We said something already about the distinctiveness of John's Gospel, and let me remind you of
something which I read from Perrin, which is in that section that you have, from his
introduction to the New Testament.
Just the several points he makes on page 221 and the following, just for a start, and then
I'll go into worrisome detail about this distinctiveness of John, because it's funny how we can read
the Gospels for... we read things in a blur, you know, we tend to go through things in
a blur, and we have a vague impression that something is different, but it doesn't crystallize,
we don't focus on exactly what it is that makes it different.
And we'll try to do that in the course with John.
Everybody who writes about John says that he's different, and says that... and the difference,
one of the big questions is, is the difference the accumulation of a lot of little things,
of a lot of characteristics, or is the difference really one thing that's manifesting itself
in a number of different ways?
And of course, I'm opting for the second.
This is what Perrin says, remember the points that he makes.
First of all, John has got his own language and way of using it.
First of all, he's talking about four texts.
He puts the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, aside, because he says it's a whole different
genre, and it looks like it comes from a different hand as well, a different kind of thing, a
different kind of animal.
So he lumps the three letters of John together with the Gospel, and says they have a unity
of style and content that shows they really belong together.
In fact, it's said that the letter, at least the first letter, is written in connection
with the interpretation of the Gospel.
We'll see that as we go along.
They use the same language in the same way.
They present stark contrasts between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and
death.
Things that in John tend to be...
It's like metaphysical contrasts, whereas in Paul, for instance, the contrasts are different.
Contrast between the Jews and the Gentiles, or the unbelievers and the believers, is a
lot more kind of reconcilable, healable than Paul, it would seem.
I'll be turning from time to time to Paul, even though Paul's not the author of the Gospel,
simply because John and Paul are the two who are most alike in the New Testament.
Those are the two kind of theological, mystical, spiritual developments of the New Testament
that come blossoming out of it, leaving the rest on another level, in a sense.
So if we're looking in the direction of spirituality, we'll naturally be talking about both of them.
And at one time or another, we'll talk about the contrast between them.
A habit of thinking in what has been called a spiral structure, so going round and round
in a sometimes annoying way, and then gradually making some kind of new point in the circle.
So not just a circle, but a spiral, but certainly not linear logic.
In fact, you don't find much linear logic in the Gospels in the New Testament at all.
When you think you're going to get it, you find some kind of rabbinical twist,
some kind of hairpin curve that leaves you wondering.
Even when Jesus uses the Old Testament, you find that.
His logic is a curious logic.
Although sometimes his logic is so clear and so instant and so intuitive,
that you can't even separate the steps of it.
The logic like daylight, sometimes, the logic of Jesus.
When he says, if you lift your ox out of the pit on the Sabbath,
why don't you do as much for your brother?
That's the instant logic of the light of truth.
Okay, and then there's the quality of meditative depth.
Even the most casual reader can sense that he's in the presence of someone
who has meditated long and earnestly on the verities of Christian faith, and so on.
Every line of the Gospel and letters of John breathes the spirit of this meditation,
which is to say, from outside, but also it has a kind of taste which is characteristic,
and which is connected with this meditative quality.
This quality has made them the fundamental literature of Christian mystics.
Okay, and then I gave some examples last time.
We'll find a lot more as we go along.
And we'll find that John permeates Christian theology in a way which is less than obvious.
But every time you see that word Word, with a capital W,
every time the Logos is used in theology, we'll find it immediately.
Irenaeus, that's John!
That's the inside of John's Gospel, that fundamental cornerstone
of what has become our Christology, that Jesus is the Word of God.
When we talk about the prologue, we'll get further into that.
And then the musical analogy.
There are a couple of angles at it he takes here.
But I remember particularly that kind of spiral effect in music.
There's a connection between what he's saying.
The assertion of a theme, and then the development, and then the return,
that kind of thing.
That's what you find in John.
So, a progression which takes you back to the same place you started in some way,
or which reveals the inner riches of something that was there at the beginning,
but brings you back always to a center.
There's a kind of circular, or orbital, or centering effect in the Gospel of John,
which I think is very much connected with the notion of the Word,
the notion of the Logos.
And then he talks about this option that we have between considering John
as a kind of a product of occasions, a product of the contact,
the collisions of the community with various experiences, various impacts,
or as kind of issuing out of the interior experience
and the creative genius of a particular author.
Two radically different options, which I think in some way...
We're going to find out those two options have to be in some way synthesized
in order really to come to terms with contemporary scholarship.
But my preferred option, of course, would be for the idea that's issuing out of the experience
and out of the creativity of a single author.
It seems that John's Gospel, even though many hands may have had to do with it,
the kind of singularity and the power and the way it all hangs together,
and the taste of it all, cannot issue from a committee
or can issue kind of from a long history,
but essentially has to come through the experience of one person,
because that's the only thing,
that's the only way that a creation of such power can happen, I think.
And I'm not denying that there have been many different influences
that have come into the Gospel,
or even that it comes out of the experience of a community, ultimately.
But the kind of essential experience, as it were the backbone
onto which everything else has to aggregate itself,
I think is the experience and the creativity of an individual.
We'll puzzle later about who that individual is,
whether he's the beloved disciple or the ultimate evangelist or editor,
that's kind of a puzzling area.
So here's that quote which I bored you with, I read it twice last time, once again.
The Gospel and letters of John give the impression of carefully composed wholes
of being a response to the internal dynamics of the genius and vision of the author,
rather than to the external dynamics of a concrete historical situation in need.
And so then he says how difficult it is to answer any historical questions
about these works, the Gospel and the letters.
The scholars are hacking away at it and they make some progress, there's no doubt.
And this is not to deny that those historical and community effects,
but only to insist that we have to keep both sides as we go through this.
Next time we'll take Brown's reconstruction of the experience and history,
the early history of the Johannine community,
and that'll give us the historical side.
For a start.
Let me talk now about the distinctiveness of John in a more detailed way.
This I'm getting from Kaisar.
The title of his book is The Maverick Gospel,
so his whole point is that John is another kind of animal.
You know where the word maverick comes from?
I looked it up in Webster's Dictionary.
Maverick was a Texas rancher who didn't brand his cattle.
So, whenever you found a calf without a brand, that was a maverick.
First of all, the similarities between...
This is all about John and the synoptics,
because after all, we have to confess that as different as we want to make John,
John wrote a gospel.
He didn't write letters like Paul.
He didn't write, the gospel is not an apocalypse.
It's not another kind of thing.
And it doesn't have the form simply of a poem.
It's a gospel.
He wanted to write a gospel.
And so, our comparison is with the synoptics for the other gospels.
First of all, among the similarities,
there's this basic structure that the key events in the Gospel of Mark,
which seems to be the basis for the other synoptic gospels,
for Matthew and Luke,
agrees with the basic structure of the Gospel of John.
First, you have the preaching of John the Baptist,
the movement into Galilee,
the feeding of the crowd,
the walking on the water,
Peter's confession,
departure for Jerusalem,
entry into Jerusalem and the anointing,
Last Supper and the Passion story.
So, you've got that basic backbone, structural backbone,
in which John agrees with the others.
In addition to which, you have a certain number of shared events.
And then you have things that are in the synoptics,
and then there's something like them in John.
An example is this,
the story of the healing of the centurion's son in Matthew,
and the healing of the Syrophoenician woman in Mark,
and the healing of the nobleman's son in John,
which is a strange sign in John,
because it's passed right over.
There's this healing, we hardly hear anything about it,
and John goes on.
