Trust the experts (Notes on John 7:40-52)

On the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus has just stood up and cried, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:37-38). We pick up the story with the people's reactions.

[40] Many of the people therefore, when they heard this saying, said, "Of a truth this is the Prophet."

"The Prophet" means the Taheb, the prophet like unto Moses, whose coming is promised in Deut. 18. I assume the people reacted this way because providing "living" (i.e. running) water was one of the miracles of Moses, and there was a general expectation that the Taheb would do what Moses did.

As I mentioned in "The Samaritan understanding of the Messiah," one of the three signs by which the Samaritans were to identify the Taheb was that he "will produce, at his hand, the staff" of Moses "in order that miracles be performed thereby." In Exodus 17:1-7, the people come to Moses saying, "Give us water that we may drink," and the Lord instructs him to smite a rock with his rod, causing water to flow out.

Jesus didn't literally have Moses' rod, and thus would not qualify as the Taheb by the standards of early 20th-century Samaritans, but there is no reason to assume that first-century Judaeans had the same specific (and extra-biblical) list of requirements. The promise of "rivers of living water" is distinctly Mosaic, and in the context of Jesus' other teachings and miracles, it may have been enough to convince many people that he was the Taheb.

[41] Others said, "This is the Christ."

We know from the Fourth Gospel itself that some people understood the Taheb and the Messiah to be two separate figures (see John 1:25), while others equated the two (see John 1:45). Since I know of no prophecies that would specifically connect the Messiah with living water, I assume these people are saying that Jesus is not only the Taheb but also -- in light of the other things he has said and done -- the Messiah.

But some said, "Shall Christ come out of Galilee? [42] Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?"

The Taheb had no specified birthplace or ancestry (aside from being an Israelite) and was in fact often expected to come from the Northern Kingdom (including what later became Galilee). The Messiah, though, was to be a descendant of David, and thus a Judaean. The more specific expectation that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem is based on Micah 5:2.

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, of course, tell us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, though the details are different. In Matthew 2, Jesus is born in Bethlehem because that's where his parents live, but the family has to flee to Egypt shortly after he is born; when they return from Egypt, Joseph is warned in a dream not to return to Judaea but to go to Galilee. In Luke 1-2, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, but they have to go to Bethlehem for a census, and Jesus is born while they are there.

If the author of the Fourth Gospel also knew that "Jesus of Nazareth" had actually been born in Bethlehem, it seems almost certain that he would have mentioned it here, but he doesn't. It therefore seems most likely to me that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, but that, due to the widespread understanding that the Messiah must be born there, various stories to that effect began circulating, two of which made it into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. (See my post "The parentage and birth of Jesus in the four Gospels" for more details.)

[43] So there was a division among the people because of him.

Some thought he was both Taheb and Messiah, some thought he was Messiah only, and I'm sure some thought he was neither.

[44] And some of them would have taken him; but no man laid hands on him.

[45] Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, "Why have ye not brought him?"

[46] The officers answered, "Never man spake like this man."

This is referring back to v. 32, where, hearing that the people were entertaining the idea that Jesus was the Messiah, "the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him." This apparently means to arrest him. As we can see in John 18:31, the chief priests enjoyed some degree of autonomy under Roman rule and were allowed to enforce their law, though not to execute the death penalty.

"Would have" means "wanted to," so v. 44 in isolation makes it sound as though someone attempted to arrest Jesus but were unable to do so -- because he escaped, was miraculously protected, etc. In the following verses, though, we see that the officers didn't even attempt to arrest him, being impressed by his words and thinking that he might really be the Messiah after all. So those who "would have taken him" are the Pharisees and chief priests, and they failed to do so because the officers they sent were unwilling to carry out their orders.

[47] Then answered them the Pharisees, "Are ye also deceived? [48] Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? [49] But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed."

For ordinary people, Jesus' miracles, teachings, and air of authority made it obvious that he was someone very special -- the prophet like unto Moses, or perhaps even the Messiah. The Pharisees, with their detailed knowledge of the Law (meaning not only the Torah of Moses but also the prophetic writings and, for Pharisees, the "Oral Torah" of tradition), knew that, despite his impressiveness, Jesus didn't actually fulfill the Messianic prophecies. And they were right; he didn't -- except in their broadest, most figurative sense. (See my post "Jesus and the Messianic prophecies: Summary and conclusions.")

"Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?" -- the first-century equivalent of our "Trust the experts!" Have you got any peer-reviewed papers to back that up? Any reliable sources? Rather than discern for themselves based on firsthand experience of Jesus, ordinary people were expected to defer to the spiritual "experts." And these experts in turn, rather than using their discernment, were primarily concerned with how well Jesus measured up against their bulleted list of Messiah Rules -- consisting of assorted lines of prophetic poetry (for all Old Testament prophecy is poetic in form) plucked from their context and collated to form a checklist.

These are the people who rejected Jesus, and this is why they rejected him. These are the people who were so blinded by the narrow specificity of their expectations that they could ask -- immediately after witnessing the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 -- "What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee?" (John 6:30). These are the people who dismissed one miraculous healing after another because, in the opinion of all the most respected Torah scholars, the mighty works had been performed on the wrong day of the week.

Those who believed in Jesus, in contrast, acknowledged such problems but trusted their own experience and discernment first. Pushed to condemn the man who had healed him as a sabbath-breaker, the man born blind said, "He is a prophet. . . . Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see" (John 9:17, 25). Faced with some of Jesus' shocking and seemingly unacceptable statements, Simon Peter's reaction was, "This is an hard saying; who can hear it? . . . [But] to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God" (John 6:60, 68-69).

Jesus' sabbath-breaking, his cryptic and deliberately provocative statements, his general failure to do what the Messiah was supposed to do -- one of the purposes of all this was surely to force this very separation of the sheep from the goats, to force people to choose to defer to authority and respectability or else to trust in their own direct experience of God. "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes" (Ps. 118:8-9).

For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:22-24).

Against the confident dismissal of the Torah-thumpers with their Messianic checklist, Nicodemus diffidently suggests that gaining some direct knowledge of who Jesus is (as he has already secretly done himself) might be in order before passing judgment.

[50] Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,) [51] "Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?"

Can we judge a man without even bothering to find out what he says or does? And the answer is: Yes, as a matter of fact we can. All we need to know is that he's from Galilee.

[52] They answered and said unto him, "Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet."

Now to be clear, nowhere in the Bible does it say there will never be any prophets from Galilee, and the canonical prophets came from various places and were not all even Israelites. In fact, if Nicodemus had followed the rhetorical suggestion that he "search, and look" in the prophecies for references to a Galilean prophet, he might have found one. Matthew did, at any rate:

And leaving Nazareth, [Jesus] came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, 'The land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles; the people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up' (Matt. 4:13-16, quoting Isa. 9:1-2).

Nazareth itself is not coastal ("by way of the sea"), which is why Matthew, alone among the Gospels, has Jesus living in the coastal Galilean town of Capernaum for a while -- just as, to fulfill another "prophecy," he has him live in Egypt for a time. Matthew's reading of Isaiah is extremely dubious. In context, Isaiah 8-9 prophesies that Assyria will invade Judah (8:7-7), bringing "trouble and darkness" (8:22), but that this darkness will not be so severe as it was when the Assyrians invaded Galilee (9:1, this earlier invasion is recounted in 2 Kgs. 15:29) and will be followed by the "great light" Matthew cites. Whatever the merits of his (mis)readings of the prophets, though, Matthew uses the Pharisaic "prophecy checklist" method to support belief in Jesus and thereby demonstrates that sympathetic Pharisees like Nicodemus could have done the same. But they didn't, because that's not what their belief in Jesus was based on.

It's interesting that the mere absence of any positive prophecy of a Galilean prophet was taken as proof that no such prophet would arise. Must every prophet be himself the subject of prophecy? Was anything about the careers of Elijah, Isaiah, and the other biblical prophets foretold in advance? It appears that the Pharisees believed that Malachi was the last prophet with the three exceptions foretold in scripture: Elijah, the Taheb, and the Messiah. We can see this in their reaction to John: "Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet?" (John 1:25). The possibility that John, or Jesus, might just be a prophet, not one of the prophets whose coming was foretold, does not seem to have occurred to them. The Messiah comes from Bethlehem, Elijah comes from heaven, and the Taheb was generally expected to be either a Levite or from one of the tribes of Joseph -- ergo, no Galilean prophet.

