Jewish Symbols of the Lamb Applied to Jesus

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 24 April 2014 3 Comments
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Question

My name is Torky. I am from Saudi Arabia. Please, may I ask you some questions?

1. You said there is NO way that John or any of Jesus’ twelve disciples could have written the Fourth Gospel. Can you please tell me why? I will memorize all of them by heart.

2. Was the unknown writer of the Fourth Gospel an eye witness? What are the reasons?

3. Is it true that John, chapter 21, verses twenty-four and twenty five, were added later, and are thus NOT an original part of the Fourth Gospel?

I really look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible. Thank you very much.

Answer

Dear Torky,

Thank you for your letter. To my knowledge, you are my first correspondent from Saudi Arabia. Welcome to our network of people who seek to worship God in the accents of the 21st century. Our audience grows bigger every month.

I cannot respond to all your questions because they are too numerous for this question and answer format but I will respond briefly to your first three, all of which relate to the Fourth Gospel. They indicate to me that my most recent book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic has made its way into Saudi Arabia. I am pleased with that realization. There is a much more detailed answer to your questions in that book than I can provide here, but let me begin with your first question on the authorship of the Fourth Gospel.

John, the son of Zebedee, was a Galilean fisherman. He lived in a world in which only about one in every hundred people could read and only about one in every thousand people could write. The lack of people in that society who knew how to write necessitated the position that we call a "scribe," which meant a professional writer, who was hired whenever a letter needed to be written. We find scribes mentioned frequently in the New Testament. Writing was such a rare and advanced skill in that day that one who possessed it would be considered a very successful person. One who could write would, therefore, not remain in the low-paying, relatively unskilled position of a Galilean fisherman, when they could earn far more as a writer. A literate Galilean fisherman would have been a wonder in that world. The fact that the book of Acts describes John (along with Peter) as "uneducated, common men” (Acts 4:13), simply confirms this fact.

The Fourth Gospel, however, was written in Greek. All indications suggest that neither Jesus nor any of his disciples could read or write Greek. Yes, they might have known a few Greek words because most commerce was conducted in Greek, but the suggestion that they were fluent in Greek or knew how to write in this language stretches credibility beyond the breaking point. To make this insight even more compelling, we need to recognize that John’s gospel was not only written in Greek, but in excellent Greek. Along with Luke, the Greek in John's gospel is the most refined Greek in the New Testament. It is clearly not the work of a Galilean fisherman!

Another consideration that helps us to determine that John Zebedee was clearly not the author of the Fourth Gospel comes in the probability that most of Jesus’ disciples were his own contemporaries in age. That seems a proper assumption given all that we know about these people, their times and their culture. If that is true then we next look at the date of the writing of the Fourth Gospel. Most scholars think today that this gospel was written over a period of years by more than one author. The date of the first strand is believed to be no earlier than 75 CE (certainly it was after the fall of Jerusalem to the Roman army in 70 CE). The finished gospel is normally dated no earlier that 95-100 CE. So, if John was Jesus’ contemporary, he would have been somewhere between 75 - 100 years old. In that world where the average life expectancy was between 30 and 40 years, for a person to reach an age of 75 to 100 would be rare indeed. In our time to write a significant book while one is in one’s late 80’s or 90’s is still very rare.

Another dating mark is found in the text of John itself where it asserts that the followers of Jesus were excommunicated from the synagogue (see chapter 9). We can now date the split between the followers of Jesus and the hierarchy of the synagogue fairly accurately in the last years of the ninth decade, or around the year 88 CE.

Finally, part of the confusion of authorship comes because people have identified John Zebedee with the enigmatic and mysterious figure referred to in the text of the fourth Gospel as “The Beloved Disciple” or “The Disciple whom Jesus loved.” This figure emerges only in the 13th chapter and then dominates the story through to the resurrection. Nowhere in John’s gospel is this enigmatic disciple ever named and nowhere is the claim made that he was John Zebedee. Throughout Christian history, books have been written trying to prove the identity of this Beloved Disciple. Thomas, James, the brother of Jesus, Lazarus (now raised from the dead) and Mary Magdalene have been among the suggested candidates.

I know of no serious New Testament scholar today who thinks that the Beloved Disciple was John Zebedee. That idea disappeared under pressure from contemporary scholars in the latter years of the 19th century. I have argued in my book on John that the “Beloved Disciple” was not a person of history at all, but a symbol of the ideal follower of Jesus. That suggestion came to me through the writing of the man I believe to have been the greatest New Testament scholar of the 20th century, Rudolf Bultmann of the University of Marburg in Germany.

In response to your second question, I do not believe that any of the authors of any of the gospels, including John, were eyewitnesses. All of the gospels are products of either the second generation of Christians or, in John’s case, of the third generation. The suggestion of eyewitness reporting behind the gospels is nothing more than fundamentalist propaganda that has infected all of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, from the 4th century on.

In regard to your third question, I have argued in my book that the entire last chapter of John (chapter twenty-one), not just the verses to which you refer, was a later addition to the Fourth Gospel by a hand quite different from the author or authors who composed the first 20 chapters. Chapter 21 is too intent upon answering questions that had clearly been raised by readers of the first 20 chapters to be authentic.

Thank you for writing. I hope to hear from you again and from others in Saudi Arabia, who would like to be part of what is now becoming a worldwide dialogue on the meaning and future of Christianity.

John Shelby Spong

 

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