Dr. Weiss,

I truly appreciate your thoughtful study of John, and I have gained much insight from your teaching. Thank you so much for your continued study in John.

I would, however, like to take exception to your statement regarding “on the third day. “ You say, “As a chronological marker it is useless because it does not tell us when the counting of days is to start”. As I see it, this phrase is pivotal to John’s overall message AND John has given a starting point.

May I suggest that the third day was the end of the first week of Jesus ministry and the use of the phrase “on the third day” was meant as an echo to elicit the memory of Moses’ meeting with God in Exodus 19. There Moses advises the people to prepare for God’s manifestation “on the third day” when God would reveal His glory from the mountain top.

John sets up this expectation in chapter 1, verse 14 when he says, “The word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son full of grace and truth.” John then contrasts this glory of Christ by calling attention to the giving of the law from Mt. Sinai. “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”(verse 17)

Following these statements in chapter one, John begins his countdown. Day one, John the Baptist, answers the questions regarding the coming Messiah. Day two, (verse 29) says, “The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him…” Day three, (verse 35) “The next day John again was standing with two disciples and watched Jesus walk by…” Day four, (verse 43) “The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee,” and there he connects with his first followers.

THEN chapter 2:1 John says, “On the third day there was a wedding…” making it day 7. At the conclusion of the wedding scenario, John ties it all together by saying, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs (there will be 7 signs in all) in Cana of Galilee AND HE REVEALED HIS GLORY and his disciples believed in him.” 2:11.

I was not trying to interpret the miracle at the wedding feast at all!!!! (that's a whole other venture) I'm picking on John's theme of "Jesus' revealed glory" and "the third day" - which carries over throughout the book...

Ultimately Jesus will rise on the third day. :-)

Elaine,

John is one of the best examples of not taking the bible literally. John has the Passover at the start and end of his gospel - with Jesus going to Jerusalem and cleansing the temple right at the beginning of his ministry. Events happen in John that the other writers appear not to have known.

The "gospel" is a literary genre... The gospels are not biographies of Jesus nor histories of Jesus life - They were written to evangelize people to the risen Christ.

The gospel writers picked and chose their materials and arranged them to make theological points and to teach believers the ways of the kingdom.

By the time the gospel of John was written, heresies were all ready coming into the church and much of John's writing appears to be an attempt to combat the erroneous beliefs regarding the nature of Christ.

And none of what I have said above necessarily negates a belief in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit - in case some might be so inclined to interpret things that way.

Donna

If the gospel stories of Jesus are not to be taken literally then what in the Bible is to be taken literally? Did Jesus really rise from the dead, as the gospel writers say, or was that just allegorical, designed to "evangelize people?" You folks treat the Bible like it was just another piece of ancient literature, rather than the divinely inspired word of God. Oh, yeah, I forgot, most of the folks here at Spectrum don't appear to believe what Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:16.

This question about the historicity of the Fourth Gospel interests me. It is often asserted that the author played fast-and-loose with history.

I've just read an article by L.W. Hurtado, He goes so far as to say the Gospel's author was "perfectly aware that much of what he put into the mouth of Jesus was never spoken by Jesus in his earthly life." He asserts "the author’s reason for giving his account of the ministry of Jesus was entirely theological, not to serve some academic modern interest in historical exactitude." I agree that the concerns of modern historiography may not have been in view. But are historical details simply being fabricated by the author in service of spiritually revealed truths?

Along that vein, I have been weighing Sandra Schneider's arguments in her seminal piece, "History and Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel." For her "the essence of the artistic symbol is not that it copies the natural symbol. John does not copy the historical Jesus. The essence of the artistic symbol is to be another symbol of that which the natural symbol revealed."

She asks, "what is the relation between the historical Jesus (i.e. the natural symbol) and the Johannine Jesus (i.e., the artistic symbol)? The relation is that both are true symbolic expressions of the same person, the Word of the Father. They are two symbols of one reality."

She offers an illustration: "To ask how the Johannine account corresponds to what 'actually happened' is like asking how Van Gogh's self-portrait corresponds to his historical face. The question is misplaced. The significant question is how does the self-portrait of Van Gogh correspond to the person of Van Gogh."

She argues that "the history of Jesus, in John, has become artistic material."