But that's enough to start to make us think,
if there's that similarity,
does that mean that John is taking one of those incidents and transforming it?
And then the common portrayal of John the Baptist.
And then even some verbal similarities.
But what surprises me is not that you find these verbal similarities.
He gives a few examples.
In John, the man who loves himself is lost,
but he who hates himself in this world will be kept safe for eternal life.
In the synoptics, by gaining his life a man will lose it,
by losing his life, for my sake he will gain it.
But what surprises me is not that you find those similarities,
those are inevitable, if Jesus said anything.
But what's surprising is the differences,
is the amount of differences there is.
And the paucity, the slimness of the resemblances.
Now let me get on to the differences.
One other thing that the biggest and most substantial similarity,
likeness, sameness between John and the others is the passion story, okay?
Now that seems to be the core of the gospel in any case.
The kind of most essential part of the gospel account.
And John shares it pretty much with the others.
Remember during Passion Week we have the four passion accounts regularly.
And so we're able to pass from one to the other.
We see the little differences, but basically it's the same John.
Now the differences.
First of all, take the preface of John and compare it with the beginnings of the other gospels, okay?
The one gospel, two gospels which begin with infancy accounts.
Another one which begins with the preaching of the gospel.
And the one that begins with the preaching of the gospel,
you have this movement upwards towards the revelation of the identity of Jesus.
Even though the gospel is longer than it's called,
but the gospel of Jesus is a son of God, you know?
Yes, Luke actually, this is very peculiar Luke,
it's very significant because he knows right from wrong.
He says he's not an eyewitness, but he's actually a researcher.
Is that the beginning of the gospel, or perhaps?
Yes, that's right.
He's got a preface too, okay?
But it's a different kind of preface.
He sets himself very cautiously and in a scholarly manner into history.
As a historian, he's done his best.
If you take a look at it, just that preface, it's like a perfect classical Greek.
It's like as good as anything on classical Greek.
And it's like you read a Greek historian who, like Herodotus,
has done his research with Thucydides and something,
and he wants to give an orderly account.
It's very different from what John sets out to do,
and from the way in which John presents Jesus from the very outset.
See, right at the beginning, he makes the maximum claim for Jesus.
In fact, he kind of stuns you with this.
When he makes that assertion of the word,
we read that a thousand times without understanding what he's really saying.
But what he's doing from the very outset is to put the whole of his gospel
at a different level and ask you to read it from a different angle and so on.
In other words, as a gospel,
he takes it out of the category of gospel right away, in a sense.
Because what he's saying is not history.
It's not historical.
A lot of our problem is going to be determining
what the relation is between John's gospel and history.
Is he writing history?
Let me give you one example.
The episode in chapter four of Jesus in the Samaritan woman.
This is a hard one.
I have a hard one from a scholar.
But most of the historical critics will tell you now,
including Raymond Brown,
that that episode probably is from the later life of the community
when the Johannine community was in contact with Samaritans
and not in the life of Jesus.
Now, that shows you the magnitude of the problem of John and history.
It's very difficult for me to accept that.
In the end, I may accept it, but it shows you.
Because I'm in love with that episode.
I love that thing, that encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman.
I hate to have to relegate it to the category of a purely mythical or pure creation,
even though it would be a theological creation.
But that's the kind of thing we're dealing with.
There's one point which seems to be countered very strongly
from looking at John and reading these things.
It's the polemical character.
Oh yes.
That it's quite different from the other gospels in this respect.
It appears, when you think about it and reflect back on this,
that there is definitely, all the time, an argument going on aimed at the Jewish.
That's right, that's right.
And this is terribly clear when you've seen that and put it into the gospel.
I think we've heard it for a long while without being conscious of that,
but now it leaps out at us.
The dialogue, not the dialogue, but the polemic with the Jews.
And of course, then you have the big problem, who are these Jews?
Schneider goes into that at some length in the class,
and it's an important question to answer.
Because of what she calls the anti-Semitic potential of John's gospel.
See, those assertions about the Jews, the Jews are demonized in John's gospel.
So obviously we can't elevate John's gospel to kind of infallibility on all sides.
The Jews seem to be demonized in John's gospel,
which gives the leverage for anti-Semitism in Christian tradition,
which has often been taken advantage of.
And it's more true, I guess, in John than it is in any of the other gospels.
So, maybe we'll deal with that sooner or later.
But that's typical of John's way of seeing things as light or dark,
black or white, no intermediate.
And the Johannine community, as he turns out to be all white, in a sense,
and all the other communities are a little bit in shadow,
and some of them could be darkness, like the world and the Jews.
So there's this polemic thing in which John is soaked, in a way.
So if we talk about John as the spiritual or the mystical gospel,
and we can, validly, on the other side it's saturated with this polemic.
Now, it doesn't permeate every episode and every paragraph of John,
but it's there most of the time, as we'll see.
So, right away we have this cosmic setting of the gospel,
as Kaiser says, but it's more than cosmic.
It's metacosmic, it's metaphysical, it's a divine background,
divine source and divine character,
divine identity of Christ, the Word, in the gospel of John, immediately.
So we're not kind of deducing that or having that verified
and through a long procedure of historical, kind of a long historical itinerary,
but it's leaking out of us right from the beginning,
and it's giving us the peculiar perspective
from which John sees Jesus and in which to read the gospel.
The prologue of the gospel suggests also the differences of style and language.
These terms, life, light, darkness, true, world, father and son.
Now, you'll find most of them also in the synoptics,
but not with nearly the same frequency or the same theological density.
There's a cluster of terms in John,
which forms a kind of constellation around the center, we'll see.
And the center is the person of Jesus, because everything in John's gospel,
this is peculiar and defines the kind of unity, the way the gospel hangs together,
that everything you touch leads you into the center,
which is the identity of Jesus, which is Jesus, the Word, if you like.
But recall that the only time that John uses that term, the Word, the logos,
is in the prologue, it doesn't come up again.
It comes up in the first letter, in a preface, a prologue to the first letter,
which is in parallel, deliberate parallel, obviously,
to the prologue of the gospel, which is a testament.
We'll see that later on.
Others are knowing, seeing, and the Jews.
So some of these are kind of sacrilegious, mystical terms,
and this one is a directly polemic one.
The two sides of John, and the sweet and the hard.
And amen, amen, translated in very truth.
He has a series of I am sayings, which is theological in intent,
attributed to Jesus.
You can see there are different kinds of those.
And then the notion of God as Father.
Now somebody counted, it's funny here, he says,
those scholars who have time to do so have counted the number of times
Jesus is made to refer to God as Father.
In the synoptic gospels, in the fourth gospel.
Father is used of God 64 times in the first three gospels,
and 120 times in the fourth gospel.
Some of the prominent terms in the synoptic gospels
are secondary in John, or you hardly ever find them.
And the most prominent is the kingdom of God.
Kingdom of God which is dominant, for instance, in the gospel of Matthew,
which seems to be what Jesus is really teaching, preaching,
initiating to in the three synoptic gospels,
and you hardly find it at all in John.
I don't know if it occurs in John.
Others, repent, apostles, we never notice it,
but the apostles are not there in that term in the gospel of John.
Scribes, Pharisees, tax collectors, adultery,
except in that one dubious passage there.
Demon and inherit.
So John has a unique vocabulary.
And some of the vocabulary, some of the theological vocabulary
of the other gospels just isn't there.
So he's got his own theology and language to go with it.
Now, the chronological order of events in the chronology of John's gospel.
