Image by mtsofan via FlickrI read this during Lent and never got around to blogging about it until now. Did you ever notice that the Gospel of John not only has different stories and takes on stories as the other three Synoptic Gospels…but it actually hates on them too (in a mean way)?
Really.
I’m reading through This Tragic Gospel by Louis Ruprecht and he outlines the ways how the Gospel according to John subverts the other Gospels…especially the Gospel of Mark. The key point of difference comes in the Lenten story of the prayer at Gethsemane. You know, where Jesus prays to God? Check out what Jesus says in Matthew, Mark, Luke:
“Father, if you will, take this cup away from me. Still, let not my will bed one, but yours.”
– Luke 22“My Father, if it is possible, then let this cup pass me by. Still, not how I want it, but how you do.”
– Matthew 26“Abba, the Father, all things are possible through you. Take this cup away from me. Still, not what I want, but what you do.”
– Mark 14
Now check it out in John.
((((crickets))))
Oh, that’s right. There is no prayer at Gethsemane. Hmm. In fact, Jesus seeks out the arresting party and confronts them, terrifies them to their knees, and practically makes them arrest him. Very different from the others.
Why is this important? Look at what Jesus says to the arresting party:
The cup that the Father has given me–shall I not drink it?
– John 18
And consider what Jesus said previously in his parables:
“Now my soul is troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour‘? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.
– John 12:27
Yup, that’s right. Jesus in John directly quotes and ridicules the Prayer of Gethsemane found in the other three gospels. Think about that for a minute…what Jesus says in John directly quotes and refutes all three of the other Gospels…and not just a line, but the heart-wrenching, soul-searing prayer in Gethsemane!
Incredible.
What does this mean? According to Ruprecht’s This Tragic Gospel:
- Jesus in John replaces the doubt and wrestling found in the other Gospels with a cold certainty and a scary intensity.
- Instead of a very human Jesus who doubts and wrestles with God found in the Synoptics, in John we have a Jesus who lacks doubt and fear and scares the arresting party to their knees.
- There is no collision of wills between Jesus and God in Gethsemane that the other gospels report on; in John, Jesus never doubts or is self-wondering or is otherwise…..human. [I would point to Lazarus’s death, though, as a story when Jesus wept]
Very weird. Thoughts? Anyone else troubled by this?
The differences between these and other passages I was first confronted with when reading Brown’s An Intro to NT.
Among other things he also cited the difference in what the authors saw as the knowledge of Jesus, where in Mark 5:30-33, Jesus looks for who touched him and in Matthew he immediately turns towards her, where in Mark where Jesus relates David entering the house of God when Abiathar was high priest, however in 1 Samuel 21:2-7 the high priest is not Abiathar but Ahimelech, and when you look up Matthew (12:4) and Luke’s (6:4) version they omit any mention of the high priest.
And also in John when Jesus asks Philip where bread can be found (John 6:5)the author adds that he was only testing Philip implying that he already knew what he would do and lastly in John 6:64 we learn that Jesus knew from the beginning who would refuse him and who would believe him.
These just seem to be concious modifications reflecting a theological belief, and that makes me a bit uncomfortable…
I always thought John was strange because of the specific polished theology it puts forth. I thought it was strange that Paul in 1 Corinthians 1.18-25 avoids using Logos to directly refer to Jesus, but uses Sophia more directly. On the other hand, John flaunts Logos to start his Gospel, and uses this theological construction as his cornerstone. I interpret this difference to John’s date being written 40-50+ years later. I think we can see theology changing to fit a particular Christian community of its time.
In the case of your specific reference Jeremy, we may see a John community that’s very much into martyrdom, that they would even balk at not being willing to be executed. They changed the story for a reason.
I know that I have joked with fellow classmates that they shouldn’t argue using John, because it doesn’t count… Maybe John does count if it means that we should be able to interpret the Good News for our own time.