Several religions have taught that their founder was the Last Prophet until the coming of the very last prophet. For the Samaritans, Moses is the last prophet until the New Moses, the Taheb. For Muslims, Muhammad is the last prophet until the Mahdi. For many Christians, Jesus is the last prophet until just before the Second Coming (when, according to the Apocalypse he will be preceded by two prophets playing Elijah- and Moses-like roles). Moses, Jesus, Muhammad -- these all make sense in the role of Ultimate Prophet -- but Malachi? A minor prophet who doesn't even get his own book in the Jewish version of the Bible? It appears as if prophecy just sort of petered out among the Hebrews, and at some point, after a sufficiently long time had passed with no plausible claimants to the title, it was retroactively decided that Malachi had been the last (except for the prophesied trio of Elijah, Taheb, and Messiah). Christians seem to have agreed with this assessment for the most part; in the King James Bible, it says "The end of the Prophets" after the last verse of Malachi; and John and Jesus are not exceptions, but were understood to be, respectively, Elijah and Taheb/Messiah. It's very curious, and I wonder how and when it was decided that there would be no ordinary prophets after Malachi. (Something roughly similar can be seen in the "end of the Apostolic Era" in Christianity. Jesus' own disciples were not the last, since Paul is accepted as an Apostle, but at some point after that the role of Apostle just quietly disappeared.)

Living water, the Holy Ghost, and Jesus as Elisha (Notes on John 7:37-39)

Jesus is in Jerusalem during the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles. His attendance at the feast was a surprise -- he had told his brothers he wasn't going to attend, let the Judaeans spend a few days asking, "Where is he?" and then finally made a public appearance on or around the fourth day. Now, on the seventh and last day of the feast, he makes another appearance.

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[37] In the last day, that great day of the feast,

The seventh and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) is Hoshana Rabbah, the Great Supplication. On this day (according to Mishnah Sukkah 4:5-6), worshipers would circle the altar seven times, to the accompaniment of trumpet blasts, and recite Psalm 118:25, "Save now, I beseech thee, O Lord: O Lord, I beseech thee, send now prosperity." This was supposed to recall the miraculous fall of the walls of Jericho, and also the seven Hebrew words of Psalm 26:6, "I will wash mine hands in innocency: So will I compass [i.e., circle] thine altar, O Lord." Furthermore, "There was a unique custom on the seventh day. They would bring palm branches to the Temple and place them on the ground at the sides of the altar, and that seventh day of Sukkot was called: The day of the placing of palm branches."

I mention all this by way of background, in case it should turn out to have any symbolic relevance to Jesus' words and actions on this day.

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Jesus stood and cried, saying, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. [38] He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

No passage in the Old Testament says anything about living water flowing from the belly of the believer, so what is Jesus referring to here? Well, the lack of punctuation in the Greek original allows for quite a few different readings.

Reading A: "'If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink,' he that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said. Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

Reading B: "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. 'He that believeth on me,' as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

Reading C: "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink, he that believeth on me. As the scripture hath said, 'Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.'"

In Reading A, the "scripture" Jesus is referring to is presumably Isaiah 55:1 -- "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters" -- of which v. 37 is a tolerably close paraphrase.

In Reading B, the scripture reference is simply "he that believeth on me," which could be a paraphrase of any number of Old Testament passages. If Jesus had one in particular in mind, my best guess would be Jeremiah 17:5-8, which says that those who trust in men will be thirsty, but those who trust in the Lord will have plenty of water.

Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

Readings A and B, as well as the King James reading, say that it is from the believer's belly that the living water will flow. Reading C allows for the possibility that Jesus is quoting a scripture about himself: "The scripture says that 'out of his (the Messiah's) belly shall flow rivers of living water.' Therefore, anyone who is thirsty can come to me (the Messiah) and drink." I can't find any scripture that actually says that, though, and overall I think we should understand the living water to be flowing from the believer himself. This is consistent with John 4:14:

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

As here in John 7, the water first comes from Jesus ("If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink") but thereafter flows from within the believer himself ("He that believeth in me . . . out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."). This idea is also present to a certain extent in the Old Testament, where those who follow the Lord will be "like a spring of water, whose waters fail not" (Isa. 58:11).

