Can We Trust the New Testament? by J. A. T. Robinson

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 5: JOHN'S PICTURE OF JESUS

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For the rest we are dealing with developments of doctrine and language which could be late, but do not need to be later than anything, say, in Colossian and Hebrews, which equally speak of the preexistence of the cosmic Christ but certainly, in my judgement, come from before the fall of Jerusalem. Indeed the Fourth Gospel, like the Epistle to the Hebrews, is a document where the argument would seem positively to invite allusion, however indirect (and John is a master of this), to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Since the rejection of Jesus as the true Messiah, Shepherd and King of the Jews involves the inevitable judgement of metropolitan Judaism, the consummation of this in the doom of the capital could scarcely escape mention if it had occurred. Yet the only reference to it lies in the future, when in 11.48 the High Priest warns that if they do not do away with Jesus (and not, as actually occurred, if they do) the Romans will come and remove their temple and nation. The destruction of the temple, so far from being described physically in the light of events of 70, is seen as fulfilled spiritually in the death of Jesus in 30 (2.19-22). Nor is there any hint of later conditions being read back. In fact in 5.2 the evangelist observes, 'There is in Jerusalem at the Sheep-Pool a place with five colonnades, called in Hebrew Bethesda'. This was to be obliterated in the demolition of the city, only to be uncovered and confirmed recently by the archaeologist's spade. Yet John says emphatically at the time of writing (and not just of Jesus's speaking) 'is' not 'was'. Moreover, his knowledge not only of the topography but of the unrepeatable social and political conditions of Palestine prior to the Jewish war has been borne out in recent study.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 5: JOHN'S PICTURE OF JESUS

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The arguments for a late date for the Gospel of John may be summed up under three heads:

1. There is the ancient tradition that John wrote 'last of all', though this goes with the theory that his object was to supply information that the others left out, which is hardly a plausible view of their relationship. It is bound up too with the tradition which is not itself incredible, that the apostle John lived on to the very end of the first century, though the common notion that he wrote as a very old man is is one for which the first evidence is quite late and unreliable. (In John 21.18 the old man is not the beloved disciple but Peter, who must have lived at most to his sixties.) But if what we have argued in the previous chapters is right, John's could still be the last Gospel and yet not be very late.

2. If he is dependent on the Synoptists and if these were written towards the end of the first century, then of course he must be later still. But neither of these "ifs" seems to be necessary or indeed likely.

3. John is usually held to come out of a situation in which the Church and Synagogue have irreparably split (as in the reconstruction I mentioned earlier of the blind man thrown out of the synagogue) and to reflect a Jewish ban against the Nazarenes which came into force in the late 80s. But any connection with this ban (which was against extreme Judaising Christians to whom St John's Gospel would have been anathema, who did not want to leave the synagogue and had to be 'smoked out') is very tenuous. Christians like Paul were already being thrown out of the synagogue much earlier. Indeed in 1 Thess. 2.14-16, in what is probably his earliest epistle, written about 50, Paul speaks in much the same external way as John does of 'the Jews' in Judea who 'drove us out'. In neither case does this imply a final breach. Excommunication was such a common discipline―for instance, as we now know, in the Qumran community―it is quite unreliable for dating.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 5: JOHN'S PICTURE OF JESUS

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Many attempts have been made to bridge the gulf between the original apostolic traditions (which could, it is agreed, well derive ultimately from John the son of Zebedee) and the evangelist and various redactors or revisers. There is no doubt that this Gospel, like the others, has passed through developing stages. For one thing, it is clear that the 'epilogue' of chapter 21 was added subsequently to the rounded close of 20.30f. I believe too that the prologue of 1.1-18 has been fitted on to, or rather round the original opening, like a porch. There are other signs of editorial touches and revisions (and lack of revision)―though I am not persuaded that any of the additions demand a different hand (except of course the certificate appended by the Johannine community in 21.24: 'It is this same disciple who attests what has here been written. It is in fact he who wrote it and we know that his testimony is true'). What seems to me much more questionable is to say that the main body of the Gospel itself represents the remoulding after a long interval by some totally unknown spiritual genius of traditions that themselves bespeak the conditions of a much earlier age. I would merely wish to ask whether this time-span and with it the separation of the evangelist from his tradition is really necessary―especially in view of the scale of development for which I argued in the previous chapter.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 5: JOHN'S PICTURE OF JESUS

