The Gospel of John

I want to use some posts here to set out some thinking on John's Gospel as I am teaching it in Semester 1, 2013. Any thoughts you wish to make via comments will sharpen my thinking.

The first three gospels pose all sorts of interesting puzzles, not least their relationship to each other. But the puzzle is interesting because potentially it is solvable, since the three gospels tell pretty much the same story with common materials, so comparing the differences leads to some good proposals re solutions.

The fourth gospel, John's Gospel, poses a different kind of puzzle. It is so different to the first three gospels that we can scarcely use comparison between the first three and the fourth to solve the puzzle of the relationship between then. The vastness of the difference is the puzzle. "Where does John's Gospel come from?" is one way to pose the puzzle. It does not seem to come from any one, two or three of the Synoptic Gospels. If those gospels are any kind of guide to whom Jesus was and what he did, then we might also ask whether John's Gospel stems from Jesus. The Synoptics' Jesus is a parable-telling, demon-exorcising, prophetic figure in the mould of Moses, Elijah and Jeremiah who agonises through his last night before the cross. The Johannine Jesus shares none of these characteristics but does share with the Synoptics' Jesus continual clashing with Jewish authorities while healing and teaching his way through Judea and Galilee. At best we could say that if the Johannine Jesus is connected to the authentic, historical Jesus of Nazareth at least as strongly as the Synoptics' Jesus then "another side" to the historical Jesus is being disclosed to the reader.

This in fact is a line taken by Richard Bauckham as he argues that the author John of the gospel is not John the Son of Zebedee but another John, a Jerusalem-based disciple with an insider's view of Jesus' activities in Jerusalem. Perhaps it is the only line which can be taken in order to offer a plausible explanation of coherency between the Jesus presented in Synoptic perspective and the Jesus presented in Johannine perspective.

Bauckham consciously argues against the other plausible explanation (if I may describe as a single explanation a variety of proposals advanced on the basis of the great work on John by the giant Bultmann which are synthesised by John Ashton). In this explanation, John's Gospel is as much, if not more so, an account of the circumstances and trials of the Johannine community (the Christians gathered around the author or authors of the fourth gospel) as it is an account of the life and times of Jesus.

The great advantage of the second account is that it does not have to justify itself in the court of biography (creative fiction about Jesus doesn't matter because the gospel document serves to convey another history). The great challenge for the first account is that it does need to justify itself in the court of biography (which Bauckham, more than any other Johannine scholar I know, rises to): did Jesus speak and act thus and so, even in a seminal way? (For we might allow, on this first account, that the gospel writer so identifies with Jesus Christ that he - through the Spirit of Jesus - stretches the words Jesus spoke into a true interpretation which Jesus speaks through the author.)
(to be cont'd).

I am still here

Hermeneutics has not gone away from my interests. Indeed the fourth Hermeneutical Hui for our church is looming - early February 2013.

For the record

Glynn Cardy's speech at GS in Fiji recently is here.

I note, on a quick read, that Glynn steers clear of the key passage (in my view) re marriage and the Bible, Ephesians 5:25-33, with specific reference to Christ and the church.

Aetiology

I am moving a discussion about the causes of homosexuality from Anglican Down Under to here.

A Change of Mind is Possible

As in here.

What do you think?

What does PORNEIA mean? (3)

Why seek a definition of porneia? Why not stick with (say) the definitions as given in good dictionaries, or follow what the best of the recent translations offer?

In his book Haller raises some questions which I think are good questions, and in following up some subsequent exchanges re reviews of his book I have found at least one other question, so the seeking of clarity about the definition of porneia includes at least the following issues:

(1) How wide is the scope of porneia when it is used in lists of objectionable/prohibited actions/attitudes (e.g. Jesus speaking about what defiles a person, Matthew 15:18-20, or Paul writing about sins which may be problematic about fellowship with sinful Christians, or are going to prevent entry to the kingdom of God, 1 Corinthians 5:1-6:20)? Specifically of interest in respect to current issues in human sexuality is whether porneia covered both heterosexual illicit sexual intercourse and same sex illicit sexual intercourse.

(2) In the end, is the weight of Scripture against 'sex before marriage' in general, or just in cases where sex between two people does not lead to their marriage? Specifically, does porneia mean 'fornication' (or include 'fornication')? A Malina article in 1972, vigorously disputed by a Jensen article in 1978, argued that porneia did not rule out sex before marriage where marriage later follows.

In other words, while translations which offer 'fornication' or 'sexual immorality' as translations of porneia are entirely laudable measured against the definitions provided by the better dictionaries, the question is whether they are sufficiently accurate for readers today who might (say) rule out more sexual activity than Scripture requires, or (say) misunderstand the historical background of the life situations into which porneia spoke.

So, it is worthwhile taking time to tease out what is going on with the use of this word in Scripture.

What does PORNEIA mean? (2)

How do we determine what a word means in the Bible? This simple question has a complicated answer!

(1) Many words have one meaning and no great controversy attaches to that meaning.

(2) Some words have more than one meaning so the question arises what meaning the word has in verse X (compared to verse Y). The answer will often be determined by the context (what the whole verse says, what the verse means in the context of a larger passage, etc). Sometimes the answer is indeterminate (i.e. scholars and translators disagree). Porneia is one such word.

(3) A few words are unique to the Bible so working out what they mean can involve much argument because usage of the word in other literature cannot be cited for comparative purposes.

(4) Some words appear to have a (slightly) different meaning in the Bible compared to usage outside of the Bible; some words in one part of the Bible are used in a standardized manner, but in another part of the Bible are used in a new way; in some instances this variation is within one book of the Bible. Arguably this last phenomenon occurs with porneia in 1 Corinthians.

Something tempting can happen within the complexities of seeking a word's meaning: we can (IMHO) become over enamoured with how words are used in literature outside of the Bible. On the premise that the Bible writers could develop their own meaning for a word, we need to be cautious about the weight we put on word usage in other literature. (One criticism I have of Haller's book is that he places a lot of weight on word usage (or non-usage) in rabbinical literature: there is value in considering this literature, but it is literature which (a) is not the Bible (so usage may be different, especially in respect of the New Testament), (b) difficult to date so that citing Rabbi X re word Y may, at best, give us the usage of a word in an era after the closure of the New Testament. What is surprising in this amount of weight being placed on rabbical literature is how little weight is placed on New Testament scholarship by Christians).

Enough for now.