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[39] (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)

This is the author's interpretation of what Jesus meant, but I think it is a plausible one. As I have said, both Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 portray the living water as something that comes from Jesus first but thereafter flows from within the believer. In the same way, the Holy Ghost comes from God but then dwells in the Christian's heart and becomes an internal source of guidance and inspiration.

This idea that the Holy Ghost could not be given until after Jesus was "glorified" (resurrected and ascended) is based on something Jesus himself says later in the Gospel:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you (John 16:7).

Was the Holy Ghost something new that was given after Jesus "departed" and was "glorified," or was it the return of something old that was paused during Jesus' mortal life? Does the Holy Ghost appear in the Old Testament? There are only two occurrences of "holy spirit" in the OT. The first is Psalm 51:11, quoted below in its poetic context (vv. 10-12).

Create in me a clean heart, O God;

    and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence;

    and take not thy holy spirit from me.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation;

    and uphold me with thy free spirit.

I think it is tolerably clear in context that "thy holy spirit" is parallel with "a right spirit" and "thy free spirit," and that none of these refers to the Holy Ghost in anything like the Christian conception. The penitent (for this is one of the Penitential Psalms) is asking the Lord to make him a good person, to put a good spirit in him -- "thy" spirit because it comes from God, but still the Psalmist's own spirit, not the literal indwelling Spirit of God himself. This was apparently the understanding of the King James translators as well, as they left "holy spirit" uncapitalized.

The second reference is in Isaiah 63:10-12, which is also poetry.

But they rebelled,

    and vexed his holy Spirit:

therefore he was turned to be their enemy,

    and he fought against them.

Then he remembered the days of old,

    Moses, and his people, saying,

Where is he that brought them up out of the sea

    with the shepherd of his flock?

where is he that put his holy Spirit within him?

That led them by the right hand of Moses

    with his glorious arm,

dividing the water before them,

    to make himself an everlasting name?

In the first reference, "his holy Spirit" pretty clearly refers to God. The pronouns in the second reference are a bit ambiguous, but the most likely reading is "he (God) that put his (God's) holy Spirit within him (either Moses or Israel)."

If we include references that don't use the word "holy," we can find references to the "spirit of God" or "spirit of the Lord" entering or "coming upon" Joseph (Gen. 41:38), Bezaleel (Ex. 31:3; 35:31), Balaam (Num. 24:2), Othniel (Judg. 3:10), Gideon (Judg. 6:34), Jephthah (Judg. 11:29), Samson (Judg. 14:6, 19; 15:14), Saul (1 Sam. 10:6, 10; 11:6; 19:23), David (1 Sam. 16:13), Saul's messengers (1 Sam. 19:20), Azariah (2 Chron. 15:1), Jahaziel (2 Chron. 20:14), Zechariah (2 Chron. 24:20), and probably several others. (I have excluded ambiguous references, such as those in Job and Isaiah.)

In the Gospel of Luke, the Holy Ghost "falls upon" or "fills" John the Baptist (1:15), Mary (1:35), Elisabeth (1:41), Zacharias (1:67), Simeon (2:25-26) -- all technically before the birth of Jesus, and so consistent with the idea that the activity of the Holy Ghost was suspended during his mortal life. John the Baptist is almost certainly an exception, though. An angel tells John's father that John "shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb." This would be a strange thing to say if the Holy Ghost were going to leave John as soon as Jesus was born -- especially given that John was only about six months older than Jesus!

And of course the most obvious exception to "no Holy Ghost during Christ's mortality" is Christ himself. Luke says this most explicitly: At Jesus' baptism, "the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him . . . and Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness" (Luke 3:22, 4:1). In the other Gospels, what fell on Jesus at his baptism is called the "Spirit of God" (Matt. 3:16) or just "the Spirit" (Mark 1:10, John 1:32-33).

Only the Fourth Gospel explicitly says that the Holy Ghost could not be given until after Jesus' death and glorification, but the other three Gospels are more or less consistent with this. Acts (a continuation of Luke) relates how the disciples received the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, shortly after the Ascension -- and it is implied, if not stated directly, that this was something new, which they had not received during Jesus' mortal ministry.

