in the Fourth Gospel.  Most scholars believed that John the Baptist was better known than Jesus, had a wider following, and greater influence.  This explains why his followers denied the superiority of Jesus over their leader.  The Fourth Gospel, however, has John the Baptist declaring such a superiority.

In the Fourth Gospel, John has Jesus in Jerusalem making unfavorable references to the Jews.  Some see this as a rebuttal on the part of the author against Jewish criticism of the early Christian church.  In none of the other gospels do the Jews, in masse, demand the death of Jesus. 

Only the Fourth Gospel seems to have resonated with Gnostics.  They were members of certain sects among the early Christians who claimed to have superior knowledge of spiritual matters, and explained the world as created by powers or agencies arising as emanations from the Godhead.  Gnosticism did not fully develop until the mid-second century.         

Comparisons to Gnosticism are not based on what John says in the Fourth Gospel but on the language of logos and light, concepts of Light and Darkness prominent in the Qumran community, the ancient Jewish village of Palestine on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank east of Jerusalem, an area noted for its caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.  For Gnostics, Jesus was not divine but a reveler of knowledge, whereas the Fourth Gospel teaches that salvation can only be achieved through revealed wisdom, which is through belief in Jesus.

Clement of Alexandria, 200 C.E., noted that the gospel of John was a “spiritual gospel,” or theological approach as distinct from the biographical approach of the Synoptic Gospels.  Accordingly, today Jesus’ teachings in John’s gospels re largely found to be irreconcilable with that found in the Synoptic Gospels, whereas they are found to be more accurate representations of the teachings of the historical Jesus.  To complicate this picture even more, the teachings of Jesus in John re distinct from those found in the Synoptic Gospels.

That said it is easier to reconcile the synoptic accounts within John’s narrative framework than to explain John’s narrative within the framework of the synoptics.  

A distinctive feature of the Gospel of John is that it provides a very different chronology of Jesus’ ministry from that in the synoptics.  First, John’s chronology is always consistent in seasonal references and in the correct sequence, geographical distances, approximate times of journeys, while references to external events is always coherent with the internal chronology of Jesus’ ministry, which cannot be claimed for any of the Synoptic accounts.  To wit, the harvest tide story of Mark (2:23) is shortly followed by reference to green springtime pastures (6:39).

Second, it would be relatively easy to have created the Synoptic chronology by selecting and editing John’s chronology, but would require a wholesale rewriting of the sources to expand the Synoptic chronology to produce that found in the Fourth Gospel.

Moreover, in John’s gospel the public ministry of Jesus extends over more than two years, whereas it is only a year in the synoptics.  In John, the start of Jesus’ ministry is in Jerusalem for the Passover, then he is in Galilee for the following Passover, before going up to Jerusalem again for his death at a third Passover.  The synoptics mention only the final Passover describing a public ministry of less than a year.  In John, Jesus drives the moneychangers at the start of his ministry, whereas the Synoptic Gospels account for this at the end immediately after Palm Sunday.

The Fourth Gospel gives no account of the Nativity of Jesus, unlike Matthew and Luke, while Jesus’ mother is never identified by name, but does assert that Jesus was known as the son of Joseph.  John (7:41-42, and again in 7:52) records that Pharisees dismiss Jesus as the Messiah on the grounds that the Messiah must be a descendent of David and born in Bethlehem, stating that Jesus instead came out of Galilee (as stated in the Gospel of Mark).  John made no effort to refute or correct this. 

Pharisees are depicted as being uniformly against Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels but sharply divided with reference to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel.  Pharisees such as Nicodemus are at least found to be partially sympathetic to Jesus.  

John has no other women going to the tomb with Mary Magdalene.  John does not contain any parables choosing rather to use metaphoric stories, allegories, or symbolism with reference to events or things.  Major speeches of Jesus are missing, including the Sermon on the Mount.  The “Kingdom of God” is mentioned only twice in John, repeatedly in the synoptics.  Conversely, exorcism is never mentioned in the synoptics.  John never lists the Twelve Apostles by name.  However, Apostle Thomas is given a personality as the “Doubting Thomas” in John.     

IN SUMMARY

Mark’s gospel is the oldest, believed to have been written in Rome in 60 C.E., or approximately 30 years after the death of Jesus.  Matthews’s was written in Antioch in 85 C.E. and Luke’s in Corinth in 80 C.E.  There is no certainty when they were written, where they were written or by whom they were written.  This is simply the commonly accepted data.  The Fourth Gospel, John’s gospel, could have been written as late as 100 C.E.

The Fourth Gospel has the account of “Feeding of the 5,000.”  We find that the fish eaten at that miraculous meal is not fish or “ichthus,” but cooked or pickled fish, or “opsarion” from the fish trade.  John was a fisherman, friend and disciple of Jesus.

The Fourth Gospel is quite different.  It offers a chronology of Jesus death that differs with the others. It makes no mention of the Eucharist, which is prominent in the others at the Last Supper.  It also differs with when Jesus died.  The Synoptic Gospels have the Crucifixion after the Passover, while John has it about the time that the Passover lambs were being slain in the Temple.  Jews were forbidden to carry weapons during Passover, which gives further credence to John’s chronology.

