The "fake Jew" question

I'm never one to shy away from controversy. This post is not for the easily triggered.

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In my original Notes on John 1, I confessed to being somewhat perplexed by the way Jesus greeted Nathanael: "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" (John 1:47) Even the use of the term Israelite seemed odd. "Did people still call themselves Israelites in Jesus' time?" I wrote. "The term strikes me as an archaism even the first century. Weren't they all Samaritans and Jews by then?"

A few verses later, Jesus is promising that Nathanael will see "the angels of God ascending and descending" (John 1:51; cf. Gen. 28:12), a very obvious reference to the story of Jacob's Ladder. My tentative interpretation of this was that Nathanael was a true Israelite -- a man like Jacob, who is Israel -- but one who (unlike the cunning deceiver Jacob) was "without guile."

Looking at Jesus' curious statement again, though, I don't see anything implying a but. The more natural reading is to see "in whom is no guile" as emphasizing "indeed." Jesus is saying, in effect, "Behold a true Israelite, not a deceiver" -- i.e., not a fake Israelite. He was identifying Nathanael as one truly of the blood of Israel, in contrast to others who lyingly claimed Israelite descent.

This interpretation sheds some light on the otherwise puzzling exchange that follows. Nathanael asks how Jesus knows him, Jesus says he saw him under a fig tree, and Nathanael replies with, "Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel" (John 1:48-49). Isn't that a bizarre response? Jesus himself jokes, "Because I said unto thee, 'I saw thee under the fig tree,' believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these" (John 1:50).

But suppose Nathanael was a true Israelite by blood, that this was not common knowledge, and that most of his fellow countrymen were fake Israelites. When Jesus declared him "an Israelite indeed," and said he knew it just by looking at Nathanael sitting under a fig tree, he was demonstrating a supernatural ability to discern true Israelites just by looking at them, without any knowledge of their family background. The "King of Israel" knew his own people by intuition -- and they him, as Nathanael's response shows.

Isn't this a rather farfetched interpretation, though? I mean, fake Israelites? And real Israelites whose identity as such was a carefully guarded secret? Bear with me.

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The clearest reference to fake Israelites in the Bible is not in the Fourth Gospel but in the Revelation of John of Patmos -- a work which obviously has some connection to the Fourth Gospel, although I do not accept the traditional idea that they are the work of the same author.

In Revelation 2:9, Jesus is made to say to the angel of the church in Smyrna, "I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan." The theme is revisited in the same verse of the next chapter, addressing the angel of the church in Philadelphia: "Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee."

I had always interpreted "Jews" in these verses in religious terms, as "practitioners of Judaism," because the contrast is not with the goyim but with the "synagogue of Satan." However, I don't think this really works. The primary meaning of Jew, in Greek as in English, is ethnic rather than religious. Here's something no one would ever say: "Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud said they were Jews, but they lied; they were atheists." A Christian who becomes an atheist is no longer a Christian, but a Jew who becomes an atheist -- or even a Satanist -- is still a Jew.

In Galatians 2, ethnic Jews who have converted to Christianity are still referred to as Jews. Paul says to Simon Peter, "If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?" (Gal. 2:14). Peter is still clearly considered to be a Jew even though he "lives after the manner of Gentiles" -- that is, no longer practices the Jewish religion.

With this in mind, I think we have to interpret Rev. 2:9 and 3:9 ethnically -- as referring to those who falsely claim to be Jewish by blood. The "blasphemy" in this, I suppose, has to do with the Jews' special status as God's covenant people.

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In John 8:31-44, the fake Jew question comes up again.

They [the Jews] answered him, "We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, 'Ye shall be made free?'"

Jesus answered them, " . . . I know that ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you. I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father."

They answered and said unto him, "Abraham is our father."

Jesus saith unto them, "If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father."

Then said they to him, "We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God."

Jesus said unto them, "If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

Talk about hard sayings! Although Jesus does, confusingly, concede "I know that ye are Abraham's seed," in the rest of his speech he seems to say that the father of his interlocutors is neither Abraham nor God, but the devil. The reference to their father being "a murderer from the beginning" seems to allude to Cain -- who, according to Jewish tradition, was the son of Satan or of a fallen angel and thus only half-brother to Abel.

1 John 3:10-12 (probably by the author of the Fourth Gospel) also connects Cain with the idea of being a child of the devil.

In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother.

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If many of the "Jews" of New Testament times were not really Jews at all, then what were they? Roger Hathaway proposes that they were Idumaeans, or Edomites -- that is, descendants of Jacob's brother Esau.

Edom’s descendants settled a region south of the Dead Sea, whose capital was Petra, and whose famous mountain was named Mt. Seir. About 312 BC, the Nabateans evicted the Edomites from that region, so they migrated not very far to the region of Idumea (named after Edom, also) which was in southern Judea (the land of the tribe of Judah). The Edomites created such problems for the Judeans that in 132 BC, the king of Judea, John Hyrcanus, compelled them to be circumcised and join the Jerusalem Temple religion of Judaism. They responded enthusiastically. In less that a century the Edomites had taken political control of Judea under their own Herod (appointed by Rome in 47BC), and they took over the Jerusalem Temple. They oppressed the Israelite Judeans and forced many into suburbs of poverty and small nearby towns. When Jesus was born, it was Edomites who ran the Temple and the priesthood and the entire political scene.

It was the Edomite oppression that the true Israelites from Galilee (Jesus’ home) and Samaria complained about. The word Judean is translated into English Bibles as Jews. The Edomites became the Judeans, and by following Jesus, the true Israelite sheep became Christians, never to be called Judeans again.

This more or less checks out. It is true that the Edomites were forcibly converted to Judaism by John Hyrcanus in 132 BC, and it is true that the Herods were an Edomite family. It is certainly possible that a large percentage of the "Jews" of Jesus' time were at least partly of Edomite ancestry.

If what Jesus meant in John 8 was that his "Jewish" interlocutors were in fact Edomites, there remains the question of why he would say that they were not the children of Abraham, since Esau/Edom was no less a grandson of Abraham than his twin brother Jacob/Israel. The Edomites would be less purely Abrahamic than the Israelites, though, since Esau married foreign wives, while Jacob married within the Abrahamic family. Well, Jesus did concede, "I know that ye are Abrahams' seed," while maintaining that they were more truly the sons of their other ancestor, the devil (presumably by way of Cain).

Roger Hathaway speculates that Esau's foreign wives were of Cainite descent, but I think there is a case to be made that Esau himself may have been the son of a Cainite, and perhaps even of Cain himself. Certainly Jacob and Esau were very different physically, suggesting that they were only half brothers. When Esau was born, he "came out red all over like an hairy garment" (Gen. 25:25). Later, when Jacob wished to disguise himself as Esau in order to steal his blessing from their blind father Isaac, he faced the problem that "Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man" (Gen. 27:11) -- a problem he solved by covering parts of his body with hairy goatskin.

There is a persistent legend -- I had thought it peculiar to Mormonism until I encountered it in the Divine Comedy also! -- that Cain was cursed to be "a fugitive and a vagabond" forever and that he still lives today. Most Mormons will have heard the story of early Mormon apostle David Patten's 1835 encounter in Tennessee

with a very remarkable personage who had represented himself as being Cain who had murdered his brother Abel. I suddenly noticed a very strange personage walking beside me for about two miles. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark … He said he had no home, that he was a wanderer of the Earth. He said he was a very miserable creature, that he earnestly sought death, but could not die and his mission was to destroy the souls of men … I rebuked him in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the virtue of the Holy Priesthood and commanded him to go hence and he immediately departed out of my sight.

From this story -- quoted by Spencer W. Kimball in the once widely read Miracle of Forgiveness -- comes the Mormon folk belief that Bigfoot is Cain. I do not believe that Patten made up the story. If he had, he would have described Cain rather differently, in keeping with the then-current belief that Cain was the ancestor of the Negroes. Although Patten does say that "his skin was very dark," being "covered with hair" is scarcely a feature one associates with that race. (As Joe Biden famously pointed out, black kids find "hairy legs" something of a novelty!)

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Coming back to Nathanael, I have said that one interpretation of his conversation with Jesus in John 1 is that Nathanael's identity as "an Israelite indeed" was a secret, and that Jesus' seemingly supernatural ability to discern Nathanael's ancestry is what convinced Nathanael that Jesus was the Son of God and the King of Israel.

I have discussed a similar case, of Israelite ancestry as a carefully guarded secret, in my 2014 post "Lehi's people." In the Book of Mormon, the patriarch Lehi does not know his own ancestry until he obtains the brass plates from Laban. So important are these brass plates that Lehi's son Nephi eventually resorts to murder to obtain them. Here is the secret they contain:

And it came to pass that my father, Lehi, also found upon the plates of brass a genealogy of his fathers; wherefore he knew that he was a descendant of Joseph; yea, even that Joseph who was the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt, and who was preserved by the hand of the Lord, that he might preserve his father, Jacob, and all his household from perishing with famine.

And they were also led out of captivity and out of the land of Egypt, by that same God who had preserved them.

And thus my father, Lehi, did discover the genealogy of his fathers. And Laban also was a descendant of Joseph, wherefore he and his fathers had kept the records (1 Ne. 5:14-16).

We are not told how closely related Lehi and Laban were, only that they were both descendants of Joseph -- something that Laban knew but Lehi did not. It appears that Laban's family had kept genealogical records not only for their own line of descent from Joseph, but for other branches of the family as well. They knew Lehi's ancestry better than Lehi himself did -- and were willing to go to extreme measures to keep that information out Lehi's hands!

And [Lehi's son Laman] desired of Laban the records which were engraven upon the plates of brass, which contained the genealogy of my father.

And behold, it came to pass that Laban was angry, and thrust him out from his presence; and he would not that he should have the records. Wherefore, he said unto him: Behold thou art a robber, and I will slay thee (1 Ne. 3:12-13).

Just as Laban was willing to kill to keep the secret out of Lehi's hands, so were Lehi's children willing to kill to obtain it. In one of the most shocking scenes in the Book of Mormon, Nephi decapitates the unconscious Laban and steals the plates, believing that God has justified him in so doing.

In my post about Lehi, I point to evidence that both he and Laban were Egyptians, descendants of the half-Egyptian sons of Joseph, and that their ancestors were left behind in the Exodus. Lehi's family apparently later converted to Judaism without realizing that they were Israelites by blood, whereas Laban's family had kept careful records and knew who they were and who their kinsmen were. Lehi's family would have remained ignorant had Lehi not had a dream from the Lord telling him that Laban had a record of their ancestors and that they needed to obtain it.

All this happened about 600 years before Christ, centuries before the forced conversion of the Edomites, and in that way is not directly relevant to Nathanael's situation. Still, the similarities are striking. Nathanael, like Laban, seemed to be privy to secret information about his own Israelite ancestry.

