I have to say that the more I look back on the BNTC sessions, the more I think this was one of the better conferences I have attended. Of course, that might be something to do with getting home to my own bed each night or the possibility of spending Friday afternoon with the family bike riding on the Monsal Trail...but the sessions were really good.
I thought it might be worth spending some blogging space on the papers delivered in the Johannine Lit sessions...so here we go - although these are my brief rememberances and may not bear too close a scrutiny.
Ok - so the first session contained two papers from PhD students: Michael Sommer from Oxford and Judy Diehl from Edinburgh.
Let me focus on each one separately, Michael's first.
Michael's paper explored whether the 'Jews' of the Fourth Gospel represent the opponents to the author's point of view in 1 John - i.e. is the Gospel an expression of renegade Johannine theology in the terms of the epistle (my summary not Michael's). Michael's take on the relationship between the two writings is that 1 John represents an earlier 'Jewish' manifestation of the Johannine Community a la Brown. This community was torah-observant and had a low Christology evidenced by the emphasis on belief centred on Jesus coming in flesh. Gradually a group moved away from this in two ways - it rejected the torah-observance and moved to a much higher Christology - apparently denying the enfleshment of Jesus as a human being. Michael's suggestion is that 1 John represents the views of the first group, that the Gospel represents the second group and that the Jews in the gospel represent the old torah-observant version of the Johannine community. Michael also threw in some discussion of HAMARTIA as a sign of social cohesion and not really 'sin' in the modern sense. I quote Michael's conclusion in full:
Conclusion
By similar reasoning we might also contextualise passages like ‘we have no king but Caesar’ and the Sabbath controversies, but I conclude with an aspect of Wendy’s analysis I noted at the beginning: the Gospel’s many fussy details which she believes John supplies in order to inform his audience. But there is another, literary, explanation for this feature of the text.
It is apparent that John’s Gospel presents a challenge to our ideas about the nature of reality, and in this sense we might think of its author as the literary ancestor of modern writers like Gogol, Kafka and Pirandello. In a Gogol story, Kovalyov discovers one morning that he is missing his nose. Later he sees it in St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt ‘wearing a gold-braided uniform with a high stand-up collar and chamois trousers, with a sword at its side. From the plumes on its hat one could tell that it held the exalted rank of State Councillor...’ Gogol’s purpose here is hardly to inform. But ‘the proliferation of homely trivia and the matter-of-fact narrative tone tend to domesticate the absurd, to absorb it almost imperceptibly into the texture of everyday life. At the same time, the narrator’s relative ‘lack of astonishment’ – to use Camus’s apt description of a Kafka narrative – in the face of the strangest incidents, subtly undermines one’s trust in the dependability or predictability of the world around us.’
In the same way, for this Evangelist, Jesus is ‘the event that redefined reality… an event that pointed to the character of reality (in terms of which) everything must now be reconceived.' The trivial details serve merely to beguile us into a sense of normality. On the surface John’s is the story of a man – reflecting the experience of the community which worships him – whose life ends in political and religious failure; who wills his own violent death and who views that death as his culminating glory. It is a self-fulfilling narrative of defeat, but embraced with such intensity that it comes to be read as a pre-ordained victory, embodying a great empirical truth: it no longer matters that the text is self-contradictory. Thus in the mind of John (and of many of his interpreters) the dream becomes the true reality and the reality – the historical reality – a mere ‘background’ to this extraordinary drama.
Because the Gospel has been such a force in Christian theology down the centuries, it is assumed to have dominated the Johannine agenda in its own time as it has done ever since. I have indicated that this is not necessarily so and that 1John may represent the primary understanding of the Johannine position which the gospel has come to oppose. I hope that the arguments I have sketched here may give grounds to reconsider the question and to sharpen some of the categories set out by Wendy two years ago. In particular I hope that Johannine study can rid itself of ‘the poison of over-theologizing’, to which it lends itself so easily, and become ‘more responsive to the reality of human existence.’
On the one hand, says Savrogin in The Devils, ‘if it were mathematically proved to you that truth was outside Christ, you would rather remain with Christ than with truth.’ On the other hand, he reflects, ‘one must really be a great man to hold out even against common sense.’