Yeah, there’s no questioning God on the cross either (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” I’m not troubled by this. John simply portrays a more “superhuman” Jesus than the rest of the gospel writers. I think this is b/c John is writing to an audience that is far more concerned about the spiritual nature of Christ than the other gospel communities. My old Prof. (Greg Riley) believes that they are Christians who are aware of/participants in the Gospel of Thomas community, and John contains polemic against gnosticism, but also stuff that will be persuasive to them. Christ as superhero falls into that category.
Good discussion. I agree with the poster who noted that John was written some later than the others and that helps account for the rather different portrayal of Jesus in the fourth gospel.
The more I think about it, the more I note connections between John and Mark. It seems to me their theology is quite similar in its focus on the cross–the “hour” in John–though they get there is very different ways.
Also, I see both Mark and John as at least somewhat anti-Petrine.
Interesting observation from Ruprecht. And he is absolutely right. Another indication that the author of John had read the Synoptics. It really beggars belief that so many scholars can still go on believing that John was not dependent on at least Mark.
Why interpret The Lord’s words in John 12:27 as “ridiculing” the prayer he prayed just before his arrest? It seems very straight forward to me.
He had prayed and The Father had strengthened The Son to do his will so that he was able to say, even though his soul was troubled,
“for this purpose I have come to this hour.”
Each of the Gospels do indeed reveal different facets from different angles but it is always the same light.
Have you read Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels? She argues that Iranaeus was the architect of teh canon, insisting on the fourfold gospels and considered John the foremost gospel because it taught clearly that Christ was the Son of God. She also cites Origin who wrote,
“John does not always tell the truth literally, he always tells the truth spiritually.” Beyound Belief page 118.
I think Pagels makes some excellent points about the role of John’s gospel in the canon.
Irenaeus was not the architect of the canon; it is generally considered that Tatian’s gospel harmony, the Diatessaron, which harmonizes the four Canonical Gospels, predates Against Heresies by at least twenty years. Even if the Diatessaron were contemporaneous with Irenaeus’s magnum opus, the fact that it sought to harmonize these four gospels into one single narrative indicates that they, and they alone, had been accepted by the early Church as canonical in years prior.
What is more, Pagels’ own scholarship is frequently of a dubious value. In Beyond Belief, she conveniently ignores the fact that, according to the Gnostics, Jesus Christ was in fact the Son of God, or rather the son of a God, the latest and most important in a succession of Gnostic deities to exist in the Pleroma, that emanated from Bythus, the impassable and unknowable arch-creator deity. In Gnosticism, Christ came to liberate those humans who happened to have a spark of the divine within them from this evil material world, the creation of the Demiurge, an incompetent or malicious creator deity whose existence in Valentinism resulted from a failed attempt by Sophia to procreate asexually. What is more, the Gospel of John was actually favored by some Gnostics, including Valentinus, for identifying Christ as the Logos, which furthered their theology; if Irenaeus was willing to stoop to unethical lows in furtherance of his theology, he would have branded it heretical and omitted it from the canon, rather than including it. It should also be noted that Origen (with an ‘e’, my dear, not an ‘i’; his original Greek name being Origenes) was later designated a heretic; his views are not authoritative nor representative of the early church at large. Many have noted that the Gospel of John is in many respects the most historically plausible of the four canonical Gospels; it is the only one on which the journeys of Christ can be plotted coherently on a map, and it is the only one to offer an account of His passion that corresponds with the known facts about the Jewish celebration of passover (the other Gospels, by all accounts, including that of Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History, got it wrong on this key chronological points).
The problem with Pagels is that her interpretation of Gnosticism is idealized, and not based on a realistic understanding of the true horror the Gnostic faith actually represented. Pagels constantly seeks to portray Gnosticism in the most positive light possible, but what she describes is really a non-existent religion, the faith that she wants Gnosticism to be, and not the faith that it actually was. Gnosticism was a dreadful heresy, featuring a Christ who was not, as Pagels and others might wish to say, fully human and not divine, but rather a Christ who was fully divine, and not in the least bit human; an all-powerful, elitist and vengeful God who made fun of those lacking the intellectual capacity to understand his secret teachings; the spiritual faculty required to comprehend this information alone would lead to salvation, which was described as complete escape from this material universe, and the reign of the demiurge, into a purely physical realm above, the Pleroma.