Here, Caesar settles on the Passover.
Now, in John, you've got three Passovers.
In the other gospels, you've only got one.
In the synoptic gospels, everything leads up to this Passover,
which is the culmination of Jesus' life,
and which is the Passion Cross.
In John, you've got three of them,
and which seems to extend Jesus' ministry over a period of three years.
And the geography mixes in with this too, you see,
because in the other gospels, you've got a Galilean ministry,
and then you've got a Judean ministry, one around Jerusalem.
In John, you've got a movement back and forth,
from Galilee to Jerusalem, Galilee to Judea,
Galilee to Judea, and finally the Passion and death at Jerusalem.
And then the Passover itself, if you look at the,
we call it Holy Week chronology, gets different in John.
In the other gospels, the time of the Last Supper
and the time of the eating of the Passover meal coincide.
So the eating of the Last Supper by Jesus' disciples is a Passover meal.
But John dismays you by messing that up
and putting the eating of the meal with the disciples earlier in the week,
so that it doesn't connect with the Passover meal at all, obviously.
And what a connection there is, is between the death of Jesus,
the crucifixion of Jesus, and the slaying of the Paschal Lamb.
Which takes us back to John 1, remember.
This is the Lamb of God, John the Baptist.
So evidently there's a theological intention in that.
Often when you find these displacements in John,
he's got a reason for it, it's not just an accident.
I say displacement, but that's presupposing that John
knows these synoptic gospels and is moving things around.
A lot of the scholars would say, no, he's got his own tradition.
So you see how much uncertainty there is,
how much kind of free play there is in these things.
It is how few facts are really certain,
as we read in the relation of John to the other gospels.
Nobody can prove absolutely that John knew the other gospels,
and that's an incredible thing.
Whereas the relation between the synoptics are pretty clear,
pretty well established.
Some further points.
I remember what I'm trying to get across is the distinctiveness of John.
We'll try to boil it down later to something more meaningful.
This may seem a little scattered.
But the different place of the temple cleansing in the account of Jesus...
Now this stares you right in the eye,
because in the other gospels, in Matthew, Luke and Mark,
I think all of them,
the cleansing of the temple comes at the end of Jesus' ministry.
It's the last thing he does,
and it's the thing that makes the chief priest,
the authority, set out to kill him.
It's a very brazen act, okay, so that's the last straw.
In John it happens in the beginning.
In John it's the first act of Jesus' ministry,
and the thing that trips off his passion and death is the raising of Lazarus, remember?
Now that's evidently deliberate.
So John's attaching a theological meaning to the cleansing of the temple,
and the meaning that you get from what he says there is that
the temple is his body, all right,
and for some reason he wants that interpretation to be there right from the outset.
And then the raising of Lazarus, of course,
and the death, resurrection of Jesus,
John wants to be linked, of course, for some reason.
He wants that to be, as it were, the culminating sign of Jesus' active life.
The difference in the portrayal of Jesus between the synoptics and John.
Now, here are the things that are in the synoptics that are missing
in John's Gospel, in the fourth Gospel.
First of all, the baptism of Jesus.
You've got John the Baptist there at the outset,
and you've got a kind of oblique reference to the baptism,
but the baptism itself is not there.
It's things like that that make me think that John knew the synoptics
and deliberately kind of played a variation on it,
by presuming something and then taking it further with that same event,
presuming that you know about it, you see.
Applying an interpretation, as it were, to a text which he can presuppose that you know,
something like that.
Excuse me, while John there, nor has been married?
We know much less about him than would enable us to get to that point to say.
We've got no knowledge about that whatsoever.
Some people even will contend that a beloved disciple,
who is the principal author, let us say, of the Gospel,
was a woman.
That's been proposed.
Well, to me, the one and the others were busy with their wives,
and I like that John was like an intimate friend who would visit them,
and then therefore would know more about Jesus.
Well, okay, tradition says that John...
Okay, John was a virgin always, and he is put in that role,
and sort of put on, as it were, in a corresponding place to marry,
in the tradition, all right?
But the current picture, as the scholars give it to us,
doesn't help us much with that.
There is a comment about his being a presbytery elder.
What was the custom of the elders for him?
I think there were.
I think that ordinarily...
You didn't have any clerical celibacy, in other words, in the early church.
And virginity was an exception which came from...
Celibacy was an exception which came from somewhere else,
but it was not imposed on bishops either, you know?
Say nothing of deacons.
Remember, a bishop is supposed to have just one wife.
I don't mean one at a time.
But that's about all you see.
So, presumably, deacons could have more than one.
The temptation in the wilderness is missing.
You can say that in John there are kind of symbolic equivalents
of the temptation, but it's not there.
The confession of Peter is missing in Caesarea Philippi,
but there's something like it in John 6, remember?
Where Jesus says, will you two go away?
And Peter says, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
It's very much like it, doesn't it?
And there are these shifts, you see,
that make you think that John had presupposed an existing text
and then deliberately makes a variant on it
so that you'll interpret it from that angle
and get something further out of it, and something deeper.
The transfiguration.
Oh my golly, the transfiguration is missing in John.
Where it's most appropriate, right?
Now, I think that there's a reason for that,
and in some way, John has injected the transfiguration into his gospel.
We can ask ourselves about that, maybe,
when we look at the prologue in the first chapter.
The struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane.
It's missing, but there's something like it, remember?
When Jesus says, now my soul is troubled, what shall I say?
Let this chalice pass from me, let this hour pass from me.
He says, not the chalice, but the hour.
No, for this reason have I come to this hour.
Father, let your will be done.
Remember he groaned in the Spirit, something like that?
And then the voice is heard from heaven in John 12.
There's something very much like it.
It's a deliberate transformation, I think, of the other event,
maybe to reveal its inner meaning,
certainly to put it in John's theological outlook
of Jesus' relation with the Father.
On the institution of the Last Supper, my mother,
what he means there, translated in Catholic terms,
the institution of the Eucharist, isn't there in John.
In the Last Supper, instead, you've got the washing of the feet,
and that's an astonishing thing.
That's a central element of Christianity.
How could John skip it?
How could he not know about it?
Particularly since John, in a way,
seems to be the most Eucharistic of all the Gospels.
His whole Gospel seems to be soaked
with that kinder sense of communion,
and especially the first letter.
So how can he leave that out?
And then finally, and of course,
my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Remember, the words, almost of desperation,
on the cross are not in John,
because the suffering Jesus is not visible
in the same way in John.
You could almost say that the kind of divine human character
of Christ, of the incarnate Word,
hardly ever quivers, hardly ever shakes or vacillates,
or is shadowed over, crowded in the Gospel of John.
Just that little bit in John 12,
when his soul is troubled,
but immediately the serenity returns and continues.
Now, here are some things found in the fourth Gospel,
about which we have nothing in the synoptic.
When I say synoptic, everybody understands, okay?
Matthew, Mark, Luke.
First, the wedding at Cana.
A deeply symbolic thing, okay?
There are plenty of feasts,
there's plenty of eating and drinking,
as Victor said in the other Gospels,
especially in Luke, isn't it?
But not the wedding feast at Cana.
The conversation with Nicodemus,
the encounter with the woman of Samaria,
which is an astonishing thing,
because of what goes on there, as we'll see.
Not astonishing that it's missing in the other Gospels,
but it's just such a surprising thing in John.
The raising of Lazarus,
the washing of the feet of the disciples,
and then a bunch of other things.
The wonders, the miracles of Jesus.