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All this is not incompatible with the view that the Fourth Gospel preserves and incorporates early material about Jesus but is itself written quite late, by someone who himself stood in a distant and external relationship to that material. Indeed this is what Dodd presupposed. He thought of an Ephesian 'elder' in the last decade of the first century (the now generally favoured date) who wrote up tradition that 'came down to him'. How they came down to him is indeed a relevant question. Attempts to analyze out written sources behind the Fourth Gospel have not been conspicuously successful. In fact such is the stylistic uniformity of the book that I would agree with the American scholar who said that 'if John used sources, he wrote them all himself'! Dodd presupposed that the traditions came down to the evangelist by word of mouth―yet in a form that time and again reveals them to be very 'primitive' and to carry marks not of Asia Minor in the 90's but of Palestine before the Jewish war of 66-70. But what was this invisible medium through which they passed uncontaminated for a full generation?

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 5: JOHN'S PICTURE OF JESUS

BACK TO SOURCE

The upshot has been to suggest that at many points both in the narrative and in the sayings of Jesus, John preserves tradition with as good, and often, better claim to take us back to source as comparable material in the other Gospels. Moreover, even the language of John, which he puts into the mouth of Jesus, is now seen to be neither so Hellenistic nor so late as was previously thought necessary. One of the by-products of the Dead Sea scrolls was to reveal that similar language was being used in the heart of southern Palestine by a strictly nationalistic Jewish group before the destruction of Jerusalem. The Gospel of John is now once again being seen as the very Jewish book it is (Lightfoot called it the most Hebraic book in the New Testament apart from the Apocalyse). That does not mean that by then the 'mix' between Hellenistic and Hebraic cultures was not far advanced. Indeed the Gospel is written in correct but simple Greek, with what might be called an Aramaic accent. It is addressed in its present form primarily, I believe, to Greek speaking Jews outside Palestine, probably in the area of Asia Minor around Ephesus. This location is borne out not only by good ancient tradition about John's presence in Ephesus but by the book of Revelation from the same area, which though almost certainly not from the same hand presupposes a 'Johannine' type of Christianity.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 5: JOHN'S PICTURE OF JESUS

For one thing no one now believes in the simple view that Mark gives us the Jesus of history and John give us the Christ of faith. The tendency if anything is to believe that both give us the Christ of faith, with the Jesus of history a long way, perhaps irrecoverably, behind. That I am convinced is an exaggerated reaction. In fact it is becoming clear that Mark is much more theological and John is much more historical than was previously supposed. It is also becoming clear that the consensus is rapidly devolving that John is dependent on the Synoptics (or, more precisely, that he certainly used Mark, probably Luke and Matthew). This indeed has been one of the swiftest turn-abouts in critical history. For up to the publication twenty years ago of C. K. Barrett's valuable commentary on the Gospel of John he was in the great majority in holding this: now he is very much in the minority. John is increasingly seen to rest on independent tradition, which therefore, is potentially as near to source as any of the other streams of Gospel tradition (those represented in Mark, 'Q', special Matthew and special Luke) and must be considered along side them as part of the total 'synoptic' or stereoscopic picture of Jesus. One of the decisive reinforcements of this trend was Dodd's major study, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel. The effects of this shift and of other aspects of what I ventured, again nearly twenty years ago, to call 'the new look on the Fourth Gospel' (historians of women's fashion will be able to date it from 'the New Look'!) have been popularized in A. M. Hunter's According to John.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 5: JOHN'S PICTURE OF JESUS