Finally, in her view, "there is not an inverse proportion between the historical and the symbolic in the Fourth Gospel. On the contrary, because history is used by John as symbolic material, the more historical it is seen to be, the more symbolic it will be seen to be." This symbolic appreciation, she says, need not lead to allegorizing or limitless interpretations, but to careful exegesis based upon its literary character.

One will find the motive force of the Gospel of John in 1 John 4:1-3.

The driving force of John's writings are to combat the Gnostic intrusion into the Christ event.

It is met head on in the letter and later in the letters to the seven churches.

John's gospel was an argument of evidence. It is an expansion of John the Baptist's proclaiming Jesus as the Lamb of God.

John's writings take us from the Lamb of God to the King of Kings and Lord of Lord's.

Marriage was His institution, The Temple was His house, the people were His people. Redemption was His idea. He was the link between heaven and earth. From the ruler Nicodemus to the woman at the well, to woman wiping His feet with her hair, to the thief on the Cross he was the Redeemer.
His humanity was as real as His divinity.

Yes indeed Christ was God in the flesh. Tom Z

Dr Weiss has earlier written about the death of Jesus as an inconvenient fact that all his followers, actual and future, would struggle to make theological sense of. As a result several 'Christianities' developed in the first century AD, and in the millennia to come, more were added. From the point of view of the early community of believers in Jerusalem, led by Jesus's brother James and his lead disciples, Paul must have looked like Joseph Smith, and to the Synoptic community of faith, the Gospel of John and the movement that created it, must have appeared as something out of Rudolf Bultmann's world.

Above all, what I have learned from Dr Weiss these last few years, is to read the Bible as a collection of manuscripts that are bound together more by context than text. Even for a non-believer, such a myself, it is hard to read Biblical texts exegetically instead of theologically. Especially the Gospels present a challenge, because we all grew up with ministers preaching from The Harmonized Gospel, a Diatessaron which resolved all conflicts and logical gaps by creating a fifth gospel out the existing four. This proof-text version of the Gospel destroys the individuality of the Gospels and only preserves their context. It would be as if future generations of Christians would try to merge Aquinas, Luther and Joseph Smith in order to have them agree among themselves.

Donna:

I would have loved to have someone like you in one of my classes when I was teaching. I have been retired now for 10 years. My decision to write this series of columns on the gospel According to John was not to get back into the classroom, but to do some reflective thinking and share it.

I did not mean to indicate that one must search for "the one right" interpretation. I think that the text allows for many valid interpretations. In these columns, however, I am not providing a scholarly panorama of the text. I am doing short reflections on a theme at a time. This means that I have to chose what at the moment seems to me the "most valid" among them. That is why I thought that when you provided an alternative reading you were enriching the mix.

As for the relationship of the gospel to the letters, I agree on most points with Raymond Brown's reconstruction of the history of the Johannine community in his book "The Community of the Beloved Disciple" He draws a clear difference between the community in which the gospel took shape as it went through several powerful experiences and the appearance of The Elder who is an authority figure taking the community toward institutionalization and the definition of orthodoxy.

None of the Gospel writers knew Jesus personally, but were followers based on stories told of him by those who knew him. As they struggled to understand why he allowed himself to be crucified, they conjectured the meaning, and Paul was the first to develop his own explanations which are still being debated to this day.

Did Christ's death pay an atonement? Who was demanding a payment and to whom was it paid? Was Jesus sent to the world for that one reason? Could anyone hope to be saved had he not been crucified--and resurrected?

Why is nearly all the emphasis on the days before his crucifixion and much less on His resurrection? His death was meaningless without the resurrection, yet it usually comes as an afterthought? In the life of Christ, the "Third Day" was the day of Resurrection' without that often overlooked event, why study the life of Christ at all?

Aage has reminded us again that the attempt to harmonize the Gospels, as well as the other writings until one complete whole leads to more, not less confusion.

Fr Jim,

Ther real Mark, Matthew and John may have known Jesus, but the actual four gospels are all anonymous and none of them have been written by an eyewitness. If you have any knowledge of Biblical scholarship you should know that - even Catholic biblical scholars agree on this.

And one final comment.

Yes, I have Raymond Brown's book "The Community of the Beloved Disciple" and appreciate his scholarly approach. (He also wrote the Anchor Bible commentary on John, as you know.) As an aside, my son once had the opportunity to be sitting beside Dr. Brown on a plane trip - he conversed as they traveled and told me how impressed he was with Dr. Brown's kindness and graciousness.