Why would Israelite ancestry need to be kept secret? And why, like Laban, attempt to keep the secret even from fellow Israelites? And does it really matter that much who's an Israelite by blood and who isn't? I don't have answers to those questions, but they're certainly worth thinking about.

The Father and the Son (Notes on John 5:19-30)

The background is that Jesus is in Jerusalem for a feast, perhaps Pentecost. He is speaking to "the Jews," who want to kill him for the two crimes of breaking the sabbath (healing a man on that day and then asking him to carry his bed) and of "making himself equal with God" by calling him his Father.

I have to say at the outset that I consider this whole section (John 5:19-47) to be of dubious authenticity. It does not seem plausible that Jesus would have responded to people who were trying to kill him with this long theological discourse, and by the time the discourse has ended, the author seems to have forgotten the whole setting of Jesus confronting his would-be murderers in Jerusalem. Nothing is said about how they responded, what happened next, how Jesus escaped death, or anything like that. Instead, the narrative jumps directly to "After these things Jesus went over the sea of Galilee, which is the sea of Tiberias" (John 6:1) -- a stage direction which is totally out of place, as the Sea of Galilee is nowhere near Jerusalem. Something is obviously amiss with the text as we have it, so we must proceed with caution.

I find this whole passage confusing and self-contradictory, and any interpretations and conclusions I present here are even more tentative than usual. (I thought seriously about just skipping this whole section but in the end decided I should soldier on.)

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[19] Then answered Jesus and said unto them, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.

When accused of breaking the Sabbath, Jesus said, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work" -- in other words, God doesn't take a break on the seventh day, and so neither does Jesus. Here Jesus continues that thought: He only does what he sees the Father do.

Mormons make much of this verse, drawing from it the conclusion that God the Father once lived as a mortal man (because Jesus did, and he can only do what his Father has done) and even that he was the "savior" of his world, undergoing something analogous to Jesus' execution by the Romans as a sacrifice for sin. (This is not an official CJCLDS doctrine but is widely believed.)

To me this verse suggests almost a Homeric view of the world -- in which human beings can do nothing of themselves, and to explain something like the Trojan war in terms of humans and their motivations is to display a laughable naïveté as to what is really going on. While it would be hard to overstate the depth of my respect for Homer and his vision, I do not think that it is a Christian vision or that it can readily be reconciled with Jesus' larger message.

If Jesus were really just doing things that had already been done by the Father, there would have been no need for him. The necessity of Jesus' mission -- surely a sine qua non of Christianity -- implies that Jesus was doing something that God the Father did not, and could not, do.

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[20] For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth: and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye may marvel. [21] For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.

This seems to be saying that even resurrection -- the centerpiece of Jesus' mission -- was not something new, but yet another instance of his copying something the Father had already done. I don't think this can possibly be right. "For as the Father raiseth up the dead" -- but when did the Father ever resurrect anybody before Jesus? And if he did -- if resurrections were already being carried out before the Resurrection -- then wherein lies the unique importance of Jesus?

The only somewhat coherent reading of this that I can come up with -- assuming that the text is not simply corrupt -- is that for the Father to show the Son what he (the Father) is doing, and for the Son to do that thing, are somehow the same thing. "He [the Father] will shew him [Jesus] greater works than these, that ye [the Jews] may marvel" -- why would the Father showing something to Jesus cause the Jews to marvel, unless that "showing" entailed Jesus' acting in some way that the Jews could observe? This implies that the Father acts through the agency of the Son in such a direct way that, for Jesus, "I healed a man" and "The Father showed me that he was healing a man" are two ways of saying the same thing. "For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me" (John 6:38).

This is metaphysically complex and conflicts somewhat with my current understanding of agency, individuality, and the relationship between God and man. I need to think about it more and decide whether it's something I can understand and agree with.

The referent of "he" is ambiguous in the last sentence, and I think this is also true in the original Greek (where the pronoun doesn't actually appear but is implied by the form of the verb). It could mean that the Son quickens (gives life to) whom the Father will, or whom he himself will. The next verse seems to imply that the latter is the proper reading.

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[22] For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son:

(This line always makes me think of John C. Wright's conversion story, which is worth a read.)

Coming right after "the Son quickeneth whom he will," this seems to be saying that Jesus, not the Father, decides who will be "quickened," or resurrected -- although it could of course also refer to judgment in a broader sense. This seems to conflict with the preceding statement that the Son can only do what he sees the Father do, since the Son judges but the Father does not.

There's also the question of why all judgment has been committed to the Son. There would be no point in the Father's deferring to the Son's judgment unless the Son would judge differently from -- and better than -- the Father. (Of course such a thing would be impossible if we assumed a strictly omniscient Supergod, but we don't.) I would guess that the Son's superior ability to judge men has to do with his direct experience of being a man and understanding the mortal condition from the inside (which in turn implies that the Mormons are wrong to assume that the Father also began his career as a man; this is something that distinguishes the Son from the Father).

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[23] That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.

The Son should be honored even as the Father. A deified man is not a "god with a small g" -- a formulation popular among those suffering from Residual Unresolved Monotheism -- but a God in the fullest sense, the same sort of being as the Father.

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[24] Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. [25] Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.

[26] For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself;

The Father hath life. God is alive -- an organism, not an abstraction -- or at least more like the former than like the latter.

That the Father has life in himself presumably means that, unlike a biological organism, he is able to stay "alive" without requiring anything outside himself. He is an uncaused cause, who exists because he wills himself to exist.

What, then, can it mean to say that the Father has given to the Son to have life in himself? If the Son has truly has life in himself -- owes his life to himself alone -- how can he also owe it to the Father? How can the Father give the Son what he (the Son) has of himself? I don't have an answer to this; I simply raise the question.

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[27] And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man.

Son of man has two possible meanings. Its primary meaning is simply "man" -- the singular form of the familiar biblical expression "children of men." The more restricted sense, referring to a Messiah-like figure, comes from the apocalyptic dream recorded in Daniel 7. In his dream, Daniel sees four successive beasts -- a lion, a bear, a four-headed leopard, and a monster with ten horns -- representing pagan kingdoms. (The beast of Revelation with its seven heads and ten horns, is a combination of these four.) The Ancient of Days appears and destroys these kingdoms, after which Daniel sees "one like the son of man" -- meaning a human being, in contrast to the beasts he had seen before -- descending from heaven. This son of man is given a kingdom which shall never be destroyed. While the text of Daniel itself seems to identify this son of man as a symbol of "the saints of the Most High," later Judaism sometimes saw him as an individual -- either the Messiah, or a separate figure who would come after the Messiah.

So, why has Jesus been given authority to execute judgment? Is it because he is the figure foreseen by Daniel, or simply because he is a man? I lean toward the latter interpretation for two reasons. First, the definite article is not present in the Greek; it literally reads "because he is a son of man." Second, v. 22 emphasizes that judgment belongs to the Son rather than to the Father. We should therefore be looking not at what distinguishes Jesus from other men (e.g. his role as the apocalyptic Son of Man) but at what distinguishes him from the Father (namely, his being a man, a son of Adam).

The implication is, again, that God as such is not fully qualified to judge men, never having walked a mile in our moccasins. Jesus can judge us because, in addition to being divine, he is one of us. (How do you square this with God's omniscience? Well, you can't, and I don't. I don't believe in Supergod.)

Alma 7:12-13 in the Book of Mormon seems relevant here.

[12] And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.

[13] Now the Spirit knoweth all things; nevertheless the Son of God suffereth according to the flesh that he might take upon him the sins of his people, that he might blot out their transgressions according to the power of his deliverance; and now behold, this is the testimony which is in me.

While there is a nod to the traditional doctrine of omniscience, Alma nevertheless insists on the necessity of Son's experiencing human life and death firsthand "that he may know according to the flesh." This is a deeper, truer sort of knowing, above and beyond the abstract sense in which it may be said that "the Spirit knoweth all things."

Even Jesus, though, hasn't lived every human life -- only his own, very specific life -- and so even his "knowing according to the flesh" is not absolute. He has firsthand knowledge of "the human condition" in general, but not of every individual human condition. Your experience is your own, and through it you come to know things that even the Gods themselves don't really know, not "according to the flesh." We are, each of us, genuine unknown quantities, exploring uncharted waters, and "it doth not yet appear what we shall be" (1 John 3:2). Some may find this frightening -- the whole "existential angst" thing -- but it is what makes a meaningful life possible.

From this I must conclude that even Jesus' role as judge is limited. Ultimately, we can only judge ourselves.

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[28] Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, [29] And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

This is the first and only mention of a "resurrection of damnation" (or, as it may also be translated, "of judgment"). It is also the first reference in this Gospel to the idea that dead will be judged according to whether they have "done good" or "done evil" -- rather than, as in vv. 24-25 and elsewhere, according to whether they have heard and believed Jesus.

What is the point if this "resurrection of damnation"? Why raise someone from the dead only to damn him? Why not just leave him as a shade in Hades? A few possibilities come to mind:

1. Even the resurrection of damnation is preferable to Hades. These people are being given the best they are able or willing to receive.
2. The resurrection of damnation is worse than Hades, but God respects the free will of those who choose it anyway.
3. The damnation spoken of is not final, and those who are resurrected to it are resurrected because they are still salvable.
4. The resurrection of damnation is reincarnation.
5. The text is corrupt. There is no resurrection of damnation.

I have no idea which, if any, of these possibilities reflects the real situation. I'm just throwing out ideas.

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[30] I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.

The word because implies that Jesus' judgment would not be just if he sought his own will -- that he himself does not will justice in the same way that the Father does. But at the same time, Jesus' judgment must be more just than the Father's own, or else the Father would not have delegated the task of judgment to him. Each of them must contribute something to the judgment process. In keeping with my speculations above, I would say that the best judgment occurs when the Father's will (which is more impersonally just, because he is not a man) is informed by Jesus' "knowledge according to the flesh" (which is truer and deeper, because he is a man).

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I repeat again that everything I have written here is highly speculative, and that in the last analysis I don't trust this part of the Gospel. Nevertheless, I don't feel that I can dismiss it without doing the hard work of trying to understand what it is saying.

"Hyper-Johannine" vocabulary in the First Epistle of John

One of the things that has come to my attention in the process of my ongoing examination of the Fourth Gospel ("of John") is how much of its distinctive vocabulary is shared by the First Epistle of John, leading me to state in a recent post that the two works are "almost certainly" by the same author. In this post I attempt to quantify that similarity.

I began (somewhat unscientifically, I must admit) by making a list of words that I think of as "typically Johannine" -- that is, as being typical of the Fourth Gospel as opposed to the Synoptics. One of these, comforter, was excluded from consideration because it occurs only in the Fourth Gospel and thus cannot be used to compare that book's style to those of other New Testament books. The remaining 10 words were: begotten, born, eternal, father, know, life, light, love, truth, and world.