Gnosticism was misogynist, (the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas attributes to Christ the unpleasant saying “Surely any female who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of God”), elitist (the Valentinans, among others, believed that most humans lacked the inner divine spark necessary for salvation, and were thus condemned to remain in this evil and degenerate material world for all eternity, under the tyranny of the demiurge; ‘spirituals’ capable of attaining salvation could look on them only with contempt), docetist (the Gnostic Christ’s physical body was a mere illusion, and He was in their mind incapable of death or suffering; the Islamic idea that it was Judas who was crucified in his place had Gnostic origins), and prone to occult rituals that can only be described as disturbing. Indeed one Gnostic sect celebrated a horrific, blasphemous form of the Eucharist, in which semen and menstrual blood were consumed in lieu of bread and wine.
Pagels, however, would rather we picture Gnosticism as an upbeat, positive religion, in which Christ isn’t God, or a God-man, or even the Son of God, but rather, as the Unitarians suggest, an enlightened teacher, showing us, in the manner of Guatama Buddha, how to liberate our soul and attain a sort of spiritual Nirvana. She ignores outright the misogynistic aspects of Gnosticism (many Gnostic sects eschewed women, some were exclusively homosexual, and a great many prohibited marriage or sexual reproduction, viewing it as a great evil to bring new children into this evil material world, to live a lifetime oppressed by the demiurge) and instead reinterprets it, based purely on an isolated text, the Gospel of Mary, and an ambiguous passage featuring a lacuna in the Gospel of Philip, as feminist, although the identity of not one feminist Gnostic heresiearch remains. The passage in question, from the Gospel of Philip, she translates as [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth].
However, a lacuna exists right there; to insert “mouth”, even in brackets, is terrible scholarship, for there is nothing in the rest of the text that indicates whether or not he would kiss her [often] or indeed [passionately] or for that matter [lightly], on her [mouth], [forehead], [hair], or another part of her anatomy. Indeed, given the sexual overtones in the Gnostic gospels, the passage may well have read something like “But Christ loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her softly on her vulva.” Such dreadful obscenity would not be a novelty in a religion that depicted a six-year old Christ murdering his next door neighbor.
I am writing an exegetical paper for my intro to bible class on John 4 — and I think the context from which it was written is hugely important for understanding why some things are the way they are.
While an exact date for the writing of John is unknown, most scholars agree that it was after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The temple, the locus of Jewish worship, had been destroyed and there was sectarian infighting going on within the Jewish sects. There were now at least two competing factions, the Pharisees and the Christians (and possibly followers of John the Baptizer). Each were trying to distinguish themselves from the other. It is in this milieu that John was written.
John is trying to distance Christianity from Judaism and the Baptizer’s movement. This is why the Pharisees are seen at worst to be feared and at best simply antagonistic to Jesus. (John 4:1-3, 9:13-34). The Baptizer is characterized as less than Jesus, the friend of the bridegroom, a law-breaker. (3:22-36).
The Johannine Jesus is the hero set against the arch nemesis the Pharisees.
The way I see it— Jesus kept John around to write Revelation and so I think more than likely Jesus had more respect for his version (the truth). The others wrote off each other. I trust Johns testimony!
I don't trust Lukes at all!
Ever wonder where the word lukewarm came from? You should research it and then read Revelation and the Laodicean church!
This older post of UM Jeremy represents the theologically most significant (and potentially heretical) article on Hacking Christianity that I have yet to address. The relationship between John and the Synoptics is almost infinitely more important to the theology of the Orthodox, Catholic faith of Christianity than any of the other subjects I’ve addressed during my polemical tenure on this blog, such as the ever nagging and unpleasant debate over homosexuality. For truly the heart of the Apostolic faith can be found in how one reconciles John, with the Synoptics, and the Pauline epistles.
I have a copy in my library of The Tragic Gospel, and in general found it to be a poorly-researched work of sensationalist drivel. However, don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself, and experience the pure, unadulterated irony with which the author rests upon every dubious and unproven assumption that underlies modern Christianity, and then on this foundation of sand, constructs the heretical mansion of his main argument: that John tried, in his gospel, to appropriate the authority of Peter, of Mary Magdalene, of Paul, of Thomas, of Luke, of Mark, and of every other Christian theological authority of the first century.