A good paper. It deals with a difficult question in a new way by exploring the dynamics of the Johannine Community. It interacts with scholarship on that subject area - although perhaps not with the latest discussions (Moody Smith, Thatcher, Conway). It explores sectarianism which is relevant to Johannine studies (although limited engagement with Petersen, Malina, Meeks). It deals with some texts in some detail.
Some issues:
I do not think that the Johannine community as represented in the epistles can be proved to be torah-observant. There is little evidence of Jewish identity markers in the text, of Jewish ritual or practice. The vocabulary, indeed, of commandment and witness are at variance with covenantal nomism. This is far from Hellenistic Diaspora Judaism as well. The insistence of Jesus as the central bedrock of the community's belief, it's non-Jewish vocabulary, it's understanding of forgiveness as dependent on Jesus, shows how far this community has moved away from such a notion. Indeed, in many ways, the confusion in the Gospel about Jewishness would suggest it represents a more primitive development away from Judaism. So, the temple is to be prized and not reduced to a cattle yard as seems to be suggested in John 2:15 and yet the temple is also to be replaced by Jesus; salvation come from the Jews (John 4:22) but the time is coming and has come when neither Jerusalem or on Gerizim. Such confusion maintains Jewish community markers as important - talk of cleansing rituals, passover meals, festivals and the like, but also seeks to break off the link with these as identity markers. There seems to be evidence in the Gospel portrayal of the community's adolescence - moving away from the parental paradigms to a new, independent awareness. This new awareness, I would argue, is then seen in the Epistles which show so little Jewishness in their language, ethos and culture.
The Jews are not a focussed group in the Gospel. Sometimes they are the enemies of Jesus, sometimes his supporters, sometimes neutral observers. Salvation comes from the Jews, but they are normally referred to in the second person and not the first - and so a kind of separation happens. To some extent, they represent not one group but all groups who lie outside the brilliance of the Johannine Community - shadow-figures. Some of these figures are darker than others, some retreat into the darkness, some emerge from the darkness. But they are not one group - there is a more diffused form of characterization going on here. As such, it seems difficult to assume that the author of the Gospel is therefore attacking those who stayed behind in the original Johannine community while his group went out and beyond. This all seems to rest on 1 John evidencing a Jewish identity which I can't see! I need more persuasion on this Michael!
The Christological development is awkward. I am not suo sure that it is feasible to say that 1 John represents a low Christology and that John represents a high, quasi-docetic Christology. The Gospel was (ab)used by the Valentinian gnostics to point to a the existence of aeons and divine emanations but this does not mean that the Gospel itself is docetic. Indeed, it was used much more by anti-heretical scholars to prove the humanity of Jesus. I don't think you can draw a trajectory from 1 John to John which suggests a move from a lower to a higher Christology. John's Christology is in itself a patchwork of different perspectives - sometimes a God striding the earth, sometimes an emotional, passionate, needy, human being - enfleshed God. Of course, in these post-Dan Brown days, that sounds so orthodox and someone might come along and say that I am reading John through post-nicene eyes (Trey!)! But the point is that the Nicene Council used the texts they had to create their doctrinal formulae. They did not have their formulae and then create their texts - however much this would fit into Brown's conspiracy theories more pleasantly. The Johannine text has been rock solid since the mid first century and does not represent the fractured mss traditon people sometimes pretend it did. So I think the Christological argument in Michael's paper needs to do some more work to convince me as well.
Probably that's enough. I enjoyed the paper - it made me think a lot and crystalized some thoughts for a piece of work I need to do over my sabbatical. Certainly the ensuing discussion was stimulating and well-informed. Having the likes of Andrew Lincoln and Judith Lieu in the room (along with all the other brilliant people!) does help to sharpen the mind.
I'd better leave it there and come back to do Judy Diehl's paper...apparently the formatting has gone wrong somewhere in this - spent ages in the HTML editor trying to get the margin back and turn these comments back into a bulleted list - failed miserably...flipping computers!
Pete
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