Though this list of words was derived from my own impressions rather than by any quantitative process, quantitative measures back up those impressions: each of the 10 words does in fact occur significantly more frequently in the Fourth Gospel than in any of the Synoptics.

The charts below show the occurrence of each of the 10 target strings in each of the four Gospels and in the First Epistle of John. The numbers indicate what percentage of verses in each book contains the target string. Words that include the target string are included in the count; so, for example, instances of knoweth, knowledge, etc. count as instances of the string know. I have used the King James Version for convenience. The numbers would of course be somewhat different in the original Greek, but the overall patterns would presumably be similar.

Two generalizations are immediately apparent:

1. Every one of the target strings occurs much more frequently both in the Fourth Gospel and in the First Epistle of John than in any of the Synoptics.

2. With two exceptions (begotten and father), the frequency of a given string in the First Epistle is not similar to its frequency in the Fourth Gospel but is rather much, much higher. For example, love occurs in about 1% of Synoptic verses, in about 4% of the verses in the Fourth Gospel, and in nearly 25% of the verses in the First Epistle!

There are two possible interpretations of this second fact. One possibility is that the differing frequencies are due to the presence of a great deal of narrative material in the Gospel, whereas the Epistle is more or less entirely theological in character. If this is true, then removing the narrative portions of the Gospel from consideration should yield frequencies more in line with those found in the Epistle.

The other possibility is that the stylistic differences are real, and that they show the Epistle to be written in an exaggerated caricature of the Johannine style. This would imply that the Epistle was not written by the author of the Gospel but rather by someone making a conscious effort to imitate his style.

Jesus in Samaria (Notes on John 4:27-42)

Continuing on from the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman:

[27] And upon this came his disciples, and marvelled that he talked with the woman: yet no man said, What seekest thou? or, Why talkest thou with her?

Since none of the disciples witnessed Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, the account in the Gospel must be based on information from either Jesus or the woman, or else on hearsay. Since the disciples were astonished to see Jesus conversing with a Samaritan, we can assume that they themselves would never do such a thing, and that the Gospel account is therefore not based on a direct interview with the woman. We are also told here that the disciples didn't ask Jesus any questions about his conversation with the woman. It's possible that Jesus later told them the whole story, but it seems more likely that the account we have is hearsay, based on rumors circulating in Samaria about how he "told her everything that ever she did." Some of the more sensational details, then, such as the five husbands, may be nothing more than rumor, but I would assume that the author of the Gospel, who knew Jesus and his ideas well, would have captured the latter fairly accurately in his record. Whether or not the actual conversation was much like the Gospel account, I think we can be fairly confident that the statements about living water, Mt. Gerizim and Jerusalem, etc. represent actual teachings of Jesus.

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[28] The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, [29] Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ? 

[30] Then they went out of the city, and came unto him.

Remember that the Samaritans acknowledged no prophets other than Moses and the Messiah (Taheb), and many held that even the Messiah would not be a second prophet but would be the second coming of Moses himself. From the Samaritan point of view, if Jesus was a prophet -- as his paranormal knowledge of the woman's life would suggest -- he could only be the prophet, the Messiah himself.

I have discussed elsewhere the Samaritan expectation that the Messiah would "tell us all things" -- which apparently derives from an alternative reading of Deuteronomy 18:18.

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[31] In the mean while his disciples prayed him, saying, Master, eat.

[32] But he said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of.

[33] Therefore said the disciples one to another, Hath any man brought him ought to eat?

[34] Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.

"Meat" here just means food, with no connotation of animal flesh.

Was Jesus really like this in conversation? It seems like it would have been rather maddening! I guess the justification for this mode of discourse -- deliberately confusing his interlocutors, letting them talk among themselves for a minute trying to figure out what he mean, and then explaining -- is that it would have engaged the disciples' attention more fully and made the final epigram more memorable.

The characterization of the Father as "he that sent me" is distinctively Johannine. The string "sent me" occurs 34 times in the Fourth Gospel and only 7 times in the other three Gospels combined.

Finishing God's work sounds like a once-and-for-all thing -- but Jesus calls it his food. Eating food is not the grand culmination of one's life's work; it is something we have to do again and again, day after day, for as long as we live. It is interesting to juxtapose this saying with the prayer, attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics, "Give us this day our daily bread"; also with the line from Deuteronomy supposedly quoted by Jesus when tempted by Satan, "man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live."

Elsewhere in the Gospel it is suggested that God's work can be "finished" more than once. Shortly before his execution (apparently at the "Last Supper") Jesus says "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do" (John 17:4), even though few would be willing to say Jesus had already finished his work before his death. Later, on the cross, his last words are "It is finished" (19:30), but I think it's safe to say his work wasn't really finished until the resurrection -- or, for those who expect a Second Coming, not until then. Come to think of it, if we believe Moses, God's work had already been pronounced "finished" long before the time of Jesus: "the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work" (Genesis 2:1-2). The belief that, pace Moses, God's work wasn't really finished until the resurrection is probably what underlies the longstanding Christian custom of keeping Sabbath on Sunday rather than on the seventh day.

Is the work of God ever really finished? The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi criticizes those who would say, "behold there is no God today, for the Lord and the Redeemer hath done his work" (2 Nephi 28:5). "There is no God today" is rather a striking way of putting it -- Joseph Smith anticipated Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead" by some 50 years -- but isn't a God who is done, who is never going to do anything ever again, world without end, the functional equivalent of one who no longer exists?

If the work of God can ever be completely finished, what then? An eternity of nothing to do, of hanging around, of resting on laurels? But on the other hand, supposing the work of God can't ever be finished, doesn't that reduce everything to a sort of Sisyphean futility? The only solution that works for me comes from combining the Book of Mormon with Spinoza: "Men are that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:25), and "Joy is man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection" (Ethics, 3, defs. 2 & 3). There is no endpoint of absolute perfection such as the Classical Theist imagines God to enjoy, but the lack of a finish line does not make the race an exercise in futility, since the joy in the passage to a greater perfection, not in the static enjoyment of absolute perfection. Another way of expressing the same point is to say that God's definitive role is not "Supreme Being" but rather Creator -- characterized not by static perfection but by continuous making-things-better. "The knowledge and power of God are expanding," says a Mormon hymn to which many a Christian might object. But of course they are; otherwise, how could he have joy?

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[35] Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. [36] And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. [37] And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. [38] I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.

The harvest of wheat and barley (the crops being alluded to by "the fields are white") was typically in April or May, so this episode apparently took place four months earlier, in December or January.

This was a favorite passage of Joseph Smith's, alluded to again and again in the Doctrine & Covenants, apparently with reference to the work of proclaiming the gospel and "harvesting" converts. It's hard to be sure whether or not that was also the meaning originally intended by Jesus.

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[39] And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did. [40] So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days.

[41] And many more believed because of his own word; [42] And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.

This is one of only two places in the Bible where the title "Saviour of the world" is used; the other is in the anonymous First Epistle of John (4:14) -- called "of John" because it is almost certainly by the author of the Fourth Gospel, for whom the name John has become conventional. It seems highly likely that the author is here putting his own ideas in the mouths of the Samaritans. Neither the Jews nor the Samaritans were anticipating a savior of the world; the Taheb and the Messiah were only expected to save Israel.

Notes on John 3:13-21

This passage consists of the author's commentary following the story of Nicodemus. (I have given here and here my reasons for holding the somewhat unconventional opinion that the conversation with Nicodemus ends with v. 12.)

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[13] And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.

I believe this is the only direct reference in this Gospel to Jesus' ascension to heaven after his resurrection. The author asserts that, to date, only Jesus had thus ascended, despite such obvious counterexamples as Enoch, who "walked with God: and he was not; for God took him" (Genesis 5:24); and Elijah, who "went up in a whirlwind into heaven . . . and [was seen] no more" (2 Kings 2:11-12). One is reminded of the same author's insistence elsewhere that, despite what is written of Moses and others, "no man hath seen God at any time" (John 1:18).

If the exclusion of Elijah from the ranks of those who have ascended to heaven is puzzling, equally puzzling is the assertion that no one since Jesus has ascended to heaven, either. The Gospel was apparently written several decades after the resurrection, in which time we might expect that at least a few of the faithful followers of Jesus would have died and, as beneficiaries of the gift Jesus brought, ascended to heaven. Whatever happened to "where I am, there ye may be also" (John 14:3)?

There is, in short, no hint of salvation in this verse. The only man who ever made it to heaven was Jesus -- and that was because he had originally come from heaven in the first place. No one, at the time the Gospel was written, had ever actually graduated, as it were, from the earthly to the heavenly life.

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Before any of these problems can be meaningfully addressed, we must establish what is meant by "heaven." The original Greek is unhelpfully vague -- οὐρανός covers the same semantic ground as English heaven and sky put together, and can mean anything from the atmosphere to the sidereal realm to the home of God an the angels.

The Fourth Gospel gives no details of Jesus' ascent into heaven, but the other Gospels make it clear that it involved physically leaving earth -- and I emphasize physically because Jesus was in a resurrected, flesh-and-bone, fish-and-honeycomb-eating body at the time of his ascent. I have elsewhere argued in all seriousness that this means Jesus went to outer space, presumably to an earthlike exoplanet. Wherever he went, it must be a physical place, to refer to which it will be convenient to adopt the Mormon name Kolob, and which may be thought of as the Christian analogue of Asgard or Olympus, the physical home of the Gods. To Christians who balk at such an unorthodox idea, I simply reiterate the fact that Jesus ascended to "heaven" in a body of flesh and bone.

If we think of Jesus as having ascended specifically to Kolob, it becomes obvious that there is no reason to assume people like Enoch and Elijah went there as well. "The sky" covers an awful lot of ground -- literally everywhere except the surface and interior of this planet -- and we should no more assume that two people who "ascended into heaven" went to the same place than we would assume the same of two people who "went overseas."

(In fact, let's take that "overseas" analogy and run with it. In the Narnia stories, the character equivalent to God is known as the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Supposing one of the characters were to say, "No one knows what the Emperor looks like, because no one has ever been over the sea, except Aslan himself" -- it would be missing the point to object, "No one's been over the sea! What about the voyage of the Dawn Treader?" In context, "over the sea" clearly has a more specific meaning than the words themselves would suggest.)

Where did Enoch and Elijah go? Who knows? Elijah was carried away in a cyclone like Dorothy Gale and could have ended up anywhere, including somewhere else on Earth, for all we know. As for Enoch, who "was not, for God took him," it almost sounds as if he achieved Nirvana and was absorbed into God, losing his individual identity.

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As for the implication that no one since Jesus had ever ascended to heaven, either, there are many possible ways to interpret this. Perhaps the meaning is simply that no one else has been to heaven and returned to tell the tale, so that Jesus is still our only reliable source of information about that place. People who passed Dante on the street used to whisper to each other, "Look, there's the man who's been to hell!" Of course it is no special distinction to have gone to hell -- but to have been there, implying a return, is another story entirely.