Now, Caesar contends that they're emphasized in John.
Curiously, you'll find others will say
that they're minimized in John,
that John doesn't emphasize so much
the extraordinary powers that Jesus has.
So that's something you'll have to verify for yourself.
Jesus doesn't seem to have to pray,
as he does in the other Gospels,
and not only in Gethsemane, but other times,
especially in Luke.
He knows the thoughts of others before they speak.
He walks through the midst of a hostile crowd
without a mic to hand to anyone.
Is the implication in all this that, for John,
Jesus is the risen Lord all the way through?
That's right, yeah.
Now, in a way, that's true in the other Gospels,
okay, but not in the same way.
In the other Gospels, the Jesus that you see
is being looked at after the resurrection,
and with the knowledge,
with the experience of the resurrection,
but the Gospel is not attempting to convey that.
It sort of creeps in implicitly,
it creeps in inevitably,
into the vision of Jesus.
But the evangelist is trying to give you
the history, more or less, all right?
Whereas in John, he's deliberately,
from the outset, explicitly,
starting from the perspective
of not only the risen Jesus,
but the pre-existent Jesus, okay?
The word, the second president of the Trinity,
as we say, who existed from all eternity.
So you couldn't start from a kind of
less earthly or less historical point of view.
Now, something about the speeches of Jesus.
Pardon the length of this,
but I think we can return to it later,
and maybe it's of some importance for us.
In the Synoptic Gospels,
you've got two kinds of speeches of Jesus, basically.
Short pithy sayings and parables.
You don't have extended speeches,
which are all in continuity,
kind of rotating about a single subject.
You'll have them short sayings,
which are strung together by a key word,
or strung together by a common theme.
Even the Sermon on the Mount is like that,
which is obviously deliberately composed by Matthew
from pre-existing short sayings,
which don't have all that much to do with one another.
There's a common tone
and a common message through all of it,
but it's not a kind of logical continuity.
Now, in John, you've got these discourses.
You don't have the parables at all,
and you don't have the short pithy sayings.
What you'll have is a kind of orbiting discourse,
a long one, which is repetitious,
and which can be obscure, too.
The story parable is entirely missing.
We commented last time
that you do have these symbolic things.
You do have parable in another sense,
parable as symbolic, even symbolic happening,
but you don't have parables told by Jesus.
You have images, symbols picked up by him.
The subject of the allegorical speeches in John
is always the same, the identity of Jesus.
Let's take Matthew.
The subject is always the kingdom of heaven, right?
The kingdom of heaven is like this.
It's like a pearl.
It's like a treasure.
It's like a net.
It's like a woman who loses a coin.
Remember?
But in John, consistently,
you're led back to that center,
which is the identity of Jesus.
The only thing he's interested in.
Now, notice the coherence of it.
See, this is not kind of just disconnected
from the other thing you're talking about.
Everything hangs together.
Why is that so in John?
Or how does it connect with that notion of the word?
The only way it could connect
is if the identity of Jesus
is really the same as that which contains all things,
in some way, okay?
Which is that word of God
that Jesus spoke of from the outset.
Q. Doesn't it seem very different with Paul, isn't it?
A. With Paul, yes.
People try to argue away, however,
the, what would you call it,
the pre-existence Christology of Paul.
You'll find them doubting
that he's saying the same thing that John is saying.
But in Ephesians and Colossians,
it comes through very, very strongly,
very close to John.
Read the sort of hymn, Christological hymn
in Colossians chapter 1, 15 to 20.
It sounds like John.
Jesus features a long extended discourses.
The logic of these discourses is not at all clear.
They're like a spiral rather than a linear bubble.
He says it too.
And they have but one subject, these discourses,
his identity, his origin, his relation with the Father.
The discourses of Jesus in the fourth gospel
suggest a different understanding of the Christ figure
and a different view of his teaching.
He's above all the revealer
whose words are the essential knowledge
needed for human salvation.
But he's the proclaimer
whose proclamation is one of his person,
once again, word.
Now, this is underneath there.
The reality of it is underneath there.
It's an out-there gospel that is never said.
And the evangelist doesn't know it.
It's just somehow in the reality.
But in John, the one who's writing knows it.
And that's the point of his gospel, is to say.
I remember your last question,
Professor John, Mark, and Matthew.
Yes, yeah.
It seems like the connection,
both for John and Mark,
the primary concern is who is Jesus
and then what does disciple mean?
Right.
Disciple, like both.
But then for Mark, it's like this struggle against
the kind of glorified discipleship
without suffering.
And for John, it's like discipleship
which is really a very,
it's like some different things,
like discipleship, like community,
that kind of thing.
Yeah, it's an interior thing.
And I'll say a little bit about that
after I try to boil this down.
It's a kind of mutual indwelling in Jesus,
very much like in the same thing,
the reproduction of the indwelling of Jesus in the Father.
Discipleship is this kind of mystical,
interior relationship, okay, by and large.
At least that's the inside of it.
The outside of it is following Jesus
just as it would be in the other gospels.
But the inside...
Well, he uses the category of friend.
Yeah, yeah.
And friendship.
He uses the word friend once there.
And that seemed to be common to Luke and to John.
He uses it once in John 15.
And that's all.
But the reality kind of permeates the last segment
as well as some of the thoughts of the gospel.
Okay, I don't want to carry that.
Oh, gee.
I'd better pull this down to a conclusion,
see if there's anything else important here.
So he contends that Jesus' wonders are heightened
in the fourth gospel.
The illness is cured or longer.
He compares the girl that wasn't quite certainly dead,
remember?
Jesus said she's asleep with Lazarus
who's four days dead and stinks.
So in John, it's like Elijah.
I said, pour water on the wood, too, before.
So also the effects of the powers of Jesus in nature,
transformation of water into wine,
so you don't find that in quite such power
in the synoptics,
even though you've got the multiplication of the bread.
The number of wondrous deeds of Jesus
in the fourth gospel is fewer.
You've only got seven.
You've got eight if you include
the miraculous catch of fish in John 21.
And we'll talk about these seven
when we get to the book of Psalms.
There aren't any exorcisms in John.
We've got plenty of them in the other gospels,
especially in Mark, don't you?
No casting out of demons in John.
Why?
In Luke, the casting out of demons
signified the advent of the kingdom of God.
And the wonders of Jesus in John, once again,
point not to the kingdom of God,
that the kingdom of God is here now,
but to the identity of Jesus, you see.
And once again, we say it's a Christological gospel.
Okay, now,
I had a page here from Ellis,
that first page of Ellis,
which I'll skim through
because it kind of pulls this close,
and then I'll give you some other thoughts on it.
I don't know if you've got page one of Ellis, have you?
Okay, the genius of John.
Now, note he's kind of looking at this
not from the point of view of an inspiration
or kind of a theological charism that John has,
or a revelation.
He's looking at it from the point of view of literature.
So he calls it the genius of God
instead of the inspiration of John,
the genius of John.
It resides in his ability to penetrate
to the theological foundations
that undergird the events of Jesus' life.
His mind reaches to the deeper meaning of the events,
the relationships of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
and the disciple.
John deals with the same revealed truth
as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul.
Now, he's sounding very Catholic throughout this, okay?
You know, he talks about it
in a confident way about revealed truth.
A Protestant scholar might not take it
with the same assurance.
His way of speaking about that truth
is always different.
Like water from the same source,
the Germanine, Pauline, Synoptic traditions
all come from the same historical Jesus.
Notice, Johannine, Pauline, and Synoptic traditions.