Another writer that I have found very useful in my own study of John is John Wijngaards, MHM. He wrote the volume on "The Gospel of John & His letters" for the "Message of Biblical Spirituality" series. If you are not familiar with his work - I highly recommend this book - and would love to converse with you about it.

Your student,
Donna

Donna
I translated one of Dr Weiss' Spanish columns a few years back, and that may have been the one you're referring to. The Spectrum search engine is not up to snuff today, so I can't find it, but you should be able to find it under my name.

I found it under "Metaphors of Salvation" (11/28/08):

THE FALL AND ITS EFFECTS
By Dr. Herold Weiss

It is not necessary to be a Christian to recognize that every human being has something inside which does not function well. Centuries before the Christian faith arose, the Greek philosophers considered the role of the conscience. The way they understood it, the conscience always condemns. It inflicts a sense of culpability for bad thoughts and bad acts. Etymologically the Greek word, syneidesis, is made up of the same elements found in the Spanish and English words, whose origin is Latin. “Con” + “science” [“sciencia” in Spanish] states that someone else “knows” “with” me what I wouldn’t like anybody to know. The attempt to understand what led me to do the things that my conscience accuses me of, leads to explanations which claim to introduce circumstances that mitigate the evil deed.
All theology, I think, begins with the attempt to understand the breach in the human personality, which causes all of us to do what is bad, to feel guilty and to try to rationalize our bad behavior. Every human being that observes itself and tries to understand the human condition, recognizes the existence of evil. Cultures which have no knowledge of Adam or Eve as their progenitors, know that human beings carry within themselves a sense of guilt.
In the Bylonian legend, Enuma Elish, Marduk, after his triumph over Tiamat and his armies, decides that the gods need those who serve them, and he creates human beings out of the fountain of Kingu’s blood, the one identified explicitly as the one responsible for the cosmic rebellion. In this way the legend explains the origin of a condemnatory conscience in all human beings. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve discover, after eating the forbidden fruit that they are naked and they hide, thus showing their sense of guilt. What is striking is that in the rest of the Old Testament there is no reference to Adam’s sin. On the contrary, the paradigmatic sin is the rebellion of the people of Israel in the desert, its grumblings and its idolatry.

Even more important than the recognition that there is something in us which inflames our conscience, has been the analysis of the extent of the damage caused by the evil that lodges in us. The situation can be compared to that of an insurance adjuster who makes an estimate of damage caused by an accident. In what kind of condition is the car after the accident? And the damage inflicted, does it affect the looks of the car or the functionality? What actually is damaged? It has a dented bumper; its bumper, lights, fender and engine cowling are damaged; its radiator is damaged and the fan is embedded in the engine; the damages are so extensive that the car has to be condemned and replaced by a new one. It is vital to establish the extent of the damage incurred before it is possible to decide what to do about it. Once the actual damage has been repaired, the owner of the car thinks he is driving a new car. Then a maneuver which makes the car vibrate violently, leads him or her to think that the entire steering system should be replaced. After replacing all four tires, the driver is greatly relieved to feel that the car again drives like a new car.

To return to the subject, to Christians the accident took place in the garden of Eden. That was the scene of the Fall, which introduced evil into the human condition. What is the state of a human being after the Fall? It has lost its appreciation for beauty; it has been deprived of good thoughts and feelings; its will is somewhat unfocused; its will is predisposed to evil and it requires a lot of spiritual clarity as counterweight to do good; its will and mind are greatly affected, and it has to be called depraved, incapable of doing good. In other words, have we been deprived of the good use of certain faculties? Are our faculties depraved? Or, are we completely depraved beings?

The answer we give to these questions determines our theology. The Bible does not pose these questions, and consequently, does not answer them. In the Old Testament it is taken for granted that individuals are fully able to make correct decisions by themselves and that, as a consequence, they are responsible. From this perspective it will appear that in the Fall, humanity did not suffer major damage. In other words, we have to concede that the Old Testament does not know anything about the Fall. When we read the Bible, against the background of centuries of theological traditions, we are, maybe unwittingly, conscious of the Fall and we assess the damage caused by it. This assessment affects our reading of the Bible and the theology we create with it. We certainly have reason to diagnose that there is something unbalanced in all human beings, but we lack the facts that would allow us to assess in detail our condition as fallen beings.