Or perhaps what is meant is that no one but Jesus has ever ascended to heaven on his own steam, though many (perhaps including Enoch and Elijah) have been taken there.

Or perhaps it means just what it says: That at the time the Gospel was written, not one single soul had yet successfully followed Jesus. "Narrow is the way," after all, "and few there be that find it." This is a radical interpretation with uncomfortable implications, though, since many people universally considered to be saints had already died by that time -- John the Baptist, for example, and James the son of Zebedee. Simon Peter, too, had at least died by the time the Gospel's epilogue (Chapter 21) was added, though it's possible that he was still alive when the Gospel itself was written. In the end, I don't think this interpretation is acceptable, because it undercuts what is supposed to be a message of hope. If even John the Baptist has not made it to heaven, what chance do we have?

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The reference to "he that came down from heaven" invites the question later raised by "the Jews" in John 6:42: "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven?" Well, how is it that both he and the Gospel writer say that? Remember that there is nothing in the Fourth Gospel to suggest that there was anything unusual about Jesus' birth or that he was anything other than the biological son of Joseph. (Matthew provides one miracle-filled nativity story; and Luke, another, entirely different, one -- but I assume, from the near-complete lack of overlap between the two nativity stories, and from the absence of any such material in Mark and John, that these stories are pious fictions. It also seems unlikely that Jesus would have embraced the title "Son of Man" if he were in fact the only man since Adam not to be the son of a man!)

Of course, even if Jesus' physical body was a product of ordinary mammalian reproduction, his spirit still came down from the "heaven" where it had been before he was born -- but the same is true of all men; all of us come trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home. (Such an explanation would be acceptable only to a creationist -- meaning, in this case, not an evolution skeptic but someone who believes that a new human soul is created from nothing each time a baby is conceived, Jesus being the one exception.)

Looking for some unique sense in which Jesus "came down from heaven," I can find only the report of John the Baptist: "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. . . . And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God" (John 1:32, 34). The Spirit of God had descended from heaven and remained upon Jesus. That is the aspect of him which came down from heaven. It was at his baptism, not his birth, that he became the Son of God. (So we infer from the other Gospels, at any rate; the Fourth Gospel never says directly that it was on the occasion of Jesus' baptism that the dove descended.)

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[14] And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: [15] That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

I would assume that most Bible readers, thinking (incorrectly) these are the words of Jesus spoken to Nicodemus, would see this as referring to the crucifixion -- in which Jesus, like the brazen serpent of Numbers, was fixed to a pole and lifted up. Jesus is saying that he must be crucified in order to save those who believe in him.

While I'm sure the author did intend to allude to the cross when he chose this particular simile, the "lifting up" of the Son of Man cannot refer primarily to the crucifixion -- or the resurrection, or the ascension -- since the author is writing in his own voice after all of these things have already taken place and yet describes the lifting up of the Son of Man as something that remains to be done.

I would guess that it probably means spreading the word about Jesus, lifting him up as a prophet lifts up his prophetic "burden," raising the cross -- as a religious symbol, not an instrument of torture -- as an ensign to the nations.

In the Moses story alluded to (Numbers 21:6-9), the Israelites were attacked by venomous snakes called seraphim (singular saraph, the same word used by Isaiah with reference to certain heavenly beings; see here for details) -- supposedly sent by the Lord as a punishment for complaining about their hardships in the desert. After many had died of snakebite, those who remained were duly penitent and asked Moses to pray on their behalf that the seraphim be taken away. Instead of taking the snakes away, the Lord instructed Moses to make a saraph of brass (or bronze, or copper; Hebrew makes no distinction) and display it on a pole. Snakebite victims who looked at this brazen serpent would live.

To the story as recorded in the Torah, the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi adds that many refused to look and be healed "because of the simpleness of the way, or the easiness of it" (1 Nephi 17:41). A later Nephite prophet, Alma, repeats the same tradition: "But there were many who were so hardened that they would not look, therefore they perished. Now the reason they would not look is because they did not believe that it would heal them" (Alma 33:20). He draws from the story the moral, "do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way" (Alma 37:46). One is reminded of the story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5 ("If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it?"). Of course it is difficult to know whether this angle on the story represents an invention of Joseph Smith's, a midrash particular to the Nephite culture, or an authentic Old World tradition of which the author of the Gospel would have been aware.

Regardless of the provenance of the Nephite version of the story, "the easiness of the way" is certainly a prominent feature even of the biblical version, and may be part of the reason the simile was chosen. In both cases, what the victim has to do to be saved is minimal: just look, just believe.

Just as the lamb to which Jesus is compared in John 1 is not a sin-offering to secure forgiveness but rather a Paschal offering to avert death (details here), it is likewise from death that the brazen serpent saved people. The Son of Man is presented as offering the same thing: not absolution, but eternal life. Jesus is first and foremost the bringer of resurrection.

If the reference is indeed to resurrection, though, the "not perish" bit needs some explanation. (While it's true that most Greek manuscripts don't actually include "not perish but" in v. 15, that doesn't really make any difference, since the phrase is incontestably there in v. 16.) Resurrection, after all, does not mean not dying, but rather returning to life after dying. Die and perish are basically synonyms in English, but apparently the Greek word which appears in these verses (and which is distinct from the usual word for "die") denotes absolute and permanent destruction. Someone who may yet rise from the grave, then, has died but cannot be said to have perished.

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[16] For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

The most famous verse in the Bible -- and as such, perhaps, so familiar that the strangeness of what it asserts often goes unnoticed. One would naturally expect that the gift of eternal life would either (a) be given freely to everyone who wants it or (b) be given only to those deemed worthy of it, to "good people." Instead, we are told that those who believe in the Son will have everlasting life, while (by implication) those who do not believe in him will perish. I have commented before on the Fourth Gospel's puzzling insistence on belief as such -- for example, "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent" (John 6:29).

Of course every teacher wants to be believed, but this generally means assenting to some particular doctrine. The Buddha, for example, wanted people to accept the validity of the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path -- specific propositions to assent to, a specific way of life to adopt. Prior to becoming enlightened themselves, people would have to accept these teachings on authority, because they trusted the Buddha as a person -- but that personal trust had only instrumental value; the real point was never the Buddha himself but rather the impersonal dharma which he taught.

In Jesus, these priorities seem to be reversed. The main thing Jesus taught was that people must believe in Jesus; whatever other moral or factual doctrines he may have touched on were strictly by-the-by. The "requisite" belief, then, is clearly personal trust rather than assent to any particular set of propositions. Creeds are -- or should be, anyway -- foreign to the community of Jesus' followers. This distinction is, I believe, reinforced by the frequent reference in the Fourth Gospel to believing on Jesus' name -- meaning Jesus as a person, as opposed to any doctrine of "Jesuism" he may be thought to have propounded.

In approaching the question of why this personal trust should be accorded such importance, I have found Bruce Charlton's post "The Good Shepherd" to be invaluable. It should be read in full, but I quote the essential parts below.

The Good Shepherd leads his sheep through death to Heaven. [. . .] What is led? The soul, after death. But why does it need to be led - why can't it find its own way to salvation? Because after death the soul becomes 'helpless', lacks agency - like a young child, a ghost, a sheep.

If unable to help itself, how then can the soul follow Jesus? Because - like a young child, or sheep - the dead soul still can recognise and love; and 'follow'.

Where does this happen? In the 'underworld'. Without Jesus, the disembodied, ghostly, demented dead souls wander like lost sheep - as described in pre-Christian accounts such as Hades of the Greeks, or Sheol of the Ancient Hebrews. 

But how does Jesus save the dead souls? Everybody has known Jesus as spirits in the premortal world, so everybody can recognise him in the underworld; but only those who love Jesus will want to follow him.

I find this interpretation compelling. A spirit which has integrated itself with a physical body (and in particular, with a brain) and is then ripped away from that body at death, is left maimed and demented. Both pre-Christian tradition and modern experience with "ghosts" confirm that shades in the underworld are severely cognitively impaired. The good news is that this damage may be undone in the resurrection, but first each shade, while still disembodied and demented, must hear and follow the Shepherd. Intellect, while of the utmost value in itself ("the glory of God is intelligence, or in other words, light and truth"), will not save us, simply because we won't have much of it at the moment when salvation is needed. Hence the emphasis on childlike faith -- not because God wants us to be (merely) childlike, but because we will in fact be reduced to a childlike state in Hades and yet still must have the wherewithal to follow Jesus to salvation. Simple love and simple trust, such as a child or a sheep is capable of, becomes all-important.

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[17] For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

While it can mean "condemn" in the right context, the basic meaning of the Greek verb here is "judge" -- or, most properly, to separate or make distinctions. This reinforces v. 16's statement that Jesus is willing to save "whosoever believeth in him," without making any attempt to separate humanity into those who are worthy of salvation and those who are not. He will conduct anyone out of the prison-house of Hades -- but of course, to get out you have to trust him enough to follow him when he opens the gate and says, "Come on, let's go."

Elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus does refer to himself as playing the role of a judge, and those passages will be dealt with in due course, but at least as far as the resurrection is concerned, Jesus offers salvation to all without judgment.

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[18] He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

At first this reads like a contradiction of the preceding verse: Jesus didn't come to judge or condemn the world -- but people who don't believe in him are condemned! I think the key here is the phrase "condemned already." Jesus offers salvation from death freely, without judging or condemning -- but of course if you don't trust him enough to follow him, there's not much he can do; a judgment has already been made. (I should emphasize again that "follow him" here does not mean to be his disciple or to live by his teachings, but rather something closer to the literal meaning of those words.)

So, really, no one is being judged and condemned as unworthy to receive resurrection -- but still, not everyone will be resurrected, and it strikes us as "unfair" that this should be for anything other than moral reasons. Therefore, the evangelist goes on to make the case that failure to trust and follow Jesus is indicative of moral failings.

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[19] And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. [20] For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. [21] But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.

Truth as something one can do is a peculiarly Johannine turn of phrase, appearing also in the First Epistle: "If we say that we have fellowship with [God], and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth" (1 John 1:6). The context is similar, too: Those who "do the truth" are drawn to the light; those who do not, prefer to walk in darkness. What is feared, I think, is not so much public exposure before others as simply being seen as one is -- by God and, worse, by oneself. Jesus brought clarity and consciousness, and is thus feared and hated by those who are in denial about themselves, who would not care to have too bright a light shined on them for fear of what they might discover. "I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself."

This is clearly meant as an explanation of why some have "not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God" -- but notice the absence of any language relating to belief in the sense of having opinions or assenting to propositions. Instead, it is made a question of love and hate, attraction and aversion. This confirms what I have said above, that "believing on his name" has nothing to do with creeds and everything to do with personal trust, love, and willingness to follow.

Notes on John 1

Geschrieben steht: »Im Anfang war das Wort!«
Hier stock' ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort?