We haven't talked about the Pauline tradition,
but we'll get to it.
But flow through different lands,
pick up different textures,
and emerge as observably different rivers.
The Johannine river flows
through a theological Shangri-La,
an almost mystic world,
a world with its own language,
its own symbolism,
its own unique theological viewpoint.
If you look at scholarship trying to figure out
where John's peculiar insights come from
during the last 100, 150 years,
it's amazing, you know,
everywhere from Gnosticism
through the Mandaeans
and from Hellenistic Platonism
and all kinds of things,
searching for this quality x
which distinguishes John's gospel
and which looks very much like one thing
because it's come from one source.
And the latest candidate is the Samaritans.
We'll get into that
when we come to Brown's reconstruction.
It's own symbolism,
its own unique theological viewpoint.
How different it is from the world of Paul
and the synoptics,
even how it borders on the world of Paul.
Okay, let me try to
sum this up in a more meaningful way.
First of all,
I would say that there's a sapiential
or cognitive language in John.
Word, light, know, see, believe, truth
and finally even glory.
This is a cluster of terms
which is partly responsible
for John's distinctive character
and which we can easily connect
with other literature like Gnostic literature.
If you take the Gnostic,
the Nag Hammadi text of the Gospel of Truth
and put it side by side with John,
you find quite a bit of correspondence.
And this is one of the things
that made people suspect a Gnostic origin
for John.
It may work the other way.
There's an obvious and deliberate symbolism.
The symbolic level is explicit in John.
It's not just kind of there in the events.
Thomas Aquinas said beautifully
that in literature, for instance,
a word can signify one or more things.
But in God's actions, in God's history,
one thing signifies another thing.
It's built right into the history.
In other words, history itself
signifies something else.
History itself has a deeper meaning.
So the history of the Old Testament
has Christ latent within it in some way.
Now, here in John,
we've got not only that work,
we've got a deliberate literary symbolism as well.
Take John 6, the Bread of Life discourse,
where Jesus himself
gives you the symbolic interpretation,
or John 7, John 4, the living water,
where the interpretation is given to you,
the symbolism is forced upon you.
It's not left to you in the form of the parable
to take or not to take.
There's a kind of symbolic metaphysics,
because the symbols all, in some way,
point beyond themselves,
and they all point to one center.
For instance, the light of the world,
the creative word, the water of life,
the bread of life, life itself,
and the I am symbols.
All of these point beyond themselves
to a kind of metaphysical conclusion,
which, once again, is the identity of Jesus.
It's our way of saying it.
Because what we're getting here
is not some kind of fact,
it's not some kind of proof,
it's an initiation.
It's supposed to be an experiential entry
into the mystery,
and not some kind of intellectual exercise,
not some kind of...
Even polemic, you know, in the end.
There's something deeper in John.
Now, there's a stress on one-to-one relationships.
Okay, so there's an intimacy in the Gospel of John
which is indicated by the word friendship,
which Victor brought up before,
that the disciple is a friend.
That's only said once.
It's in John 15.
But the sense of it permeates,
especially the Last Supper discourse.
Even read John 1,
and it reads like a love saga in some way,
the attraction of the first disciples to Jesus.
So there's the one-to-one relationship
of the disciple to Jesus,
and then of Jesus to the Father.
And the whole of this revelation
of the identity of Jesus, in fact,
is his relation to the Father.
The Father has sent him,
that the Father is in him,
that the works that he does,
the Father does,
that the truth he speaks is from the Father,
that everything the Father has is his,
and so on, okay?
That's, in some way,
can be said to be the totality of the revelation.
Now, that comes into the other relationship,
so that the relationship of the disciple to Jesus
becomes the same as the relationship
of Jesus to the Father,
and so the disciple is drawn into that relationship
to the Father in Jesus, okay?
And then there's a language of interiority,
a language of indwelling.
If anyone loves me, he'll keep my word,
and I will come,
and the Father will come,
we'll dwell in him,
and I'll manifest myself to him.
That's extremely intimate,
an extremely intimate language,
a language kind of a fusing of beings.
We find that fusing of beings in other ways, too.
That revelation of the person of Jesus,
where Jesus seems to dissolve the boundaries
between him and the symbolic things he talks about
and identifies himself with,
so that he is bread,
so that he is life,
so that he is light.
The boundaries seem in some way to be dissolved
as we find out that not only he is in these things,
but he contains these things.
This word out of which everything came,
and which is also a man walking among men,
walking among human beings.
Okay, there's a kind of centering quality in John,
as I said, which we'll come to again and again,
about the language of interiority in John.
It's a language of indwelling,
a language of abiding,
and the promise of the paraclete,
okay, who will be in you.
All of that's in the last separate discourse,
John 14, 15, 16, 17.
And then just the word in,
just the word in,
which we find also very striking and dominant in Saint Paul.
In John it has this peculiar sense of intimacy,
of one-to-one relationship.
Remember also that in John
there's a sponso erotic or bridal imagery,
nuptial imagery that just comes up a couple of times,
but I think which is a key to the understanding of John.
That is where John the Baptist says of Jesus that
the friend of the bridegroom,
there's another place where the friend is,
the friend of the bridegroom stands
and hears the voice of the bridegroom.
His is not the bride,
the bride belongs to the bridegroom,
the bridegroom is Jesus.
Now, that's just said about once,
and yet I think it's a key,
a window to interpreting the whole of the Gospel.
And once again, we align the Gospel of John here
with the Song of Songs.
I'll try to prove that later on.
It's very much related to that notion of intimacy
and the one-to-one relationship in John.
And then there's this kind of quality X,
which I would say this...
Call it the high Christology of John, okay?
The quality X, which distinguishes John,
and which I would contend is one thing,
is one central insight
which gathers everything into itself.
Just the same way as the notion of the Word in John
gathers everything else into itself.
Just as the person of Jesus in John
gathers everything else into himself.
So this quality X,
the theological distinguishing point,
essence, whatever it be, of John's Gospel,
and which is attributed to so many different sources
by the scholars.
And we'll have to tussle with that a bit
as to where we think that...
How did that get into the Gospel?
Where does it come from?
What's the argument?
Did it simply come through the Apostle John's experience of Jesus,
the beloved disciple who leaned his head on the breast of Jesus?
Was it influenced by something from outside,
some kind of philosophy?
How is John...
How does he obtain such a universalist outlook?
Why can you somehow bring all the religious traditions together
in that notion of the Word, the Logos?
That's kind of crude, but I'll come back to that later.
The relation between theology,
the identity of Jesus, the Logos,
and the form of the Gospel,
that's a thesis which I would contend
that they're very tightly, very closely related.
And so, therefore, that the Gospel of John
cannot really be interpreted as an aggregate
which happened through certain diverse experiences
of the community, okay?
It issues from one inspiration, as it were.
And that the form of it flows essentially...
The essential form of it comes from this quality X,
from this interior inspiration or experience,
whatever you want to call it.
Whatever it is, it's a knowledge which is also experience.
And that is the point of the Gospel, in a way.
A knowledge which is experience,
and a knowledge which in the end dissolves all the boundaries.
And that's what I mean when I say sepiential.
That this knowledge which is the Word,
which is Christ in some way,
it relates itself to everything else
so that it flows into everything else.
Not just from a commanding point of view,
but with a kind of eminence.
Okay, I'd like to get on to the four Gospels today,
at the risk of...
Do you want to go on a little longer?
Maybe I should break and ask if there are any questions about this.
