Yet Again The Always Needed Commentary On John's Extremely Troublesome And, Variously, Valuable Gospel

BEING LESS THAN A BEGINNER in this sort of thing, I have to admit that I find the scholarly writings about the Gospel of John some of the most confusing and confounding aspects of looking more deeply into the Scriptures.   The disagreements over the often fraught, confusing text, sometimes at odds with the synoptic Gospels (which also have odds among themselves) is enough to make you throw up your hands if, as beginners will, you expect to find one final, convincing description of it.  I will tell you one thing I have learned conclusively, we don't have access to that one final, convincing point of view on it.   On any of it.   So that is typical of all human texts dealing with just about anything of any more real life complexity than pure mathematics.

Of course when the cycle in the lectionary comes to the year that concentrates more on John for the end of Lent and into the Easter time,* the troublesome use of the word "Jews" in that particular Gospel forces us to contemplate the origins and long-standing sins of antisemitism, antisemitic murder and genocide, discrimination and stereotyping, much of it derived from readings of the Gospel of John, ignoring the fact that John is as explicit as the other Gospel writers and those who wrote the rest of the Second Testament in noting that Jesus was a Jew as were all of his closest followers, those who are presented as being saved or, at least, had expectations of being saved as well as those who play the role of villains in his narrative.  

In noting that Creation didn't stop when Paul expected it to but has gone on for two millennia and that along with that change, which is the ongoing act of creation, it's certain that today, after the genocides of the mid-20th century, many of the variant understandings of  the Gospel of John in those approximately 1900 years was not only wrong, they were malicious and evil.   Out of the several papers I've read online on the topic, this one by Reverend Lawrence E. Frizzell, D.Phil. of Seton Hall University, goes into great detail, noting the very different uses of the word "Jews" throughout the text and how later writers such as Jerome and John Chrysostom exacerbated through their misunderstanding,  the very complex and often confounding text of John, trying to tease out of it meanings that are certainly wrong.   Frizzell presents a lot of variant readings of John's Gospel to show that what he used one word for, "Jews" means at times the Temple Priesthood and its functionaries, other definable groups of Jews who were not included in that elite, all of the Children of Abraham, and how what is said in the Gospel is likely indicative of the complex late First Century relationships between Jewish believers in Jesus who were being expelled from synagogues - most of whom, if not all of whom, considered themselves to be Jews and how events such as the Bar Kochbar revolt, the attitudes and beliefs about him among various groups of Jews in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and other extremely complex issues that most later writers and commentators may well have known nothing about.   

In one of his lectures Luke Timothy Johnson points out that we probably know more about the First Century Middle-East than was even known to the best of scholars at the beginning of the 20th century.  And with that knowledge should come an appreciation that a lot of the most fraught issues of New Testament interpretation and the role that later,  often quite ideologically interested commentary had in creating some of those fraught conditions that a more informed reading of the texts - APPRECIATING THE COMPLEXITY REVEALED BY THE CONTRADICTORY LITERAL READING OF THE TEXTS WITHOUT THAT BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE.  

In Frizzel's paper he admits that some, maybe much of what John says is more of a reflection of conditions in the late 1st century, several very turbulent decades after the death and Resurrection of Jesus and the passing of the generation who were there to witness his life and ministry, to testify to his Resurrection.  He specifically says that we can't rely on the Gospel of John to come to a view of "the historical Jesus" while admitting the value of much of it.  Having so recently written again about the story of The Woman Taken in Adultery and have written about the account of Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the Risen Jesus, the one Jesus ordained with the role of Minister to the Apostles, I certainly don't reject the MEANING of everything in it as I will admit that it is one of the most difficult books of the New Testament and is undoubtedly cited by those who interpreted it maliciously in the past two thousand years.  

I would note this passage, Chapter 8: 21-59 because it contains just about all there is to be seen in the problems of John's inspecificity when talking about "the Jews" in a context that probably has more to do with the hostilities among various factions of Jews, those who believed in Jesus, those who didn't, the, no doubt, different factions within those two categories, keeping in mind the tendency of groups to internally hold some of their most violent and inflammatory talk for those within different subsets of the set of all Irish (some of the stuff said about those accused of pro-Brit sentiments is hair raising), French (those who claimed to be involved in the resistance [an ever expanding number] to those accused of collaboration) and Americans  (as someone online recently said, the Republican-fascists really do want to disenfranchise us, and that's not counting tens of thousands of those who want to kill us) . . .  Note that as the argument continues and gets more heated, they even accuse Jesus of being a Samaritan, from what I understand it would probably have been like an antisemite calling someone "a Jew" today.   Perhaps even the author of John's Gospel shared in that prejudice. **

That later Roman and Greek gentile commentators had no knowledge of or appreciation for the complex background against which the Gospel of John and, to an extent, the other books of the Bible were written is to be taken for granted. Whatever insights they may have had on some things that seem to still be of value, they're worth taking into consideration.   But much of what they said was out of ignorance and out of sin.  

That passage from Chapter 8 noted that Jesus said that salvation would come to those who followed his word, not lying and, certainly, following his commandments to love not only those who were your family and friends but those who opposed you.  

Those commandments are some of the ones that Christians have hardly taken as binding while they investigate the sex lives of other people with such minute scrupulosity and look for the least sign of infidelity with their own, entirely sectarian codes and rules and creeds.  

If Jerome, Ambrose and Chrysostom had been careful to keep that stuff out of their commentary, if John had been more careful to designate just who he meant when he abbreviated their identity to "the Jews" (I wonder if he did that in the way of early scribes because paper was rare and expensive, something that should always be kept in mind) centuries of evil could have been avoided, perhaps.  People do have such a habit of being able to find their way to doing that, which we should all confess and keep in mind to avoid.

