Maronite Meditation 75
We shall now consider a question which most people may not realise is contentious: the assertion that the Gospel of St John was the product of a so-called “Johannine Community.” I am not going, in this short treatment, to attempt to critique the entire concept and the conclusions draw from it. I intend rather to consider what the late John Ashton said about it in the second edition of his Understanding the Fourth Gospel, because there he self-consciously attempted to rise to the challenges which had recently been made against that theory. In my treatment, I am aiming to not so much to positively establish that there was not a Johannine community, but – more modestly – that the reasons offered for it by John Ashton are inadequate. Now, if that is so, then the question arises, are there other grounds for believing that the Gospel according to St John was written by a community, and if not, what can we say about its writing? We shall need to take this topic in several stages, over several programmes. But as we examine these questions, I shall attemot to show how easy it is to be swept along by an apparently scholarly book like Ashton’s, and to uncritically accept its assumptions and contentions.
So, in the Introduction to the second edition, published in 2007, Ashton includes a section titled “The Johannine Community” to specifically answer arguments against the idea of that community. Early in this chapter, Ashton seems to postulate a “community” on the basis of what he calls an “uncompromisingly bitter tone of the exchanges between Jesus and the ‘Jews’ in chapters 5, 8 and 10” (22). This, he says, reflects the experience of a community which has been expelled from the synagogues. Further, he rhetorically asks: “As for the existence of the community, how else should we explain the sheepfold of chapter 10 or the many-branched vine of chapter 15?” (23)
I will note that he does not define this imagined “community.” It is a notoriously vague word: what is a community? A group of people living together? A group of people who do not live together but come together? Can it comprise some who live together and others who only visit? A group of people who neither live nor come together, but correspond with each other? Do they all know one another? Do they all agree on every point, some points, and if so, which ones? Is a community the same as a church, meaning, does it comprise the congregation of a church? Where was the church? What was its liturgy like, if it had any liturgy at all? To what purpose did it put the Gospel? Ashton does not address this at all. Neither does he condescend to explain why these passages, the sheepfold and the many-branched vine, necessarily refer to a community, however defined. Why, for example, can they not be referring to all Christians?
It may appear that I am presenting a caricature of Ashton’s argument. But I am not. He does in fact undertake to prove, against doubters, that the Gospel according to St John was produced by a “Johannine community,” which he has not only never defined, but for which he has not even sketched a portrait. And the community produces this Gospel for an unstated purpose: did they read it amongst themselves, or privately, was it used in services of some description — any description — or a combination of these? As to any and all of this, Ashton was mute.
This vague theory of the community, the late dating of the Gospel to the end of the first century or early in the second century, and scepticism as to its historical and theological authenticity all go together. If it was produced by a community separate in space and time from other Christians, it is relatively late, it is tendentious and not historical, and its theology was tailored to fit their own preconceptions and desires, and it possessed a tenuous connection with the historical teaching of Our Lord. The Johannine community and all its works comprise but one strain in the ancient Christian world, and not a central one. It can rightly be marginalised.
When Ashton turns to what he calls “specific objections against the community theory,” he opens with a sub-chapter “A Life of Christ?” One reads four pages and finds no objection here to the idea he is ostensibly defending. The confusion seems deliberate: one does not imagine that Ashton would not submerge us in pointless prose, and so he must be proving his point. Only on the fourth page of this section does he assert that “The violent dissensions of chapters 5, 8 and 10, the way ‘the Jews’ are portrayed in these, the claims made by Jesus about himself and the consolatory words of the farewell discourse (14-16) all go to prove that their author, whom we call the evangelist, was writing for readers whose circumstances were radically different from those of the last few followers Jesus had gathered in his own lifetime …” (27)
These three arguments all go together. They are clearly circular because they assume that the passages in question can only refer to a later period of time. But why? Take the vine of chapter 15. Ashton makes an aside that simply rhetorically asks how there might be some way to understand this unless it is referring to a specific community. He does not even assert it, saving himself the trouble of fashioning a logical argument: he merely asks how anyone could disagree. But we do not need a community of some description, any description, to make sense of teachings such as: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Compare that saying to the parable of the mustard seed in Mark 4:31, wherein the seed germinates, shoots up, and puts out branches in the shade of which the birds may dwell. The mustard seed no more calls for a community to have been the audience of the Gospel than does that of the vine. So, when Ashton asks, as if the only answer could be the community: “how else should we explain the sheepfold of chapter 10 or the many-branched vine of chapter 15?” my reply is to say what has been understood for almost two thousand years: Our Lord was directly speaking to His apostles and disciples, and indirectly to all the faithful of every time and land.