The Fourth Gospel endeavors to show Christianity as the “New Israel,” a Jewish faith for Jews, not a faith for Gentiles as well.  Jesus in his last hours reformed and reestablished Israel as a new religion, John is saying and that religion was Christianity.

Readings of the Jewish New Year: “Now then, arise” (Deuteronomy 2:12); “Depart, go up hence” (Exodus 13:1).  These words were incomprehensible to the Twelve Apostles, but a straight forward narrative from John: “When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples over the Brook Kidron” (John 18:1) and into the Garden of Gethsemane.  

These gospel writers put together narratives to interpret events consistent with the written tradition of prophecy.  This would be alien to historians or biographers today.  Matthew makes Jesus a new Moses, delivering a New Law to the chosen people of Israel from the mountain-top; Mark likens Jesus to trekking through the wilderness to the Promised Land; and Luke shows Jesus as man become God.

None started with a set of theological beliefs about Jesus, and then fitted the narrative into these beliefs.  Only the Fourth Gospel departs from the historical Jesus to the memory of Jesus of Nazareth.  It is a poor memory that only works backwards. 

The Fourth Gospel endeavors to present Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Jesus as if from an eyewitness account.  It is not clear that John witnessed this exchange.  But like the other gospel writers, his assumptions paralleled the Scripture. 

Author A. N. Wilson in “Jesus, A Life” (1992) writes,

He (John) was not making a straight story into a myth.  He was starting with a myth.  The myth is that “In the Beginning was the Word.”  The Fourth Gospel sees life as a perpetual conflict between light and darkness, with the darkness never able to ‘master’ the light, never able to understand or to conquer it.  The kosmos (the “world”) hates Jesus.  He does not need to judge or condemn it, for it condemns itself by its own ignorance.  The ‘love’ which God shows to the kosmos in this Gospel is, to say the least, limited.  In his (John’s) mythological way of looking at things, benighted humanity is represented by the ‘Judeans’ who failed to see the glory of the Galilean Jesus even when he performed signs among them.  These Jews are represented as urging the death of Jesus upon Pilate.

What makes the Fourth Gospel intriguing as well as puzzling is its strong anti-Christian vein and much less emphasis on the idea of a church in contrast to the unqualified Christianity espoused by Paul, Matthew, Mark and Luke. 

Believers in the Fourth Gospel are born again as individuals into the Light of Jesus.  Readers do not find Jesus in a community of saints.  There is no Eucharist.  Faith is the total basis of belief, which is not based on knowledge, scholarship, seeing or experiencing, in other words, basically anti-Paul.  It is not even about Jesus as God, but the story of Jesus as the Divine Logos (Word), which is not quite the same thing as God.  Indeed, it makes no reference to Jesus being the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. 

The Fourth Gospel sees Jesus primarily as a teacher.  It puts all these teachings into the mouth of Jesus.  It records the Feeding of the 5,000, the Last Supper, and other events with no concern about historical credibility.  Theologians and historians still have a legitimate right to ask who was the real Jesus, did he exist, what did he teach, can any truth be recovered from the Gospels or the Dead Sea Scrolls?  They will not, however, find answers in the Gospel of John. 

Given the unapologetic mythological framework of the Fourth Gospel, it still purports to be a legitimate story of an historical personality, Jesus.

Few New Testament scholars believe Jesus never existed.  The gospel writers did not have the same intent as these scholars.  They wrote, as the Fourth Gospel says, “that ye might believe.”  But it would be folly to believe the gospel writers are describing people, times, places and events with cutting edge historical accuracy.  It was not their focus.  They were selling an idea. 

Even the Crucifixion of Jesus, which is central to the theology of Paul and the Christianity he promulgated to the Gentiles cannot be confirmed with certainty.

In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus makes no claim to being the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, but the Synoptic Gospels do.  On the other hand, these gospels discounts the idea that Jesus thought of himself as the Preexistent Logos sent from the Father to ‘reveal’ God to the enlightened few, as the Fourth Gospel maintains. 

The passages where the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel makes these claims for himself are so unlike the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels that it is impossible to imagine that they are ‘historical.’ 

That said it strains credulity to suppose that there was an actual Galilean preacher, who was an exorcist, miracle worker, and charismatic figure who died on the cross around the year 30 C.E.  Equally, it is hard to imagine an improbable band of men would endure martyrdom to spread a new monotheistic faith to the polytheistic Gentiles based on  remembering a man called “Jesus.”  Yet, 2,000 years later, we cannot seem to get enough of this story.

The Fourth Gospel used the activities of Jesus as symbolic signs.  The wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns the water into wine in Jewish pots, is meant to symbolize the Jewish rites of purification with the new wine intoxicating new Israel with the living God.

It would be wrong to assume that such symbolism was absent from the Synoptic Gospels.  In Matthew, the disciples in a boat with Jesus are caught in a terrible storm.  “Save us Lord, or we perish,” they cry.  Jesus awakes from a deep sleep and a great calm follows. 