Last month we studied the Lamentations of Jeremiah. He was more awed by his people’s ignorance of God’s justice and righteousness than he was of migratory birds. This awe turned into frustration and lamentation--face to face with the impossibility of learning the secrets of flight and the ignorance of God’s people. Since our understanding of the mystery of evil is no better than that of Jeremiah, our confidence in the correctness of our various theologies should be sprinkled with a healthy dose of humility.

Thanks Herold. I've made a couple of edits (humanity beings to 'human beings' and resolved a singular-plural conflict). To me this particular column changed the entire way I look at the OT.

Aage wrote: "From the point of view of the early community of believers in Jerusalem, led by Jesus's brother James and his lead disciples, Paul must have looked like Joseph Smith, and to the Synoptic community of faith, the Gospel of John and the movement that created it, must have appeared as something out of Rudolf Bultmann's world."

Interesting contrasts. From the above, among the many distinct theologies (or christianities) in the NT, were there at least four? Such as: 1) Jewish-Christian fellowships under James, et al, 2) Gentile house churches founded by Paul and his associates; 3) Synoptic community (or, communities) of faith; 4) John's movement.

Joselito
I'm not enough of a scholar to know the extent to which the Synoptic community overlapped with Paul's. That's one for Dr Weiss. It certainly is an interesting question.

Sirje
What I meant was that we're forever reading the NT into the OT. We who grow up in the "Christian" world take it for granted that the OT says what the NT and ecclesiastical tradition imputes to it. Thus having it pointed out that the Christian concept of "the Fall" is not based on exegesis of OT texts, is significant. Paul used it to make sense of the death of Jesus, and the Western church, especially the RCC, has used it to make sense of the church as the institution entrusted with God's antidote to the Serpent's primeval bite. (One thing I hope Dr Weiss will address is the extent to which the Gospel of John subscribes to the doctrine of the Fall.)

The lack of such a doctrine in the OT is also relevant when it comes to the debate around evolution. It seems to me that Judaism, for this reason alone, could live with evolution in a way that Christians can't.

We must not discount the inter testamental writings and the influence they had on lst century believers and their theology.

"They are two separate personalities."

Yes, the Father Himself loves you.

But...if you don't love Him back, He will burn you alive in wrath without mixture.

It doesn't help me a bit to separate the Old and New Testaments, Sirje. It seems to me the two personalities are in both the Old and New Testaments, and, not surprisingly, in Ellen White's writings.

In reference to a typology of early Christianities, I can recommend two sources. You may read an article by Raymond Brown on the subject in Brown, Raymond and John Meier. Antioch and Rome, Paulist Press, 1983. Secondly you may read an elaboration of Brown's reconstruction in reference to views on the Sabbath in early Christianity in my book, A Day of Gladness, The Sabbath Among Jews and Christians in Antiquity. University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Page 180 has a handy summary.

In reference to Donna's anecdote about her son conversing with Father Brown on an air flight, I can only say that her son's impression is shared by every one who knew Raymond Brown. He was a most decent human being, a committed Christian, a faithful priest and a wonderful scholar. Those who were privileged to do graduate studies with him at Union Seminary in NYC hold him in highest regard. He did his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in the department of Semitic Languages and Archaeology under William Albright. Like many Adventists doing graduate work in Biblical Studies he was a Catholic at the time when the Curia was fighting Modernism and had just excommunicated Alfred Loisy in France and cleaned up Seminaries in the USA. The only safe area was to study archaeology, ancient languages or textual criticism. In the 1940s and 50s, however, Raymond Brown, the New Testament scholar and John McKenzy, the Old Testament scholar, were challenging the reactionaries in the church and advocating serious biblical research at great peril to their careers. Their efforts finally gave fruit after Vatican II, and Catholic biblical scholarship, thanks to them, was able to catch up and be at the cutting edge of biblical studies in no time.

When we see popular mystic numbers (e.g., 3, 7, 12, 40 in pericopes, we should appreciate the hint that they are not to be understood as actual histories.

Incidentally, if we don't think Jesus was referring to the third day of the calendar week when He predicted He would be raised on the "third day", why do we think that the seventh day refers to the seventh day of the calendar week?

Incidentally again, neither the Jews or the Romans had a seven day calendar week.

Harry