How do these letters fit in with the First John,
with the Gospel, I guess?
Okay, First John talks the same language
as the Gospel of John.
It's a different kind of writing.
A letter is a different kind of writing from a Gospel.
And so, most of the things we've been talking about in John's Gospel
are not evident in John's letter.
You don't have any happenings in there.
You don't have any figures in there, except a couple.
Does he mention any of those opponents in there?
But the language and the central thought is the same.
And a lot of the things I've been saying just now
are the same in the First Letter of John.
You've got this kind of spiral thinking,
okay, a kind of intimacy.
You've got the same relation between truth and love
and life and light, all right?
You've got the same kind of a metaphysical point of view.
And you've got the same...
It's just got the same flavor,
especially as the Last Supper Discourses of John,
John 14 through 17, okay?
It's got the same flavor.
A lot of the language is the same.
And then there's the deliberate connection.
If you look at the prologue of the First Letter
and the prologue of John's Gospel,
it was obviously written to be immediately related
to the Gospel, okay?
And we'll get on later as to how Brown and others
think that the letter was written,
the First Letter was written to avoid
a misinterpretation of the Gospel,
that some people were interpreting the Gospel,
some people in John's community were interpreting
the Gospel in a Gnostic sense,
denying the humanity of Jesus.
And so the letter comes along,
it's written to correct that,
and to ensure that anybody who denies
that Jesus has come in the flesh,
and Christ has come in the flesh,
is outside,
has gone afoul of the faith in some way, okay?
Q. But for this letter,
perhaps someone that would run
the same conflictual character...
A. Oh yeah, sure does.
Q. Because the calling one is making
is that those who run out from one's side...
A. That's right, it's terrible.
Q. Yeah, right.
It's a very conflictual atmosphere, John.
A. I think it's Aylward who mentions this sometimes,
that the sweetness that you find,
the kind of, what would you call it,
the love quality of John,
the insistence upon love and so on,
is balanced off somehow with an inevitable balance
and harshness of this polemic
and of the kind of condemnations that are there,
the consigning of people to the darkness
and to what seems like damnation.
Q. We would feel that women would be
very comfortable with John,
like a man who is, as it seems,
an antibiotic doctor,
and is affective and intuitive,
while the others look more factual
and almost workaholic in their own definition.
A. Yeah, that's right.
With Mark and Matthew,
when you get to Luke, though,
there's a sensitivity beginning to break through,
a sensitivity and a feminine quality in Luke, I think.
Q. Not to the extent of John.
A. No.
Q. John is much more poetic in their book.
A. That's right.
Q. And so tender and intimate.
A. That's right.
Even though, on the other side,
you've got this harshness that comes out.
Q. I'm convinced after reading the book
and hearing about it,
that actually, all that thing about love
that you have in the early apostolic writing,
in many ways,
are just about as circumscribed as for the Jews
and limited to the people outside the community.
A. That's right.
Q. And so it took some,
quite a lot of development and understanding
before it begins to expand outside communities.
Q. I mean, if this is something that characterizes us,
and then we read back the material,
we actually are rereading it
and reinterpreting the material
because it's so universal.
A. When you see the harsh responses
to these conflicts,
or to the persecution by the Jews,
and so on, you realize it.
Q. It's that harshness, I just wondered,
you know, when you love somebody so much
and you see that person misused,
or the name misused,
or somebody betraying that person
because they'll use his name
and use his wisdom
in order to have something esoteric or something,
as if they're superior.
I can see where that harshness would come,
almost out of an anger of being,
you know, how can you do this
when the love is there so strong?
A. That could be.
That could account for the harshness of the second,
what Brown calls the fourth phase.
One of those things I gave you there is four phases.
One, it's a question of these so-called secessionists
who are interpreting John's Gospel in a gnostic way,
that is, against the truth of Christ in some way.
So there's a ferocity towards that.
It's like a civil war, you know,
a war among brothers, which is...
And the same thing is visible,
of course, it's a civil war also with the Jews,
because these people are Jews.
I mean, the Johannine community comes out of,
basically out of the Jewish synagogue,
and they wanted to remain Jews.
They didn't want to break off.
It's through this violence that they're forced to break off.
And there's a terrific amount of bitterness there.
It's in St. Paul, but surprisingly in St. Paul it's mitigated.
In St. Paul, remember, in Romans chapter 10 and 11,
he says, well, I give my soul for these Jews,
because they're my flesh, you know,
and in the end they're going to be saved.
But John doesn't say that.
Wow, when he consigns them to the darkness,
they're finished.
I say John as if we're all one author.
Right, you're right.
You have the same conflicting situations arising,
the same kind of excommunication taking place.
Yeah.
And the interesting thing is, I mean,
I just understand, it's like,
you might as well admit that the Vatican
to the Constitution of the Church of the modern world
is like a new state of mind.
I mean, Paul isn't calling the early church
to be dialoguing with...
with other people,
and that it's not a dialogical mindset,
because it's a different thing.
And revelation and this receiving of God's truth
is taking place through this very,
very human kind of situation,
human response, including conflict.
Sometimes it looks like there's only one evolution
that takes place,
and that's the evolution of openness,
or gradually recognizing that all human beings
are the same flesh,
are your brothers and sisters,
as if that's the one historical development
that takes place as the church evolves,
so that it gradually gets the courage to open itself
in the face of all kinds of misunderstanding
and hostility,
to dialogue and to an acceptance of all people,
and even to a dialogue with the other religious traditions,
as Thomas was saying this morning.
It's quite funny.
I see him considering that the Samaritans
who were just very close by
were not accepting of Jesus Christ,
and none of the other world-wide view
proposed to us by the church.
Yeah, of course, that's a summertime view.
I mean, it's one thing to say that in the summertime
when you've got the windows open,
it's another thing when you're under assault,
okay?
Because then, when we start getting hurt,
then we take a different view.
Then we move back to the 19th century,
in the days of P.O. Nono,
we batten down the hatches.
It's very easy to be ecumenical
when the sun is shining.
It's pretty easy, anyway.
It's not easy for everybody,
because a lot of people have internalized this,
I think, to such a degree.
Well, the word I was looking for,
that's when I was talking about
the John and Mark comparison,
that Jesus is a witness.
That's the word I was looking for.
The distinction, the distinctive word for John,
if I'm not mistaken, is witness,
only he doesn't use it, I think,
but Jesus is the witness of the Father.
Okay, yeah.
And then, the disciples would be the witness of Jesus.
That's right.
The Paraclete makes that possible.
That's right.
The Paraclete's going to witness, too.
Yeah.
You're going to witness,
the Paraclete witnesses,
and I witness.
And that's a different articulation,
discipleship, from Mark,
which is a different problematic,
different question.
But it's interesting that then,
like the book,
the work itself is a witness
to the whole thing,
Father, Jesus, disciples.
That's right.
That's right.
It's a continuing witness.
And then, remember, there are three witnesses?
That's right.
In the letter.
That's right.
The water, the spirit, and the blood,
and the three witnesses are one.
Whatever that means is very mysterious,
so the witness thing is very important.
That right there is not discipleship,
but the other is.
Paul was wanting to win people over
and bring them back.
Yes.
Seems like John is taking a stand
where he sees that the only thing he can do
is hit people over the head
with the reality...
I mean, there's an absolute confrontation there.
And it's almost like he's talking
to his own community,
not caring about the others hearing,
because it's like a survival thing, okay?
Yes.
I'm talking more about the letter now
than the gospel,
but it flows back into the gospel too.