The boat is a parable for the Church.  The disciples are the early Church distressed by the storm of persecution.  The story informs the disciples that times will become harsh and they will endure hardships, but the Church will survive as all things will occur in Jesus’s name to fulfill Scripture.

One has to wonder reading the Gospels at the cleverness of the authors as these tracts, which are not history manage to creep into our imagination and take possession of us.  They play on that part of us that has a capacity to remake what we read into our own history.  

The Fourth Gospel in particular appeals to this imagination, but not for Paul.  He comes down on the mind with an anvil; John with a feather, another reason John had a problem with this apostle.  Paul’s approach was visceral with a carnal rather than imaginative vision.  He didn’t put the reader in the center of his gospels but the gospels in the center of the reader.  His provocative style was often in conflict with John if not the other gospel writers. 

The Fourth Gospel is a world view meant for the individual to look at the nature of things through his or her own eyes, not only about Jesus, but about the idea of God and everything. 

The Greeks had a different world view.  Writers as different as Plato and Aeschylus saw man as part of the natural order.  Contemporary man is closer to Socrates than to St. John.  Plato’s Gorgias puts it this way:

“The sages (Greek) say that heaven and earth, the gods and men, are held together by fellowship (koinonia) and friendship and harmony (kosmiotes) and self-limitation and righteousness.  So, they call the universe as a whole order (kosmos) not, as we say, disorder, or want of discipline – perhaps the fact escaped you that the mathematical relationship has power among gods and men.”

For the Fourth Gospel, and the Synoptic Gospels as well, the kosmos is not the ultimate reality.  These gospels are not interested in Plato’s other worldly concepts of mind, or of mathematics, politics or law. 

Belief is not a worldwide view but the sphere of the imagination with the Scriptures the linchpin.  Weltanschauung seeks to make destiny and everything comprehensible on the basis of the general understanding of man and the world.  A. N. Wilson writes:

According to the view of the New Testament, in that way, I am running away from my real existence.  I do not attain to my existence in the sphere of what happens generally, but rather in a concrete situation, in the here and now, in my individual responsibility and decision, where as I hazard myself I can gain or lose myself  (Wilson 1992, p. 64).

That is, I stand as an individual in the presence of God.  It is in this light that we are to understand the Fourth Gospel’s perpetually dismissive attitude to what it calls the kosmos, dismissive, yet paradoxical, as Jesus says, I am come not to judge the world but to save the world (John 12:47). 

For the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is the Eternal Logos, unseen and misunderstood by the world, not apprehended by mankind in general, not by the Church, but by the individual.  Jesus says to Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” 

This means that the reader, the individual, who is still “of this world,” still looking at the sun and seeing “a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea,” as William Blake puts it, will be simply unable to “see” what the Fourth Gospel is about, for the reader comes to see Jesus by night with all its rich symbolism of darkness, the darkness of a corporeal world as opposed to an imaginative singular vision.

John is saying in this gospel that the Jews are not so much the actual adherents to Judaism (Jesus and his disciples are that), but the people who inhabit the kosmos, who have Weltanschauung not faith for whom God and Man and Law are part of the same clockwork game. 

To escape this, John is saying in the Fourth Gospel that “the ruler of the Jews must be reborn, must abandon the old womb, no longer worship in the old Temple for he is confronted with a spiritual crisis” (Wilson, 1992, p. 65).

We, the modern reader, come to Jesus in this gospel by night, blinkered with the desire to make sense of things, bounded by common sense, decency, and by ethical and scientific notions which are containable within the kosmos rather than being wholly outside it.  We clutch at mathematical algorithms wanting to know if the Fourth Gospel is the case, if the stories are in any small particle verifiable.  That is the nature of the night. 

Scholars have created a tremendous mountain over the Fourth Gospel: did the story of Doubting Thomas take place; were the disciples a matter of historical fact; did they convene after the Crucifixion; did Jesus in fact rise from the dead and appear to these disciples a week later; or are these episodes that more than a billion souls some 2,000 years later go to war to defend without substance?

By a strange and haunting consistency not duplicated in the Synoptic Gospels, the Fourth Gospel, Jesus becomes the Word.  He is snappy, irascible, teasing, jocular, angry, consoling, fascinating, fully human.  We ask ourselves, what manner of man is this?  And we cannot answer.

He is so real in our consciousness that we find ourselves going back to the Fourth Gospel in deference to the others because, mythology or not, he is real to us.  He is everything that consciousness can conceive of being clearly outside the purview of our understanding and comprehension.  Alas, even as fond as we are of John’s epistles, he breaks free of the Fourth Gospel to clash with the sinless Jesus of theology to be seen through strange lenses. 

This gospel stands alone among regular church goers as their favorite book in the New Testament. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals. It includes such well known and oft-quoted texts as: "God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life." It boasts the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept," which serves the needs of many crossword puzzle creators. Its prologue was used for centuries in Catholic liturgies as "the last gospel" at the mass. It includes characters like Doubting Thomas, whose very name has entered our public discourse.  Believers and nonbelievers usually agreed that this gospel was written by a Jewish mystique. 

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