— Goethe's Faust

"In the beginning was the Word," I read.
Already stymied! How can I proceed?

— my translation

I've always found the Fourth Gospel to be the least accessible of the four — feeling, with Faust, my understanding blocked from the very first sentence. However, as the only one of the Gospels which even claims to be an eyewitness account, it is obviously the most important text in the Bible and must be confronted sooner or later. Recently I have been going through it very slowly, transcribing it by hand in a notebook and brooding as I go. So far I have to admit that, to coin a phrase, "the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Nevertheless I am publishing here my notes, such as they are, in the hope that my thoughts will be clarified by the writing process, as they so often are, and that the post might attract helpful comments from those whose understanding is deeper than my own.

For convenience, I shall refer to the Fourth Gospel and its author by the conventional name "John," though I do not think it there are any very good reasons for identifying its anonymous author (known only as "the disciple whom Jesus loved") with the apostle called John in the Synoptics or with the author of the Apocalypse.

The text of John 1 is in purple; everything else is my notes.

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The Prologue

The authority of the Fourth Gospel lies in the fact (or claim, anyway) that the author's reports of the sayings and doings of Jesus Christ are those of an eyewitness — and of a particularly valuable eyewitness: one who was present when most of the other disciples were not (at the crucifixion, for instance) and who, as one of those who was closest to Jesus ("whom Jesus loved"), would be more likely than others to have understood Jesus and reported his teachings with a minimum of distortion.

The prologue to John, constituting the first 18 verses, is theology presented in the author's own voice rather than a report of the teachings of Christ. The author's credentials as an eyewitness are thus not directly relevant to this passage, which should therefore be considered somewhat less authoritative than the rest of the Gospel. It represents the author's own understanding of who Jesus was and what he was about — and, as I have said, the author likely understood Jesus as well as anybody.

[1] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [2] The same was in the beginning with God. [3] All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

This seems needlessly repetitive. The second verse adds nothing to the first, and the second clause of v. 3 simply rephrases the first clause. I suppose that what we are reading here is poetry, and specifically poetry in the classical Hebrew style (though of course it is written in Greek). The poetic technique of parallelism, where each line is followed by a slight rewording of the same underlying thought, will be familiar to readers of Isaiah and some of the other Hebrew prophets. This suggests to me that the author (no matter how "Greek" he sometimes seems!) was likely an educated, Bible-reading Jew. This is consistent with the Gospel's internal claim that its author was one of Jesus' original disciples (i.e., a Jew) and that he "was known unto the high priest" (John 18:16) and thus presumably of the upper class and perhaps a priest himself. It is not terribly consistent with the traditional identification of the author as an illiterate Galilean fisherman.

There is an obvious allusion to the opening of Genesis here — again, implying that the author knew the Hebrew Bible well.

[1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. [2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. [3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. [4] And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1:1-4).

The parallels are even clearer if the original Greek is compared with the Greek (Septuagint) version of Genesis. "In the beginning" is the same (ἐν ἀρχῇ) in both passages, and "all things were made by him" (πάντα δι' αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο) uses the same Greek verb as "there was light" (ἐγένετο φῶς) — literally, "all things came into being through it/him [the word]" and "light came into being."

The key word λόγος ("word") does not occur in the Genesis passage, but the idea that all things came into being through God's word is clearly there. Light comes into being because God says, "Let there be light," and the same is true of the other things he creates. This Mosaic idea of creating-by-speaking is perhaps so familiar that we take it for granted, but it's actually fairly unique. In most creation myths, the gods create either by pro-creating (as in Hesiod) or by physically doing things. It can be instructive to compare Genesis 1 with its most important predecessor, the Babylonian Enûma Eliš, in this regard. For example, in the latter text, Marduk physically slices the sea (Tiamat) in two "like a dried fish"  and stretches half out as the heavens — whereas the corresponding point in Moses' version of the story has God simply say, "Let there be a firmament, and let it divide the waters from the waters," and it is so.

What did Moses (and John) mean by having God create through his word? One possible interpretation — presupposing an animistic universe in which even the elements are possessed of some measure of intelligence and free will — is that God is literally commanding the heretofore chaotically arranged particles to assume particular ordered configurations and that they — out of love, or respect for his authority, or the simple tendency of weaker wills to bend to a stronger — obey him. Jesus' power over nature is described in similar terms in the Synoptic Gospels: "he commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey him" (Luke 8:25). This reading presupposes that creation was preceded by chaos rather than by absolute nothingness and thus runs afoul of what is called "classical" (i.e., Hellenized) theology, but I do not consider that to be any great point against it.

It is also possible to interpret God's "saying" as thinking rather than commanding. The same Hebrew verb (אָמַר) is used in both "God said, Let there be light" and "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God," showing that biblical "saying" can refer to internal thought as well as to communication. (The Greek λόγος can of course also refer to thought as well as to its verbal expression.) God thinks the world into being, because thinking in its purest form just is creative.

I find the latter interpretation more likely, at least as far as John is concerned, because of the assertion that "the Word was God." That God's thoughts constitute God himself, that God just is his thoughts — surely that is more intelligible than identifying God's commands to the elements with God himself.

This leads us into the difficult but essential concept of Primary Thinking, as formulated by Bruce Charlton. (Part of my correspondence with Bruce on this topic can be read online here.) I shall take the liberty of quoting myself rather extensively.

If primary thinking is certainly true (not just hypothesis), and if it is free, then it seems to follow that it is literally creative. If it is free, it need not conform itself to the world; but if it is true, then there is nevertheless a correspondence between what is thought and what actually exists. There can be no necessary correspondence without some sort of causal relationship, and if primary thinking is not caused by external facts, then the inescapable conclusion (if, given what I have just said about the freedom of thought, I may be permitted the phrase) is that the causation runs the other way: external facts conform themselves to thoughts. Primary thinking creates the world.

My first thought was to call that a reductio ad absurdum and reject the whole "primary thinking" model, but on second thought I think it has to be accepted. After all, theism requires some such concept in order to make sense of God's role as creator. We can hardly imagine that God created the world by physically moving matter around with some kind of construction equipment; rather, he created everything by his "word" or logos. And what is possible for God is possible in a general sense — and, if we are his children, possible for us.

[In Mormon doctrine, it is said] that Adam helped create the earth, but that when he entered mortality he forgot that fact. And when Adam fell, the earth fell with him. Did God deliberately wreck his own creation as a way of punishing Adam — or was the world in some way directly dependent on Adam's thoughts, Adam's state of mind? The knowledge of evil came first, and the existence of evil followed. And of course Adam, the prototypical man whose name simply means "Man," represents all of us.

(Is "faith" primary thinking? It, too, is supposed to be both free and true. In the New Testament, faith can make you whole, enable you to walk on water, and cast mountains into the sea — in other words, the external world changes to conform itself to true faith.)

One problem with this idea is that it threatens to destroy the re-ality ("thingishness") of the world by making it wholly dependent on thought — a hallucination, essentially. Without something that exists independently of our own thoughts there is, it seems, no world. Another problem is the question of how the thoughts of potentially billions of different primary-thinkers interact to create the one world we presumably share — and what it is about God's thoughts that make them uniquely powerful, making him "the" creator. But I suppose the second problem offers a solution to the first. The reality of the world comes from its being the production of many minds, and not of mine alone.

[. . . ]

I lean toward thinking of the world of raw, meaningless phenomena as being an effect, rather than a precondition, of primary thinking. The "raw" world may be meaningless in the same sense that a hundred different voices speaking simultaneously produce a meaningless cacophony. The unintended interaction of various meaningful primary thoughts may yield a meaningless hodgepodge. Forging this into a harmony (not a unison!) is the work of creation.

If, as I assume above, creative Primary Thinking is something all thinking beings are potentially capable of, and if beings other than God therefore participated in the creation of the world, that suggests a possible interpretation of "the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (The word translated as "with" here is πρὸς, which most literally means "toward.") The creative Word is the combined Primary Thinking of God himself and of all those who think in harmony with him.

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[4] In him was life; and the life was the light of men. [5] And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Moses' creation story opens with darkness, and with God's word creating light; and the newly created light is separated from the darkness, which continues to exist. Likewise, John has the Word produce a light which shines in the darkness without eliminating it or being comprehended (or, as it may also be translated, overpowered, absorbed, or appropriated) by it.

Light as the first creation is an intriguing concept. Light is, literally and metaphorically, what allows us to see (perceive, know) everything else. It illuminates the world and makes it knowable. But when God says, "Let there be light," there is nothing to illuminate, nothing to see, nothing to know. What light can be shed, in any meaningful sense, on pure chaos, on the primordial tohu wa-bohu? When you turn on the light in a completely featureless space, what do you see? How is it any different for being illuminated? Moses tells us what God saw: simply the light itself. "And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness." Even after light had been created, it took a separate divine act to divide it from darkness, the difference between the two not being immediately obvious in the absence of anything to illuminate.

Joseph Smith in his Book of Abraham has an interesting variant on Moses' text: "And they (the Gods) comprehended the light, for it was bright; and they divided the light, or caused it to be divided, from the darkness" — interesting here because its use of the verb comprehend constitutes an implicit reference to John as well as to Genesis. The darkness does not comprehend the light, but the Gods do. ("The Gods" = the Word that was with God, and was God.)

As mentioned in the discussion of Primary Thinking above, in the story of the Fall, Adam comes to know evil while he is still in paradise — that is, before there is any evil for him to know. In much the same way, God creates light by which to see the world before there is any world to see. This is because, at the deepest level, thought gives rise to the world rather than the other way round. To shine a light on chaos — to think about it — is to begin the process of transforming it into a cosmos.

When Descartes wrote "I think, therefore I am," he meant "therefore" in the epistemic sense: the premise "I think" entails the conclusion "I am." In the Primary Thinking model, though, it is true in the causative sense: I think, and as a result I exist. We each think ourselves into being and collectively think the cosmos into being. Thinking which is both free and true (i.e., Primary Thinking) is by its nature an uncaused cause. As Joseph Smith put it, "Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence" (D&C 93:29-30).

What does the first thinker think of, before any objects for thought exist? On what is the light of the first day shed? On itself, and on the implied possibility of that which is not-itself. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). "And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness" (Genesis 1:4).

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John identifies the light with life: "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." The same connection is made again later in the same Gospel: "I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life" (John 8:12).

What does it mean to say that the life of God's Word is the light of men? If life is left out of the equation, "God's word is the light of men" is clear enough: Men are enlightened by communications from God, by revelation. But John emphasizes what it is about the Word that allows it to serve as a light to men: "In [the Word] was life, and the life was the light of men." It is those who "have the light of life" that "shall not walk in darkness."

The implication is that those who walk in darkness are lacking in life. Not that they are dead exactly (else how could they walk at all?), but that they are sleepwalking — that they are robots, zombies, on autopilot. Light and life represent consciousness, will, action. Walking in darkness represents habit, automatism, mere happening. Christ, as the supreme example of conscious will, is able to awaken the same in others — to serve as "the light of men."