For the past 150 years or so the Gospel of John has suffered from being isolated―almost insulated―from the others. Up to that time even so liberal a theologian as Schleiermacher could treat it on a par with the rest and indeed regard it as having priority for the picture it gave us of Jesus, since it was the one by the most intimate of his apostles. But over against the Synoptic Gospels John has been treated as the odd one out―in a minority of one to three, and doing a different job. In the hey-day of Liberal Protestant criticism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mark supplied the Jesus of history, John the Christ of faith. From the historical point of view, John was entirely secondary, dependent on the Synoptists for anything reliable that he incorporates. In space and time too he was far removed from any direct or even indirect contact with the person whose significance it was his contribution to draw out in the categories of Hellenistic (that is late Greek) mystical philosophy. In date he was put as late as 170. This last has at any rate been knocked out by the most direct piece of evidence possible, the discovery of an actual fragment of the Gospel dated by the paleographers from the first half of the second century―and time must then be allowed for it to have been copied and reached Egypt, in whose dry sands it was preserved. But this was only the first blow to an assessment of the Gospel which has become more and more incredible over the years.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

But there is still one significant part of the New Testament literature that we have not mentioned, the Gospel and Epistles of John. How does this fit into the picture? It was indeed from consideration forced upon me by the Fourth Gospel that I was compelled to look again at the old picture. To treat them in a separate chapter will also allow us to reassess the place of this Gospel today, which is, properly, of so much concern to the conservatism of the committed―not to mention the fundamentalism of the fearful.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

If therefore we place the development and emergence of the Synoptic Gospels in the period up to 60 or soon thereafter, it would narrow the gap between the crucifixion and the written records from some 35-70 years (on the usual reckoning) to little more than 30―with most of the material traceable a good deal further back. This would mean a gap of a single generation, comparable to the interval that now [as of 1977] separates us from the end of the second world war. Of course legends can grow in that time (witness the angels of Mons even within the first world war), and much development and reflection can take place. But it would mean that the mists of 'mythopaeic time' are a great deal less impenetrable than the cynicism of the foolish―or even the scepticism of the wise―would suggest.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

With regard to Matthew, his Gospel shows all the marks of being produced for a community, and by a community, that needed to formulate its own position over against the main body of Pharisaic and Sadducaic Judaism (the latter, the priestly party, virtually disappearing after the demise of the temple ritual in 70). It is concerned with such questions as the interpretation of Scripture and the place of the Law, its proper attitude towards the temple and its sacrifices, the sabbath, fasting and prayer, Jewish food laws and purification rises, its rules for admission and the disciplining of offenders, for marriage and divorce, its policy towards Samaritan and Gentiles in a dominantly Jewish Church, and so on. These problems reflect a period when the requirements of co-existence compelled a clarification of what was the distinctively Christian line on a number of issues that could previously be taken for granted. This corresponds to the stage, in a later period of Church history, when the early Methodists in England were forced by events to cease regarding themselves simply as methodical Anglicans, loyal to the parish church and its structures as well as to their own class-meetings. At this point all kinds of questions of organization, of ministry and liturgy, doctrine and discipline, law and finance, present themselves afresh, as a 'society' or 'synagogue' takes on the burden of becoming a 'church'. But uneasy coexistence does not imply irrevocable break: indeed John Wesley claimed that he lived and died a priest of the Church of England. It is in some such interval that the Gospel of Matthew seems most naturally to fit. This is well illustrated by Matthew's characteristic interest (in 17.24-7) in what should be the Christian attitude to the half-shekel tax for upkeep of the temple. The teaching of Jesus is taken to be that 'as we do not want to cause difficulty for these people' the tax should be paid, even though Christians may rightly consider themselves free. This certainly does not argue a situation of open breach, rather a concern not to provoke one. In any case it clearly points to a time before 70. For after that this tax had to be paid to the upkeep of a pagan temple in Rome and would have had no bearing on the Jewish question (not to be confused with the issue of the payment of tribute to Caesar raised in Mark 13.12-17) which Jesus is represented as settling.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