Among the assumptions used towards implementing this grand design:
1. John was, in the author’s mind, definitely authored after 90 AD, thus the actual author could not be John the Apostle, but was rather the psuedepigraphical contemporary of Ignatius the Episcopalians euphemistically referred to as “John of Patmos.”
2. The above not withstanding, we are asked to believe that this was due to some power struggle that actually apparently did exist between John and the other disciples.
3. Mark is reduced from the scribe of Peter and the first Bishop of Alexandria, to a mysterious, shadowy figure, a Roman tragic author in the Greek tradition, who sought to unify the early church through writing the first Gospel.
4. The Church tradition that Matthew was the first Gospel is ignored; the modernist view that says Mark is older is held as being above question, despite the recent and well publicized hypothesis that posits an older, now lost Aramaic Gospel of Matthew, which was a primary source for Mark and the other Synoptics, and which itself was later translated and completely rewritten by a “Mathetist” into the Koine Greek gospel we know today, quite possibly after Mark and Luke had already been written.
5. The Gospel of Mark is dated after all Pauline epistles, which seems rather a stretch in light of its claims to be the first gospel; most conservative dating posits its authorship as having occurred around 58 AD, whereas Paul it is believed was executed around 64 AD.
6. The statement in John commending the care of the Virgin Mary to the beloved disciple is mocked as the author’s attempt to usurp other ecclesiastical authorities, including Luke. The traditional ecclesiastical history, that featured Luke the Evangelist living with John and Mary, and acting as a physician to the Theotokos, after the martyrdom of Paul, is not mentioned, as one might expect.
7. The authenticity of the Gnostic gospels compared to the Canonical gospels is not questioned; nor does the author mention the fact that the Gnostics have been dated with reasonable certainty to the late second century; none of them can be shown to have the same antiquity as the Canonicals, even the Gospel of John.
However, the most fundamental problem with the book is that the author interprets John not mentioning something as being equivalent to John speaking in opposition to something. The Synoptics mention Christ praying fervently in the Garden of Gesthemane, and asking the Father to relieve him of this unbearable cup. John does not, but does mention him stating that this cup has been apportioned to him, to the centurions who come to arrest him. Yet are these statements incompatible? Surely not; rather, when taken together, they depict the God-Man Christ daunted, in a manner true to His humanity, at the terrible fate that was to befall him: painful crucifixion, followed by temporary separation from the Trinity, in order to procure our salvation. Surely any human would ask the of his Father the same question. Yet the realization was clear: there could be no other way. Thus, when Jesus said to Peter: “Put the sword into its sheath. The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” he was affirming the conviction of purpose that had fallen onto him, now that it had become evident that it was by this way, and no other, that His children could be saved from their sin. The synoptics depict the fear of even the bravest soldier before going into Battle; John depicts the resolve that naturally falls upon them when the Enemy comes into view, and their duty becomes clear.
Of course, the most compelling evidence that John was not an antithetical rebuttal against Mark is simply the fact that the early Church accepted both as canonical, while rejecting the Gnostics, a fact demonstrated by the composition of the Diatessaron from all four Canonicals by Tatian, and the writings of Iraeneus, among other innumerable sources. The Gnostics tried to play the game of “Let’s write a psuedepigraphical Gospel in order to undermine the theology of the church” on numerous occasions, in some cases, such as that of the Gospel of Peter, coming very close to success, however, in each case they were foiled, by the fact that the divergent theology of their gospel, combined by the lack of historical witness to it, clearly demarcated it as forgery. In the case of John however, its apostolic authenticity is well attested throughout Patristic tradition, and none of the church fathers perceived any legitimate incompatibility between its theology and the theology of the Synpotics; for its reason, it was included, whereas the false Gospels of Thomas, Philip, Mary, Judas, Truth, and Peter, along with the truly horrific Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which in depicting a malicious young Jesus killing his schoolteachers out of spite, and bringing clay birds to life, is the stuff of nightmares, were excluded.