But not of all men — of very few, in fact. For the most part, the light shines on the uncomprehending darkness of blind habit. To spiritual sleepwalkers (typified by the Pharisees and Sadducees), trapped in their Plato's-cave of laws and traditions and what-is-done, Christ is simply incomprehensible. He can be seen only as a disruptive force — as annoying as bright lights generally are to sleepers — that must be neutralized.

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Serendipity saw to it that just after writing the above notes I read two quite different works: the Shakespeare play Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Frank Herbert's novel The Godmakers.

In Pericles, Thaisa describes the arms of the various knights who are competing in a tournament for her hand in marriage. The first is a knight from Sparta,

And the device he bears upon his shield
Is a black Ethiop reaching at the sun;
The word: Lux tua vita mihi (2.2.19-21).

The Latin motto, meaning "Thy light is my life" (presumably spoken by the Ethiopian to the sun) is the reverse of John's "In him was life, and the life was the light of men" — and reminds us that the Johannine version (which would have men saying to the divine Word, "Vita tua lux nobis") is a somewhat counterintuitive reversal of the more natural metaphor. God's Word, like the light of the sun, gives us life; "by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live" (Deuteronomy 8:3). John's is not this natural metaphor of a life-giving light, but rather that of a light-giving life.

In Herbert's novel I read the following.

Life, as we understand it, represents a bridge between Order and Chaos. We define Chaos as raw energy, untamed, available to anything that can subdue it and bring it into some form of Order. In this sense, Life becomes stored Chaos. [. . .] To restate the situation, Life feeds on Chaos, but must exist within Order. Chaos represents a background against which Life knows itself (p. 138-139).

This fits very nicely with the role of the Word, characterized by life, in the creation of the cosmos from chaos — and with the continued existence of darkness/chaos even after creation.

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[6] There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. [7] The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.

John's role is "to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe." The implication is that John's endorsement would lead people to believe in Christ who might not otherwise have believed.  The Synoptics tell us that "all men" (excepting the chief priests, scribes, and elders) regarded John as a prophet, so when John said something people would have sat up and taken notice. Still, it's a little unclear why this should have been necessary.  John clearly came from outside the established religious hierarchy, and indeed was rejected by that hierarchy, so whatever authority he had in the eyes of the people would have been charismatic in nature. But precisely the same was true of Jesus himself. It scarcely seems that those who would have rejected Christ himself without John's endorsement would have been inclined to believe in John in the first place. In fact, Christ's self-validating charismatic authority must surely have been stronger than John's. The whole idea that someone needs to "bear witness" to a light "that lighteneth every man" is a strange one. If the sun is shining, you scarcely need someone to point it out to you; if you can't see the sun itself, what can you see?

Perhaps John's witness was important and effective because his message was less revolutionary than Jesus', representing less of a break with Judaism as his contemporaries knew it. This is speculation, since the Fourth Gospel gives little indication of the content of John's preaching (apart from his endorsement of Jesus), but it is generally held that he was more-or-less a prophet in the Old Testament mold. He was apparently unorthodox enough to be unacceptable to the chief priests and elders, yet still conventional enough to be universally accepted by the people as a whole. Fewer people would have been able to hear and accept Jesus without accepting John as an intermediary step.

This passage also introduces what will become a persistent theme in this gospel: the idea that what Christ wants above all is for people to believe in him — an idea which has since been rendered familiar by Christianity but is nevertheless rather strange. Naturally, anyone with a message to deliver wants people to believe that message, so that they may act accordingly, but in the Fourth Gospel belief itself often seems to be the whole point. "What shall we do," Jesus is later asked, "that we may work the works of God?" His answer: "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent" (John 6:28-29).

Forms of the word believe occur (in the King James Version) 11 times in Matthew, 17 times in Mark, and 11 times in Luke — but 102 times in John. No other book in the Bible reaches even half that figure. In fact, the Fourth Gospel accounts for nearly one-third of all occurrences of believe in the entire Bible.

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[8] He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

The author apparently thinks his readers might have thought that John the Baptist was himself the Light of God's Word, suggesting that he is writing for disciples of John. (However, elsewhere in the Gospel he seems to assume that his readers have little familiarity with Judaism, since he feels the need to supply glosses for such basic terms as rabbi and Messiah.)

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[9] That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

There's some syntactic ambiguity here in the Greek. In the King James reading, the relative clause "that cometh into the world" clearly modifies "man," but the majority of modern translations (qv) read it as modifying "Light." A typical example is the New Revised Standard Version: "The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world." However, several versions do follow the KJV interpretation, or at least mention it in footnotes, so I gather that both are defensible readings of the Greek.

The difference makes a difference. In the KJV reading, every man that comes into the world — including, implicitly, those who lived and died before the coming of Christ — is enlightened by the true Light. (This reading has been codified in Mormon doctrine, where the "light of Christ" essentially refers to each person's conscience or intuition, considered as a universal gift originating in Christ.) In the NRSV reading, something new is coming into the world, presumably to enlighten those who had not theretofore been so enlightened. All in all, I lean toward the latter reading.

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[10] He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. [11] He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

I'm not sure whether to read "his own" broadly or narrowly here. The immediate context suggests that "coming unto his own" means coming into the world he himself had created, among human beings, God's children, his spiritual conspecifics. The narrower, and more traditional, reading is that he came specifically to the Jews — who, this reading implies, were "his own" people in a special sense even prior to his incarnation as one of them.

My uncertainty as to how to read John here reflects an underlying uncertainty regarding the purported uniqueness of the Hebrews. Did Christ choose to incarnate among them because they, alone among all the peoples of the earth, had the one true religion and worshiped the one true God? Certainly he was seen by his followers as being the Jewish Messiah, the successor to Moses and the prophets, and the son of Judaism's one true God. On the other hand, there seems to be little in Christ's message that was specifically Jewish. He deemphasized — and often deliberately broke — the Law of Moses which is at the heart of that religion, and his claim to be God's fully divine Son is hardly consistent with Mosaic monotheism. Nor, except in a vague metaphorical sense, did he do what the Messiah was expected to do. Paul would later say that the Law of Moses "was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ" — but as Christianity spread among the gentiles, and indeed became much more successful among them than it ever had been among the Jews, it became clear that other schoolmasters, most notably Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, could do that job just as well.

While we should obviously assume that Christ chose the most suitable time, place, and religious milieu in which to incarnate, I tend toward the view that Judaism, while quantitatively the most suitable foundation on which to build Christianity, was not absolutely superior to other schools of religion and philosophy — was not the "one true religion" until Christ retroactively made it so. In its standard Chinese translation, the Fourth Gospel begins with "In the beginning was the Tao" and refers to God as Shangdi. I suspect that Christ could have incarnated in China, incorporated the local religious vocabulary and concepts, quoted that country's inspired writers instead of the Hebrew prophets, and established Christianity without the benefit of the Old Testament. The Chinese would then in retrospect seem to have had the one true religion all along. Of course I cannot be sure to what extent what I have just written is true, but I do think we tend to overestimate the essential Jewishness of Christ and his message.

If "his own" does mean the Jews, then the author is implicitly saying that Christ's message was received primarily by the gentiles rather than the Jews, which implies he is writing at a late enough date to have observed that happen.

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[12] But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

Jesus is not — or at least may not always be — the only son of God. Those who receive him have the power to become the sons of God as well. It also implies that one is not born a son of God but becomes one — which presumably applies to Jesus himself as much as to those who receive him. The Fourth Gospel has no story of a virgin birth, and Jesus is twice referred to as the "son of Joseph" without anything corresponding to the parenthetical "as was supposed" added by Luke (3:23).

I have already mentioned the Fourth Gospel's emphasis on believing. Believing on Jesus' name is an even more characteristically Johannine concept, occurring three times in the Fourth Gospel, three times in the First Epistle of John, and nowhere else in the entire Bible. What exactly does it mean? The fact that the actual name "Jesus" is not even mentioned in this passage suggests that John is not literally proposing some Hare-Krishna-style focus on the name itself. Is it just a figure of speech, with "his name" simply meaning "him"? If so, it perhaps serves to emphasize that, for the Fourth Gospel, believing in Jesus as a person is more important than assenting to any particular doctrinal propositions that he taught.

Another possibility is that name is being used in the sense of "reputation" — the point being that even those who never met Jesus in person can still believe in him through secondhand reports (such as the Gospel itself) and thereby become sons of God. The Gospel itself states that it was "written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name" (John 20:31).

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[13] Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

I suppose that being "born . . . of blood" signifies ordinary biological procreation and heredity (as we speak of bloodlines, blood relatives, etc.). The sons of God are not his literal biological sons (obviously, else how could those who receive Christ become sons of God?). The "will of the flesh" presumably refers to sexual desire and is thus making the same point: that the sonship in question has nothing to do with sexual reproduction. The "will of man" could be synonymous with the "will of the flesh," or it could mean that divine sonship is not something that can be achieved deliberately, by making an effort.

The expression translated "born . . . of God" is "ἐκ Θεοῦ ἐγεννήθησαν." Thayer's lexicon says that this verb is properly used "of men begetting children . . . followed by ἐκ with the genitive of the mother" — but John has ἐκ with the genitive of "God"; in other words, the Greek does literally say "born of God," as if God were the mother, not "begotten by God" as father. This usage is, according to Thayer, peculiar to the Gospel and First Epistle of John and not to be found elsewhere.

(Already the textual evidence seems quite strong that the First Epistle of John was indeed written by the same author as the Gospel.)

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[14] And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

If, as I have proposed above, the Word indicated "the combined Primary Thinking of God himself and of all those who think in harmony with him," then presumably what is meant by Jesus' being "the Word made flesh" is that his thoughts were entirely in harmony with those of God and thus embodied the creative Word.

The use of "only begotten" here (rather than, say "firstborn") seems to imply, contra v. 12, that Jesus is unique in his divine sonship. On the other hand, it does say that his glory was as that of the only begotten, not that he actually was the only begotten.

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[15] John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.

"He was before me" implies that, while Jesus "was in the beginning with God," John the Baptist was not — contradicting my assumption that all thinking beings are coeternal with God. Or perhaps he means something else. After all, merely being older than John hardly seems sufficient grounds for being preferred before him.

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[16] And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.

This is no longer John the Baptist speaking, but the author.

"Of his fulness" means "from his fullness." We have not received his fullness, but what we have received comes from that fullness.

"Grace for grace" (χάριν ἀντί χάριτος) is probably meant in the sense of "grace taking the place of grace" — i.e., one grace succeeding upon another, one grace after another.

Does "all we" mean "all we Christians" or "all we human beings"? I assume the latter, and that this is a reference to the "light that lighteneth every man"

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[17] For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

Finally Jesus Christ is mentioned by name.