We also have a very strange situation because at no point does Ashton consider that the texts he sees as written to reflect later conditions might actually be historical and refer to the time of Our Lord. For example, the straightforward way to read the Gospel is that St John is recording a fact, namely, that on two occasions the Jews picked up stones to hurl at the Lord. Why does that have to reflect the experience of a community after His death? In an odd way, the very barrenness of the hypothesis is its best defence: there is no fully articulated contention to seize upon, only an assumption that one accepts or does not. Ashton seems to think that by referring to “violent dissensions” in these chapters, he is saying something substantial. But although the Jews take up stones, which they do not hurl, I do not see any violence here. Ashton never descends to the detail of explaining why the opposition to the Lord is so different from that in the other Gospels that we have to perceive here the experience of a community which has been expelled from synagogues. For example, in chapter 3:6 of St Mark’s Gospel, it is recorded that after the Lord cured the man with a withered hand, the Pharisees and the Herodians “took counsel with the Herodians against him to put him to death.” It is far more natural, I would suggest, to see St John as having recorded some historical events which the other Gospels had not.
In the end, his argument, in so far as it is an argument and not the merest of assertions, comes down to “my subjective impression of this text is that what is written here did not happen, and it refers to a historical situation which is not written here.”
The same goes with the Farewell Discourse. Why is it so radically different from the facts of the last days of the Lord’s life that one has to say it is writing the history of the Johannine community under guise of describing the Last Supper? The rational course is to learn what those days were like from the sources, and not to reject the sources because they do not fit our picture. Were there some specific contradictions between the Discourse and some other source, that would be one thing. But in major matters, nothing in St John contradicts, it rather supplements the other Gospels, and that is exactly what the ancient sources tell us St John had in mind in writing [however, he does correct the Synoptics on some details of fact]. To sum this up, Ashton never provides a skerrick of evidence for the bare assertion that these must relate to events which occurred after the time of Jesus. Of course, it is implicit, although not asserted, that they will then be fictions; for if they did not occur during His life, then they did not occur because the Lord is absolutely central to these incidents.
Ashton then turns to critique Richard Bauckham’s argument in The Gospels for all Christians, a major attack on the community theories. Ashton wrote that Bauckham is wrong that the Gospels were written for all Christians, because there was, at the time of the Gospels, no concept of a Christian Church. He points to the epistles of St Paul the word ekklesia refers only to an individual church, and not until the Epistle to the Ephesians which does use that word generally, can one speak of a “universal church”, rather, he asserts, there were only individual churches. (28). Once more we see the anti-Catholic bias: the idea of a Christian Church being early is anathema to the Bible studies establishment. However, in his ostensibly scholarly treatment of Bauckham’s idea that the Gospels were written for all Christians, Ashton overlooks some significant matters. First, an important text from the time of the Gospels uses just that word ekklesia, in a context which can only mean a “universal church,” it is Matthew 16:18 “Thou are Peter, and upon this rock I build my church.” ekklesia. This is a very significant omission, and I will not judge his motives, but the damage to his thesis is fatal. Second had Ashton checked the dictionary, he would have found that is says: “the term ekklesia apparently became popular among Christians in Greek-speaking areas for chiefly two reasons: to affirm continuity with Israel through use of a term found in Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, and to allay suspicion, especially in political circles, that Christians were a disorderly group” (BDAG, 303). This suggests that the use of that word to mean a universal church was an early, logical and natural development.
But I think that more even than searching for the word “church,” we should be looking for the reality of a universal church. Ashton, and others alike, work on the basis that the Epistles of St Paul were written for one particular church or community, but precisely there we will find evidence that they are wrong. In Colossians 4:16, St Paul wrote: “And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you also read the letter from Laodicea.” (ESV) The letters to one church could and were to be read in the other churches. Hence, St Peter says in his second letter, which is not addressed to any one particular church: “… count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” The clear meaning and interpretation of this is that all the letters of St Paul were being read by all Christians as were those of St Peter. I shall develop this side of the argument in a fuller book-length treatment, but taken with the picture found in the Acts of the Apostles, it is quite sufficient to show that the Christians who appear in the New Testament saw themselves as a people united by a teaching, and their letters, even by new scriptures.
I continue with Ashton’s other contentions in the next podcast.
Glory be to the Father …