Indeed, there was never even any controversy about whether or not these false gospels should be accepted; their condemnation by the hierarchy of the Apostolic Church was unequivocal. In contrast, the exclusion of the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalpyse of Peter, and the Epistle of Barnabas, and the inclusion of the epistles of Jude, 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, 1 and 2 Timothy, and the Apocalypse of John, were highly controversial, and the debate that ultimately gave us the canon in its final form raged throughout the fourth century, although compared to the Arian controversy, it was a storm in a teacup.
Finally, and most importantly, much of John is best understood in light of the Synoptics; likewise, the Synoptics are best understood in light of John. The major theme of Mark is Christ’s attempt to keep secret his true identity, as the Son of God, but even then, Mark preserves an element of mystery, which is resolved when one opens John to find out that this Son of God is in fact the divine Logos, the Word of God himself. Both Mark and John are better understood in light of the Nativity story of Matthew and Luke. Finally, the post-Resurrection narratives in Luke and John complement each other; the Doubting Thomas episode explaining what gave the Disciples in Luke-Acts such complete confidence in the bodily resurrection of Christ, who based purely on the Luke resurrection narrative, would seem rather spectral. The Apostle Thomas also brings to the surface a huge problem with qualifications of this theologian, for he suggests that he agrees with the view espoused in the Gnostic “Book of Thomas the Contender” that Thomas was the twin brother of Jesus Christ, a view so completely heretical that it alone destroys any credibility the author might otherwise have.
However, even if this were a competent theologian, with solid credentials in teaching the Apostolic faith, writing this book, it would still be impossibly flawed as a work of Biblical commentary, for its central premise, that the Gospels of John and Mark are in opposition to each other, is manifestly untrue, as a simple reading of both Gospels, along with the related commentary of the Church Fathers, most especially Irenaeus, will demonstrate.
If John were really authored by a megalomaniacal psuedepigraphical figure (or perhaps, given the author’s assertion that by the time the book was written, all eyewitnesses, including implicitly the Apostle John himself, were dead, the undead Ghost of John, or John the Beloved Zombie), seeking to ruthlessly discredit all other important personalities in the theological life of the first century church, then surely, he would have bothered to include a Nativity story. He would not have allowed his gospel to, in any way, rely on the others, for this, or for any other important details of Christ’s life, including the Last Supper, which John clearly alludes to in Chapter 6, without describing in detail in the chapters leading up to Christ’s betrayal, in spite of clearly having had time to do so.
One man did in fact attempt to usurp the Apostolic hierarchy in exactly the same way that the author of This Tragic Gospel alleges, and that man’s name was Marcion. Marcion, a Greek merchant, was of the opinion that the God of the Jews was a wrathful, evil, hateful figure, and could not be reconciled with, nor identified as the heavenly father of, Jesus Christ, in spite of Christ explicitly identifying the Jewish God as his father throughout the Gospels, and in spite of this identification being maintained throughout the epistles and in Revelation. Thus, Marcion edited the Gospel of Luke, to remove all content that alluded to a connection between the Jewish God, who was recast, in the manner of the Gnostics, as an evil demiurge, and Jesus Christ, and in like manner edited a subset of the Pauline epistles. He then banned the reading of all other gospels by the members of his schismatic sect.
Sadly, rather than retelling the oft-forgotten and oft-misunderstood story of how an anti-Semitic heretic attempted to hijack the early Church in Rome to suit his own prejudices, the author of “This Tragic Gospel” sought instead to imagine a similar conflict having occurred, where none in fact existed, and had the audacity to accuse John the Son of Zebidee of the same offense that was in reality perpetuated by Marcion. Thus, the real tragedy is of this book is not the nature of the Gospel of Mark, nor the scope of John’s ambitions, but the manner in which an enmity has been implied where there was none; the integrity of a holy Apostle impugned, and the dogmatic integrity of the Christian faith called into question, by a man who, by virtue of his own theological opinions, can clearly be identified as sympathetic to Gnosticism, or at least the whitewashed, politically correct form of Gnosticism championed by Elaine Pagels.