We have already been told that Christ was "full of grace and truth." Here the author adds (or very strongly implies) that neither grace nor truth were provided by Moses or the Mosaic law.

"Grace" (χάρις), according to Thayer, is "properly, that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness"; and secondarily "good-will, loving-kindness, favor," particularly "kindness which bestows upon one what he has not deserved." That grace, in the sense of undeserved favor, came not through the law is a commonplace. If God's favor is dependent upon obedience to law — if he bestows it on those who follow his checklist of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots and withholds it from those who do not — then it is not grace in the fullest sense. (Nor, I might add, pace the Psalmist, is it easy to imagine the harsh and persnickety law of Moses having been a source of "joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness.") All this is so familiar as to be almost trite.

It is a bit more surprising to see it implied that Moses did not even give the people truth — that (what else can it mean?) the Torah is not true! Obviously this can be understood in several different ways, and just as obviously it does not amount to a complete rejection of Moses and his message, which Jesus appears to endorse elsewhere in the Gospel: "For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" (John 5:46-47). The Mosaic writings are here presented as fit objects of belief — as, in a word, true. So truth did come by Moses. We must assume, then, that while Moses brought some truth, a partial truth, Jesus brought more truth, the full truth. But what additional truth did he bring? As I recall from past readings of John (and I may later modify this impression as I continue this project of going through it with a fine-tooth comb), the Johannine Jesus is not much of a propounder of truths and indeed scarcely seems to preach any doctrine at all, beyond his own identity and the importance of love.

My own understanding is that Mosaic "truth" was limited by its character as a set of laws — that is, generalizations derived by abstraction and implemented by ignoring most of the specific details of any given situation. Laws as such can only aspire to be rough approximations of the truth, which is ultimately individual, specific, personal. Christ — at least the Johannine Christ — brought both grace and truth by transcending law. The Christ of the Synoptics added lots of new laws ("Ye have heard it said, thou shalt not do such-and-such, but I say unto you, thou shalt not do lots of other things as well"), but there is nothing corresponding to this in John.

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In what certainly seems like an ironical commentary by the synchronicity fairies, just minutes after writing the above paragraph about Christ transcending law, I happened to read the following passage.

For the wise man, there are no such things as laws. Since all laws are subject to errors or exceptions, it is for the wise man to judge for himself whether he shall obey them or break them.

The irony is that I read it in Colin Wilson's Criminal History of Mankind, and it is a quotation from a letter written from death row by the 19th-century French murderer known as Prado. Wilson adds, "His comments about the ‘wise man' make him sound like a criminal Marcus Aurelius; we have to remind ourselves that he is in court merely for slitting the throat of a prostitute."

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[18] No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

This is a surprisingly categorical statement, given that the Old Testament mentions several people having seen God. It is doubly surprising given that John has identified Jesus (who was seen by innumerable people) as the incarnate Word, which is God, and identified him as God again in this very verse. (The original Greek has μονογενὴς Θεὸς, "the only begotten God.") But John does not even say that God has been seen in the person of his fully divine Son; only that the Son hath declared him.

Moses is not mentioned by name in this verse, but he is the most obvious counterexample of someone who is said to have seen God, and perhaps this verse should be seen as a continuation of the Moses-Jesus contrast begun in v. 17. Moses brought the law, but Jesus brought grace and truth; Moses "saw God" (but didn't really see him, since no one has), but Jesus explained God.

Here's what I think this means. God as such cannot be seen even in principle, because divinity has nothing whatever to do with being a physical object that produces or reflects light. Even those who saw Jesus Christ face to face saw just that: his face, and other parts of his physical body. That is, they may have seen directly that he was a man, but they could not have seen, in the same direct sense, that he was God. That in him which made him God could not be seen. Even those who saw him work miracles saw only that: a man with paranormal powers, which is not at all the same thing as God.

The same goes for God the Father, even if we assume (as Mormons do) that he has a physical body which can be, and has been, seen. To see a body, no matter whose, is not to see God. To see one sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, his train filling the temple and six-winged seraphim flying above him crying "Holy, holy, holy" is not to see God. No conceivable sort of empirical observation could ever, even in principle, amount to an observation of God qua God. The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, and the same can be said of God himself.

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John's ministry before meeting Christ

[19] And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou? [20] And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ.

Levites were assistant priests, descended from Levi but not from Aaron. (Moses and Aaron were descendants of Levi.)

When John is asked "Who art thou?" he apparently takes it to mean "Are you the Messiah?" The author also wants to make it clear that John was not a false Messiah — that, in fact, he never even claimed to be the Messiah. Clearly there was widespread speculation that John was the Messiah.

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[21] And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No.

Matthew 11:14 has Jesus say that John the Baptist is Elias. To harmonize these conflicting statements, I've seen it proposed that John was the reincarnation of Elijah but did not know it, so that he answered the question honestly but not correctly — the idea being that, after all, most people have little or no memory of any past lives they may have lived. Elijah is a bit of a special case, though, since he ascended to heaven bodily instead of dying; his return would thus not have been a reincarnation in the usual sense and would presumably not be accompanied by a loss of memory. Other possibilities are that John was Elijah only metaphorically, or that (as so often) Matthew's report is unreliable.

I assume that "that prophet" refers to the prophet like unto Moses, whose coming is prophesied in Deuteronomy 18:15.  Christians later came to believe that Jesus was both the Messiah and the Prophet (and the Son of Man to boot), but his contemporaries assumed these would be separate figures.

The fact that John's questioners were unsure as to which of these prophesied figures (Messiah, Elijah, Prophet) he was supposed to be suggests that the evangelist is correct in saying that John never claimed to be any of them. People, then, must have just assumed that John was Something Big on the strength of his personal charisma, air of authority, etc.

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[22] Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? [23] He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias.

The quotation is from Isaiah 40.

[3] The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. [4] Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: [5] And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

Based on the normal patterns of Hebrew poetic parallelism, I think John (and the KJV translators) have parsed Isaiah incorrectly. It should be "The voice of him that crieth, In the wilderness prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God." The wilderness is where the way is to be prepared, not where the voice is crying. Perhaps the Hebrew is legitimately ambiguous and John's reading is possible (I don't know enough Hebrew grammar to pass judgment on that), but it is surely not the reading Isaiah intended.

John the Baptist, unlike the author of this Gospel, is not an educated, Bible-reading Jew. He is misquoting from memory something he has heard read aloud in the synagogue.

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The Fourth Gospel does not focus on the supposed fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies to the extent that some of the others (most notably Matthew) do, but there are still a few passages like this, forcing us to deal  with the question of how to understand the relationship between Old Testament writings and New Testament events.

At the one extreme is the idea that OT prophets consciously foresaw many specific details surrounding the ministry of Jesus Christ and recorded that precognitive information in their writings — that, for example, Isaiah knew that God would come in the person of Jesus Christ, knew all about John the Baptist and the role he would play in paving the way for Jesus, and had John specifically in mind when he wrote the verses quoted above. I find this very unlikely. Although of course I can't prove that it's not true, it's certainly not the impression I get when I read Isaiah.

An intermediate possibility is that precognitive information about John did play a role in Isaiah's writings, but that Isaiah did not consciously know that. This is how I would tend to interpret some of Nostradamus's more impressive prophecies, such as that of the death of Henry II. I don't think he saw the future clearly and then deliberately scrambled the message by dressing it up in cryptic verses; I think he wrote in a trance state, in which he more or less unconsciously "picked up" free-floating words and images without understanding their meaning or context in any detail. This would be more or less the sort of garbled, not-consciously-understood precognition seen in the experiments of J. W. Dunne. If Isaiah also prophesied in a trance state (as we know prophets in Saul's time did), it would be surprising if this sort of thing (I think of it as the "Edgar Cayce effect") did not happen.

At the other extreme, we could assume that Isaiah's writings have nothing specifically to do with Jesus or John, but that John quoted lines which just happened to fit him and his situation — just as we might quote the Bible or Shakespeare or Monty Python apropos of our own situations, with no idea of implying that what we are quoting was written with us in mind. In this particular case, I find that quite plausible. John doesn't say anything like "I am he of whom Isaiah spake . . . ." He just quotes Isaiah (loosely) and cites his source. In just the same way, I might say, "I'm the kind of guy who reads poetry for the grammar, as one of Iris Murdoch's characters puts it" — obviously not meaning to suggest that I was the intended subject of the Murdoch quip.

Less charitably, we could assume that Isaiah never wrote about John, but that John (delusionally) thought he had, in much the same way that Charles Manson thought all the Beatles' lyrics were about him. I don't see any reason to interpret this passage in that way, though.

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[24] And they which were sent were of the Pharisees. [25] And they asked him, and said unto him, Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet? [26] John answered them, saying, I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; [27] He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose.

The author has not mentioned until now that John was baptizing people. Obviously he takes it for granted that his readers pretty much know who John was and what he was doing. Also omitted, though obviously implied in what comes later (and by "I baptize with water"), is John's statement that the one coming after him would baptize with the Holy Ghost.

It's not clear why they associated baptizing with prophesied figures such as the Messiah, Elijah, and the Prophet. I can't think of any Old Testament prophecy that makes such a connection. Then again, they were Pharisees and as such believed in the "oral Torah" of tradition as well as the Bible proper.

John doesn't answer the question "Why baptizest thou?" but the answer he does give implies that his questioners are right to associate baptism with the Messiah or some similar figure. In essence, he says, "Yes, you're right that real baptism is the prerogative of the Messiah. My baptism in mere water is just a prelude to the real thing."

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Update: Googling "Why did the Pharisees think the Messiah would baptize?" led me to a post by one James Duncan, a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher,  called "What the Pharisees taught me about baptism." He finds several references to sprinkling in various Old Testament passages generally understood to be Messianic prophecies. These apparently slipped under my radar because of my unexamined assumption that biblical baptism was by immersion (that being the normal meaning of the Greek word). The following references are all from Mr. Duncan.

We are told of Isaiah's suffering servant (often identified with the Messiah), "So shall he sprinkle many nations" (Isaiah 52:15).

A passage in Ezekiel 36 is perhaps especially relevant because it provides a possible connection between water baptism (or sprinkling, anyway) and the Holy Ghost.

[25] Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. [26] A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. [27] And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

The "I" in the Ezekiel passage is the Lord himself, so putting the Christian perspective aside, I'm not sure the Pharisees would have read it as a prophecy of the Messiah (whom they understood to be a human king, not the Lord incarnate).

As for the Elijah connection, in Malachi 3:1-3 we are told that the Lord's messenger (later, in Malachi 4:5, identified as Elijah) "shall purify the sons of Levi." In Numbers 8, the rite for purifying the sons of Levi is described.

[5] And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Take the Levites from among the children of Israel, and cleanse them. [7] And thus shalt thou do unto them, to cleanse them: Sprinkle water of purifying upon them . . .