It's like a survival thing,
to save the ship,
and don't worry about those other guys.
We can't do anything about them.
All we can do is protect our own heritage,
our own community.
Because there must have been so many
going over to Gnosticism,
and that was so powerful...
And at first the resistance of the synagogue
was so great,
because they were surrounded by it, you know?
So it's like moving from one diaspora situation
to another minority situation,
and therefore not being able, really,
to be that optimistic,
to be able to turn to the others
with a missionary purpose.
When you say that John is the main basis
for the theology of the church,
that's a hard one,
because there's a lot more explicit
trinitarian language in Paul,
even though Paul never uses the word trinity.
But he'll sometimes say
something about the Father,
something about the Son,
something about the Holy Spirit,
in one sentence almost, okay?
He's a lot more objective than John,
in this sense.
He's more of a theologian than...
Or a different kind of theologian than John.
John is a theologian poet
who incarnates his theology in a gospel, okay?
So then, by looking through the surface of the gospel,
you're able to see the theology, okay?
And the theology kind of boils itself down
into the figure of Jesus.
Whereas Paul is a rational, discursive theologian
who puts the concepts out there.
Concept of grace,
concept of a whole lot of things, you know?
Faith and so on.
And then he'll reason out a theology of faith
and a theology of grace, okay?
So you'll get a lot more explicit,
objective trinitarian theology coming from Paul.
Whereas what you get in John is the core,
the kernel of that theology,
which is the relationship of Jesus with the Father, okay?
And then Jesus' relation as Word
to the whole of creation and to everything else,
and his revelatory character as Word, too.
So there's a very deep kernel
of the trinitarian theology in John,
but in Paul you get all this explicit.
Explicit and often nuanced, too,
when he talks about the Spirit.
Or when he talks about the different aspects of Christ.
Question from the audience
Well, we have to say that John is not interested in that.
And even though that happened during the life of Jesus,
John selects what he wants to talk about
from the life of Jesus.
And therefore he doesn't give us everything
that's in the other Gospels.
Now, why would he skip that?
It seems to be more connected with Mark's view of Jesus,
and where the ministry of Jesus is troubled in another way.
He's battling with the adversaries in another way.
In the Gospel of John, the adversaries are all through human form.
They don't have the temptations of Jesus,
and they don't have the exorcisms, okay?
So the demonic is manifested through human beings
in the Gospel of John.
Whereas in the other Gospels,
the demonic is manifested in these various ways,
in these kind of pure possessions and so on.
Okay?
But I can't give you a deep reason for that.
I haven't thought it out.
A lot of those things we can't explain.
We can say it's so, and John is different,
but we can't give you a good reason for it always.
It's a different view.
The presence of the demonic in itself,
or in these extraordinary forms of demonic possession and so on,
doesn't seem to be of any interest to John.
Maybe he thinks it's not significant enough theologically.
It doesn't fit into his theology.
It's connected probably with the absence of the temptation.
Seeing how actually the three of them play three different roles,
two of the synoptic Gospels even,
there's quite a difference between Mark's little abbreviations,
and the more elaborate ones.
And even between the two elaborate ones,
there's significant differences.
So they're all written with a particular slant,
to try it.
Nothing's accidental.
They're all constructed.
It's like a construction,
a whole unified construction in every one of the Gospels.
Right.
Yeah, I think that there's a definite struggle going on in John's Gospel,
but it's articulated differently.
Yeah, notice how the demonic...
We could search out the places where the devil comes into John.
The prince of this world.
Now the prince of this world is cast out.
Now the devil is called onto the stage, okay,
at a particular point, very deliberately by John.
And then it's Judas, he's connected with Judas, okay?
And he's lurking, but it's always in a human being.
In other words, John has simplified the struggle,
so that there are the opponents, there are the bad guys,
and the devil is manifested, expressed in them.
The devil isn't kind of getting in your way otherwise.
He's not around otherwise.
He's simplified the drama, and he puts it that way.
So there's Judas, and then the people into whose hands Jesus is passed by Judas.
That's where the demonic is.
And then the crucifixion of Jesus, the exaltation of Jesus,
the prince of this world is cast out,
and Jesus lifted up those old things to himself.
So the prince of this world is only allowed to come on stage as actor
at a certain point in a very controlled role.
That fits in with what you said earlier, in terms of the letter,
that anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus is demonic.
Yeah, I mean, anyone in the world, you see.
Sure, it's in very human form.
It's not in that dramatic or extraordinary way.
It's right there around you.
We had a master of lapses in the Jesuits, his name was Jan.
He said, don't look for the devil when I'm there somewhere.
Look for him in the Jesuit cassock right next to you.
And I think that's the devil's fault.
Anything that's watering down our tradition and watering down the word,
I mean, boy, that's what we need to...
See, the exorcism thing very often is an escape,
because it enables you to detach the demon from the ordinary
and from our own world, and put him in this extraordinary world
which in some way flows by the heart, you know,
where we don't have to wrestle with anything.
It can be an escape and a sidestep from the struggle of the heart,
where the demon is really affecting our own behavior,
and where we have to align ourselves, we have to make decisions, you see,
about what side we're on.
You don't have to do that, but it's obvious out there,
and you just get somebody to conjure him away.
Right in line with the great mention of Paul, I wonder whether it says,
"'Cursed be anybody who doesn't believe in Jesus.'"
I mean, instead of offering a prayer for him, he comes up and curses him.
Translation is correct.
Yeah. He was, I don't know, he could be kind of, what do you call it?
Choleric.
He was in a struggle, wasn't he?
I think he's, I don't know if it says something about
he did a lot more than he's known from my words.
Well, that's in John, that's in the first letter of John.
Well, I was thinking about something like that.
Yeah.
We've got to be careful in interpreting all these things
that have come out of struggles, okay?
When we take a theology that results from some intense conflict,
and then we generalize it, it's murder.
That's what happens with anti-Semitism, you see.
That particular struggle with the Jews at that time,
which made Christians demonize Jews, seems to justify anything.
It doesn't justify anything at all.
That's a creature of that time.
That's why Schneider's can talk about the need for
doing an ideological analysis of the Gospel,
something we've never done before, something we've never dreamed of,
because we say, this is the word of the Lord, you know, this is God's word.
And so it must be true in every respect under every aspect.
And now we find that what seems like the word of the Lord
has given rise to anti-Semitism
because there was something in that history that's not God's word.
There's something in that situation that doesn't express God's will,
and we can't interpret that reaction in terms of God's will and God's word.
That becomes a very difficult job, you see.
It's so difficult that the Church allows that,
the Church being under the guidance of the Spirit.
I was reading in the Life of Saint Elizabeth that
there were reflections about the Lord Jesus,
we have to avenge him and go to the crucifix.
He gave his life freely, he said so,
but for our salvation, why should we avenge such a thing?
You see, it's amazing that there was no light shed upon it at this time.
Yeah, but it's the same tragedy, though,
that you see already in the history of the New Testament.
Because look at the New Testament, these struggles that are going on.
Struggle with the Jews, that God's good people, you know.
And this butchery that's going on between the persecution and everything.
There it is, and then we find it reproduced in the Church and we're surprised.
But there it is. It's always going to be that way during history, you know.
That's the tragedy of existence, that the good turn against the good, and so on.
I haven't put it very well, but it keeps reproducing itself,
we keep finding it at every point.
Our temptation as Christians is to think that we're beyond Israel,
that the Church is sort of in the New Testament, it's free of all of that horror.