*  The paper notes that the post-Vatican II Catholic lectionary has used the Gospel of John a lot less than previously.  

The Fourth Gospel is not proclaimed throughout the three-year lectionary of the post-Vatican II Roman rite in the same way as the Synoptics.  Certain passages of John are introduced sporadically in "Ordinary Time.  John 4:5-42; 9:1-41 and 11:1-45 are chosen for the third, fourth and fifth Sundays of Lent in Year A.  These dramatic passages are used as well in the two years when catecumens are progressing through the revised Rite of christian Initiation for Adults.  . . .

He goes on to note that any use of the Gospel should be accompanied by rigorous instruction that prevents an anti-Jewish understanding of them, no doubt on the basis of that potential being proven in the whole history of their misuse and the evil that has come of that.

That said, it's never been my experience that antisemites, other racists, misogynists, queer-bashers take the teachings of Jesus that seriously, the commandments to love opponents and even enemies, those who say mean things about us, etc.  I've never noted them to be especially pious and, in the several experiences of threat and violence I've experienced from them, they are quite willing to take The Lord's name in vain,  blasphemy is the dialect of their mother tongue, which is lying.

** For Christians of any age to grasp the message of John, they must be imbued with a deep understanding of Jewish worship in the Second Temple Period. 

In other words, hardly any but a few rare specialists in such topics will really be able to get a lot of what John wrote.  I will note that if this is true then the author of John and his intended audience must have been Jews because he would certainly have written it differently if he didn't expect his readers to get the distinctions and subtlties that he'd never have expected gentiles to get. 

Perhaps the single most devastating statement about "the Jews" in the Fourth Gospel is the Accusatory dictum summarized as "Your father is the devil" (8:44).  In this text (or the tradition behind it) the background for the phrase "synagoge tou satana" (Apoc 2:9, 3:9).  Rather than showing an appreciation for the Jewish heritage of Jesus and his Gospel, the Church Fathers (especially Ambrose and John Chrysostom) and later generations of Christian teachers used this image of the diabolical to describe the synagogue and Jewish prayer in their own times.

In reading the whole argument that Jesus is having with a specific group of People - no doubt they were the ones he was making admonitions to, not "the Jews" as the whole nation, as later antisemites would read it.  As I said, I think John almost certainly would have considered himself to be a Jew, maybe one who was sore about having been kicked out of the local synagogue.

These [later Christian] preachers and writers did not realize that the intense pitting of life against death, truth against falsehood, God against Satan in John was a literary approach that derived from polemics between Jewish teachers of the age.  They must have understood that the reprimand of Jesus to Peter "Get behind me satan!" (Matthew 16:23) was an admonition rather than a declaration of definitive rejection.  Unfortunately, it suited their purpose to construe this debate among Jews being the children of God and of Abraham so that Jesus seemed to be making an eternally valid condemnation of all Jews of all periods of post-biblical history, except those who converted to Christianity.

We should now explain that, like the prophets of earlier times, John the Baptist and Jesus exercised the function of mokeah, "admonisher" to their peers as teachers of the ordinary people.  Name-calling was a method commonly used to shake those judged to be complacent leaders into a realization of the effect of their instruction  Sometimes a title, such as "guides to the blind" would be reversed (see Romans 2:19, Matthew 15:14; 23:16, 19, 24) to startle the opponents into a reflection on their work.  Because misinterpretation of Scripture could be attributed to the devil (see Matt 4:6) erroneous teachings might be wittingly or unwittingly diabolical (see 2 Cor 11:14-15).  Scandals or obstacles to the faith of the "little ones" must be avoided at all costs (see Matt 18:6-10).  But, on the other hand, in situations of conflict or disagreement, people should harken to the advice of Gamaliel:  "Any group of human origin will break up of its own accord,  but if a movement comes from God you will not be able to destroy them,  but you might find yourselves fighting against God" (Acts 5:39).

I doubt that Ambrose and Chrysostom and almost all later commentators on this would have had much if any understanding of that background.  We, on the other hand, have access to a level of knowledge of the necessary primary texts, many in their original languages, many in English and other translations, so many of the modern commentaries on it which take those as a more reliable guide than late Classical, medieval - even some current traditionalist commentators on them, are likely far more accurate.  It's not unlike what I've found with studying other controversies I've gone into, Darwinism and its relationship to eugenics, the U. S. Constitution.   It's one of the tragedies of the internet that with all of that so available that so much of what else is put on it is sheer evil, some merely banal in its evil, much of it far worse. 

Note:  Reading through this, again before posting it,  I have to point out that, just as John's use of "the Jews" is, the word "antisemtism" is extremely problematic in itself.  The word has radically different meanings depending on what AND WHO it's used to describe.  

The "antisemitism" of those who want to convert Jews to Christianity is certainly not the same thing as the biological-eugenic antisemitism, the antisemtism of someone like Voltaire who attributed malign stereotypes to Jews based on their biological inheritance or the later, materialist, "enlightenment" forms of that as found in German romanticism and pseudo-scientific linguistics, Darwinist eugenics (English as well as Nazi-German and other) and on to the post-WWII genetic neo-Nazism which has found a home both in English language neo-Nazism and in evolutionary psychology on an academic level.   

There is all the difference in the world as to whether someone wants to convert you and, if you choose not to convert,  to leave you alone, or someone who wants to kill you whether or not you convert to Christianity, especially to those who also reject Christianity.   I've noted before that the German antisemite who invented the term to make his hate more sciency, the bizarre Wilhelm Marr,  hated Christianity as "the new Judaism" which he dis-credited with bringing Judaism into the gentile world.  

To call all of those wrongs the same thing is anything from confusing to unhelpful and in many of the uses of the word, now, for many things which are not remotely anti-Jewish, unjust.   And far worse than that, when it is used to label People.