Interestingly, the Gospel has priests and Levites (priests being a subset of Levites) coming to ask John who he is. Perhaps the implied thrust of their questions was, "Are you the one coming to purify us Levites? Do we need to be sprinkled by you?"

The one who originally purified the sons of Levi was Moses himself — so here we have biblical links between baptism-by-sprinkling and all three of the figures the Pharisees asked about: the Messiah, Elijah, and (the Prophet like unto) Moses. Pretty impressive! Almost thou persuadest me that John was a Sprinkler rather than a Baptist properly so called.

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[28] These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing.

Some manuscripts of this Gospel have John baptizing in Bethany instead of Bethabara. If "Bethany" is the correct reading, it would have to be a different place from the Bethany where Lazarus and his sisters lived. The Bethany of Lazarus was about two miles from Jerusalem (John 11:18), but John was baptizing "beyond" (i.e., east of) the Jordan.

Again we have some attachment ambiguity here, at least in English. I have read "where John was baptizing" as modifying "Bethabara/Bethany beyond Jordan," but it could also be read as modifying "Jordan" alone.

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John identifies the Lamb of God

[29] The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

This Gospel does not mention the actual event of Jesus' baptism by John (again, he obviously assumed his readers knew the story), so it is not clear whether John said this before or after Jesus' baptism. "John seeth Jesus coming unto him" suggests that this is Jesus coming to be baptized, and that John identified him as the Lamb of God before he was baptized and before he saw the Spirit descending on him like a dove. In that case, the baptism presumably takes place between verses 31 and 32.

The other possibility is that Jesus' baptism took place before v. 29, and that it was the sign of the dove that convinced John that Jesus was the Lamb of God.

This verse is the first indication in the Fourth Gospel that Jesus' role is analogous to that of a sacrificial animal slaughtered for the expiation of sins. According to the regulations laid out in Leviticus 4 for sin offerings (presumably what is being alluded to), a bullock is offered if a priest or the whole congregation has sinned; a male kid if the ruler has sinner; and a female kid or lamb if a commoner has sinned. In no case is a male lamb offered as a sin offering, and even a female lamb seems to be a sort of second option if a kid is not available. Why then did John choose a lamb? Why did he not call Jesus the Bullock of God (the closest fit for taking away the sins of the world) or the Kid of God?

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[30] This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me. [31] And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water.

"I knew him not" seems to contradict the Lukan story that Jesus and John were first cousins and that John recognized Jesus and leaped for joy while they were both still in the womb!

It's interesting that John says the whole purpose of his baptizing was to identify the Messiah. I wonder if he stopped baptizing after finding Jesus.

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[32] And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. [33] And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. [34] And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God.

Bruce Charlton has this interpretation:

John the Baptist is saying that before he met Jesus he was ‘merely' baptising with water – so during baptism the spirit would descend and touch – then leave the baptised person; which only affected this life: the spirit affected them but did not make them divine. But when John baptised Jesus, the spirit abode on him, that is – Jesus became divine. John cannot make anyone divine, but Jesus can.

Because Jesus is now divine, he can ‘baptise' Men with the Holy Ghost – can make Men divine. But we are told elsewhere in this Gospel that Jesus did not literally baptise anyone (by immersion in water, only his disciples did this), so the implication is that when Jesus ‘baptises' it means something not-literal. What it means is that Jesus transforms us to become divine by our own death and resurrection (born again); as Jesus was thus transformed at the baptism by John.

The suggestion is that Jesus became fully divine at his baptism, when the Spirit of God entered him permanently. In the Synoptic version, the descent of the Spirit is accompanied by a voice from heaven saying "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11). This seems to me to echo Psalm 2:7: "the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee" (i.e., you were not my Son in the full sense before), and indeed this line is quoted elsewhere in the New Testament, in Acts and Hebrews, and applied to Jesus.

The idea that Jesus was not born the fully divine Son of God, but became such at his baptism, can also be found in the Mormon scriptures, in Section 93 of the Doctrine and Covenants:

[12] And I, John [the Baptist], saw that he [Jesus] received not of the fulness at the first, but received grace for grace; [13] And he received not of the fulness at first, but continued from grace to grace, until he received a fulness; [14] And thus he was called the Son of God, because he received not of the fulness at the first.

[15] And I, John, bear record, and lo, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove, and sat upon him, and there came a voice out of heaven saying: This is my beloved Son. [16] And I, John, bear record that he received a fulness of the glory of the Father; [17] And he received all power, both in heaven and on earth, and the glory of the Father was with him, for he dwelt in him.

I find this interpretation compelling, at least within the context of the Fourth Gospel. Matthew and Luke have (two completely different) nativity stories in which Jesus is the Son of God in something like the literal sense, having been born without a mortal father, but John has nothing like that. Instead it introduces John the Baptist almost immediately and implies by juxtaposition that he had an important role in the process of the Word becoming flesh.

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Why is the Spirit represented as, or compared to, a dove? I mentioned in my post on the Rider-Waite Magician that it is probably an antitype of two different biblical scenes: that of the spirit of God hovering over the primordial waters of Tiamat at the beginning of the Creation, and that of the dove of Noah flying out over the Flood waters and finally, after failing a few times and having to return to the ark, finding a place to land (just as, in Bruce's interpretation, the Spirit descended from heaven and returned again several times before finally coming to rest on Jesus). The Flood was a symbolic baptism of the earth (a metaphor which works regardless of the mode of baptism, since a flood caused by rainfall involves both sprinkling and immersion). If, as discussed above, Jesus' baptism was the moment when the Word became flesh, when the true light that lighteth every man came into the world, that moment is also typified by the opening of the Genesis story: the spirit of God hovering over the water, and then, "Let there be light."

(As a side note, Noah's dove is preceded by a raven — the bird of Elijah. Coincidence?)

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When John says, "he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me . . . ," I wonder if he is describing a direct communication from God himself, or John had some human master or teacher out in the desert, lost to history, who gave him these instructions.

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John's disciples follow Jesus

[35] Again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples; [36] And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God! [37] And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. [38] Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou? [39] He saith unto them, Come and see. They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day: for it was about the tenth hour. [40] One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother.

Only one of these two disciples, Andrew, is named, inviting the inference that the other, the anonymous one, is none other than our anonymous author.

Apparently "they followed Jesus" is meant entirely literally here — not that they became his followers or disciples, but that they actually started following him, shadowing him, apparently hoping to find out where he lived. Some time later he turned around, noticed them, and asked them what they wanted.

This strikes me as very strange behavior on the part of the two disciples. Why would they just start following him silently, rather than approaching him and speaking to him? To me, this only makes sense if Jesus was not alone, but was already surrounded by a sizable group of followers, such that unobtrusively falling in with the group would have been easier than approaching him directly. They presumably had no prior knowledge of Jesus and yet called him rabbi ("teacher"), again suggesting that he already had a group of students. If Andrew and his fellow disciple were not Jesus' first followers, why are they the first mentioned? Perhaps because the author would have had only limited information about Jesus' circle before he himself had joined it.

Against these inferences is that fact that this all seems to take place just one day after the baptism that marks the beginning of Jesus' ministry — scarcely enough time to have acquired many disciples, I would have thought!

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[41] He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ. [42] And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.

I don't know why the King James translators call Simon's father Jona. In Greek it is precisely the same name that is translated as "John" when it refers to the Baptist (compare "ὁ υἱὸς Ἰωάννου," KJV "the son of Jona," and "ἡ μαρτυρία τοῦ Ἰωάννου," KJV "the record of John").

Cephas is Aramaic (כֵּיפָא, with the Greek -s ending added, as in Messias); and Πέτρος (translated as "a stone" here and as "Peter" hereafter) is Greek, both refering to a rock. Reference works seem to be divided on the question of whether the Greek refers most properly to a small stone or a large one, with suggested translations ranging from "pebble" to "boulder," but they are more or less agreed that it refers to a rock — an isolated piece of stone — rather than the rock face of a cliff or mountain. As for the significance of the nickname, Thayer says it is "used metaphorically of a soul hard and unyielding, and so resembling a rock" and cites Sophocles and Euripides in his support.

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The calling of Philip and Nathanael

[43] The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me. [44] Now Philip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.

Bethsaida is on the Sea of Galilee, very far from the area where John was baptizing. Andrew had traveled quite some distance to follow his master. Apparently Andrew went and found Peter while they were still in the Bethabara area, before Jesus went to Galilee, so we might infer that Peter had also been a disciple of John.

Perhaps the same is true of Philip. When it says "Jesus would [i.e., wanted to] go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me," I think the most natural reading is that Jesus found Philip while they were still in the Bethabara area, and Jesus said something like, "We're going back to Galilee. Want to come with us?"

Simon (Simeon) is a Hebrew name, but Andrew and Philip are both Greek. Galilee was only partly Jewish — cf. "Galilee of the Gentiles" (Matthew 4:15). It's a bit surprising that even in one family, one brother would have a Hebrew name and another a Greek one. It suggests a level of cultural mixing almost comparable to that of modern America.

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[45] Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

It's not clear if he found Nathanael in Judaea, or in Galilee after they went back. (We read in John 21:2 that Nathanael was from Cana in Galilee, where Jesus turned water into wine.)

Philip is here identifying Jesus as both the Prophet whose coming was predicted in the Torah (in Deuteronomy) and the Messiah written of in the prophetic books.

Jesus is described, even by someone who believes he is the Messiah, as the son of Joseph — with no suggestion of a virgin birth.

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[46] And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see.

Did Nazareth have such a bad reputation? Or does Nathanael just mean that there are no prophecies about the Messiah or the Prophet coming from Nazareth. Matthew claims that it "was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene" (Matthew 2:23), but it's hard to imagine which prophecy he has in mind.

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[47] Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! [48] Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. [49] Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel. [50] Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these.

This whole episode is pretty obscure! Why on earth would he accept Jesus as the Messiah on the strength of his having seen him under a fig tree? There must be some untold story behind this; something must have happened under that fig tree which only Nathanael and God could have known about — perhaps something related to his being "an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile." (Did people still call themselves Israelites in Jesus' time? The term strikes me as an archaism even the first century. Weren't they all Samaritans and Jews by then?)

Why would John have recorded this story, then, if only Nathanael himself could understand its meaning? Perhaps something has been lost from the text.

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[51] And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.

"The angels of God ascending and descending" certainly sounds like a reference to Jacob's dream — "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it" (Genesis 28:12) — with the Son of man playing the role of the ladder.

Could this possibly be related to "an Israelite indeed" (i.e., a true descendant of Jacob) "in whom is no guile"? Jacob was notorious for his guile.

After Jacob awoke from his dream, he said, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not" (Genesis 28:16). The angels of God had been there all along, but he had been unaware of it until his dream opened heaven to him. Perhaps Nathanael is being promised that he, too, will be enabled to see what was there all along. Is it because of his guilelessness? (Jacob could only see the angels when his habitual guile had been silenced by sleep.) Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.