And then we find it within Christianity again and again and again.
Even things like the Holocaust, you know, being perpetrated by nominal Christians,
by people, by a Christian nation.
Does that mean, perhaps, that in each one's life, in each community's life,
in the life of the history of mankind,
that that enactment from Old Testament way of thinking and then coming to the New Testament
is a progression that has to take place over and over again,
rather than assuming it's all finished.
That's right, exactly.
It has to take place in each one of us, each one of us.
And that's the initiation we're talking about, or the transformation, or whatever.
It's like you have to relive the whole of the Bible, in a sense.
We begin with a lot of brutality in ourselves and we don't realize it at all until much later.
And see, the different kinds of Christianity...
If you take a fundamentalist kind of Christianity, it permits you to keep that brutality right along,
by aligning yourself perfectly with the light and then casting the other guy into the darkness,
and you just go along happily in that way.
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's pretty much true.
There's a kind of Christianity which does not require you to undergo any growth, any development,
or actually only an initial conversion,
and then you harden in a certain posture at that initial conversion to go right through.
Okay.
Okay, I want to...
One other thing before I quit.
I'm not going to keep you any longer, but just to carry this thing one stage further.
I'll leave this as a puzzle for next time.
Four Apostles. John, Paul, James.
Those who have been around for a few years will recognize this particular kind of madness.
It's going to be carried to further outrageous heights.
This is Peter.
Over here, it's still...
Now, let's go look at the four Gospels.
That's what we're dealing with, the four Gospels.
This is Matthew over here, and Mark over here.
I would contend that there's a kind of form in Christianity,
or a kind of form in the Church, or also in Revelation,
which arrives at a certain symmetry.
And the symmetry somehow is fourfold, nobody knows why.
But the fact that you've got four Gospels,
and also the fact that there seem to be four, in a sense, apostolic traditions,
that can be contested a lot.
But I just invite you to kind of try this on and see if it works.
Remember the three kind of favored disciples of Jesus in the Gospel,
who are Peter, James and John, whom he takes with him for various things.
Transfiguration, when he heals the little girl, the daughter of Jairus,
the garden of Gethsemane, those three are there.
But especially the Transfiguration, okay,
that time of insight into the deeper identity of Jesus,
when those three are there, as well as Gethsemane,
which balances it out from the shadow side.
And then the one other, who is, as he says,
a sort of born out of time, or aborted, or something like that at all,
who, though not at the Transfiguration,
somehow shares the illumination of the Transfiguration in a surpassing life.
And it's that experience he has with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus,
and the whole of his...
...his gnosis, his peculiar illumination which follows from that, and his theology.
So I would contend that those represent somehow four dimensions
of Christianity, Christian tradition, of Revelation and of the Church.
At least it makes a convenient kind of paradigm to go along.
Then, I would contend also that you can set up a certain parallel with the four Gospels.
So that Marcus, of course, is supposed to be the disciple of Peter,
I don't know how much that's still held up by these scholars now.
James and Matthew are found to have a certain parallel,
and that Matthew as a Gospel is written for the Jews,
it's written in dialogue with the synagogue,
it's written as the law, as the Torah for the Church,
and it's written for the Church as an institution, as an organization.
And Luke and Paul, of course, were connected historically.
I mean, Luke was the associate of Paul for part of the time.
And also, I find that there's a thrust in Luke's Gospel,
and in the Acts of the Apostles even more.
Consider the emphasis on the Holy Spirit,
the presence of the Holy Spirit in Luke and then in Acts,
which makes me connect Luke with Paul.
And then finally, I don't have to make any apology for connecting John with John.
They say, of course, that things were often given names of the apostles
in order to be inspired, okay?
Something would be written by someone
which would receive approval in New Testament times,
but then really to canonize it, the name of an apostle would be put on it.
So they'll talk about that even in connection with the Gospel of John.
I'm not going to try to work that out, to figure it out.
But what I would like to do next time, what I do at this time,
is to try to delineate these four dimensions in Christianity,
these four dimensions in the Church.
Let me just sketch it out now with a couple of ideas,
and then we'll go further next time.
We'll find, I mentioned last time that John and Mark are Christological, okay?
The central question is the identity of Jesus.
Mark can be called the Gospel of the hidden and suffering Jesus.
There's predominant in it what's called the messianic secret,
that is, the identity of Jesus is only gradually perceived.
It gradually comes out from the darkness, from the obscurity,
and Jesus is always hushing people up.
They're not to tell who he is until the end.
Now, this is the direct opposite of John.
In John, the identity of Jesus, in the loftiest terms,
is proclaimed right at the outset.
Okay?
Now, they're the same because they have the same focus on the identity of Jesus.
They differ because of the angle from above or from below.
Here we have the purest Christology from above, high Christology.
Here we have Christology from below, in Mark.
Now, what about Matthew and Luke?
I'm not putting them on the same axis, but on a perpendicular axis.
If this is the Christological axis,
this can be called either the ecclesial axis, which I think is better.
In other words, here it's about Jesus, it's about Christ, his identity.
Here it's about the church.
Now, Matthew gives you church as organization, church as structure,
church as institution, and he gives you a law.
He gives you these discourses in which Jesus proclaims the new Torah,
just like Moses did in the five books of Moses.
You get the five discourses in the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew is said to be a book more than a gospel,
and it's the book of a church, of an organizational church.
And to be interpreted in an authoritative way later on by the disciples.
That's part of their role, is to be interpreters,
in an authoritative way, of a revelation which has been given once and for all.
It's not a progressive, continuing revelation.
What do we find over here?
Something that contrasts dramatically with that.
Luke is all taken up with the church, but what kind of a church do you see?
A church which is growing, which is mushrooming, which is moving out.
A church which moves out from Jerusalem to Rome,
which means symbolically to the ends of the earth, okay?
So, this is the church as structure, this is the church as dynamism,
the church as movement, the church of the Holy Spirit.
This is a church of a verbal law, of a verbal discipline,
a verbal revelation, and a verbal morality.
This is the church of the movement of the Spirit, okay?
There are a bunch of other parallels I could point out.
Maybe we'll do something with them next time.
I just offered this for your reflection.
So, I think that it's like you have two movements here.
One is the movement of, shall we call it, the manifestation of the Spirit,
and the other is the movement of the revelation of the words, okay?
One is, you can say, ontological, and the terms are heaven and earth,
or God and creation, or light and darkness, okay?
All of those sets of terms.
The other is historical, is dynamic, and the terms are past and future,
for Old Testament and New Testament, okay?
The before and the after.
One is a journey, and the other is like metaphysics.
So, when John does these dualisms, you know, of light and darkness,
they're like absolutes, they're like eternal, non-temporal dualisms,
which seem to consign whole bunches of people to unending darkness.
But it's something else in Matthew and Luke, it's also in Paul.
It's a developing situation in which different things can happen,
reconciliations can happen, and so on, okay?
Paul's theology also is a dynamic theology, okay?
The movement, Paul himself is like a cannonball, okay?
He's moving from the experience of Christ out to the ends of the earth,
to bring this Gospel to everybody.
And in him you feel an impulse, you feel a dynamism,
you feel something moving, something expanding.
What do you feel in John?
You feel a movement inward, you're drawn toward the center,
you're drawn into interiority, you're drawn into the word which dwells within you.
It's an initiation.
Now, there's some of that in Paul, but predominantly you have this expansion, okay?
The movement out to the Gentiles, and the initiation into the center, okay?
We'll go on to that next time.
Thank you.