Where, however, I differ from most New Testament critics is in doubting whether this extended process requires to be dated nearly so late as current orthodoxy would suggest. I believe the period 40-60 (which was also the creative period of the Pauline preaching) satisfies the requirement well and that there is little or nothing that demands or suggests a later date―though developments in the liturgical and other life-proceses of the Church naturally went on, which are reflected in the later textual tradition. But there is nothing, as I see it, in Mark or Luke which requires a setting later than the period of missionary expansion covered by the Acts story.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

All this adds up to the conclusion that the Synoptic Gospels grew up together over a period of time in different centers and varied contexts of the early Christian Church. They did not simply follow each other in a straight line of succession, but incorporated overlapping traditions, both oral and written, without doubt influencing one another. I should not wish to assign overall priority to any, though I would judge that in general Mark probably preserves the preaching tradition (based perhaps on summaries of Peter's) in its most primitive state, while Matthew and Luke will at differing points take us back in the traditions of Jesus's teaching.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

The other thing that form-critics have rightly emphasized is that the Gospels are the product over a period of communities that collected and shaped material relevant to the needs of their developing life. This is not to deny the creative role of individual editors―particularly in the case of Luke, who describes his own aim and methods (1.1-4), and John. But, unlike the Epistles, the Gospels were not written for specific occasions at a moment of time. They appear to have grown from combining diverse traditions and to have passed through various stages and states. This I believe to be true of all the Gospels (it is quite likely, as many have thought, that Luke had already done a first draft of his Gospel before he came across Mark). But it is especially true of Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew is in a sense a collector's piece, often holding together divergent traditions (e.g., about the coming of the Son of Man), which Luke has taken trouble to harmonize. Matthew also has material with good claim to belong to the most primitive tradition of the Palestinian Church (and which has affinities with the Epistle of James and the early Paul) combined with quasi-legendary matter and editorial developments that appear to be among the latest elements of the Synoptic tradition.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

This is precisely the sort of detail that one does not get in the New Testament. Moreover, it is difficult to see what purpose would be served by perpetuating, let alone creating, such prophecies long after the dust has settled, except to show Jesus to have been a prognosticator of uncanny accuracy. But then why did Matthew and Luke also include such notoriously unfulfilled prophesies as these: 'Before you have gone through all the towns of Israel the Son of Man will have come' (Matt. 10.23); 'There are some standing here who will not taste of death before they have seen the Son of Man coming in his kingdom' (Matt. 16.28; Luke 9.27); 'I tell you the present generation will live to see it all' (Matt. 24.34; Luke 21.32). If these Gospels really do belong to the period 80-90, that is fifty to sixty years after the crucifixion, it is surely difficult to explain why modifications after the non-event did not take place. Indeed, one of the few modifications―if that is the right way round to put it―Matthew made to the programme of the end of Mark 13 was actually to insert the final coming of Christ would follow immediately after' (Matt. 24.29; contrast Mark 13.24) the tribulation in Judea (on this interpretation the war of 66-70). This scarcely suggests that he was deliberately writing for the period of delay between the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the world! It seems far more likely that, if (as the form-critics have taught us to expect) sayings of Jesus were pointed up to serve the uses of the Church, it should be when they are relevant to the struggle ahead, not when it was all over.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 4: THE GENERATION GAP

ACTS AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

In Matthew the most suspicious piece of evidence looks to be that in 22.7: 'The king was furious; he sent troops to kill those murderers and set their town on fire'. As we said earlier, this is clearly a most inappropriate addition to the parable of the great supper (it is not in Luke's version of the story) and it was evidently added by the Church against the Jews. The sole question is whether the correspondence is so exact as to require the addition to be after the event. I would doubt it. Jewish prophecies which were unquestionably composed after the event (like the book of Baruch in the Apocrypha or the Apocalypse known as Baruch) go into much more precise detail, and if one really wants to see what such pseudo-prediction looks like, here is a Christian one from the so-called Sibylline Oracles: 'A Roman leader shall come to Syria, who shall burn down Jerusalem's temple with fire, and therewith slay many men, and shall waste the great land of the Jews'.