Nowhere is it said that anyone other than Jesus himself received the Holy Ghost during Jesus' mortal life -- but John, having received it in the womb, before Jesus was born, presumably retained it even while Jesus was alive. Can it be a coincidence, then, that Jesus received the Holy Ghost when he was baptized by John? Was John, prior to baptizing Jesus, "full of the Holy Ghost" in some unique and unprecedented way? ("A prophet?" Jesus had said of him. "Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet." What did that "much more" mean?) And at Jesus' baptism, did this unique gift pass from John into Jesus? ("He must increase, but I must decrease.") Jesus said that John was in some sense Elijah, and one of the things Elijah is famous for is passing on "a double portion of his spirit" to his successor, Elisha (see 2 Kgs. 2) -- and this even took place at the River Jordan, the very place where Jesus was baptized! The names Elisha and Jesus have the same meaning, except that a different name of God is used. (Elisha means "My God is salvation"; Jesus means "Yahweh is salvation." Elijah, very neatly, means "My God is Yahweh.") 

The author of the Fourth Gospel writes of Jesus that "God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand" (John 3:34-35). Is this a subtle reference to Elisha's "double portion" of prophetic spirit? Elisha received a double portion of the spirit that had been in Elijah, but Jesus received the whole -- an infinitely greater portion -- of the Holy Spirit that had been in the new Elijah, John. And could that somehow be the reason that the Holy Ghost was not available to anyone else while Jesus was alive -- that he had "all of it"? This is a strange thought, as we are not accustomed to thinking of God as being limited in such ways, but it seems like a possibility worth exploring.

We are in the habit of seeing Jesus as a new Moses and a new David. A "new Elisha" is not an idea that comes readily to mind, partly because Elisha, despite supposedly receiving a double portion of Elijah's spirit, didn't really outshine Elijah in anything like the way that Jesus outshone John, and therefore seems like a relatively minor prophet. It makes perfect sense, though, that Jesus would symbolically be Elisha to John's Elijah, and I have already noted that the feeding of the five thousand, particularly as told in the Fourth Gospel, alludes unmistakably to that prophet.

I'm not sure yet where this line of thinking is going to lead. I'm just throwing out ideas and trying to connect some dots.

I was going to do the rest of Chapter 7, but I think this post is long enough as it is.

Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me (Notes on John 7:28-36)

Jesus is preaching in the Temple at the Feast of Tabernacles. The people of Jerusalem have cast doubt on his Messianic claims because "we know this man whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is" (John 7:27).

[28] Then cried Jesus in the temple as he taught, saying, "Ye both know me, and ye know whence I am: and I am not come of myself, but he that sent me is true, whom ye know not. [29] But I know him: for I am from him, and he hath sent me."

It is not clear if the people were audibly criticizing Jesus while he was teaching, or if we are to understand that he knew their thoughts be supernatural means.

We are told that Jesus is widely believed to be the son of Joseph (John 6:42), born in Nazareth and not Bethlehem (John 7:42). When the people say "we know this man whence he is," Jesus agrees -- "Ye both know me, and ye know whence I am." This strongly implies (contra Matthew and Luke) that Jesus really was the son of Joseph, born in Nazareth.

Jesus seems to concede that they know his parentage and place of birth, but that they still do not know fully "whence he is." This is because he was sent by God and is therefore "from" God. Since they do not know God, they cannot truly be said to know where Jesus is from. This is how Jesus reconciles the facts about himself with the expectation that "when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is": the Messiah is sent by God, and comes in a time when no man truly knows God.

This rejoinder seems to rely very heavily on the specific wording of the criticism, playing on a possible ambiguity of "whence he is." It does not address the possible biblical sources of the criticism, about being of unknown "generation" (Isa. 53:8), coming "with the clouds of heaven" (Dan. 7:13), or coming "suddenly . . . to his temple" (Mal. 3:1). This makes me think that the belief that "no man knoweth whence he is" had some other source -- perhaps an oral tradition, or perhaps some biblical text modern commentators have not yet noticed.

The Jewish expectation that the Messiah would be "unknown" is put in the mouth of Justin Martyr's Jewish interlocutor in the Dialogue with Trypho (c. AD 155-160). It is unclear whether the dialogue really took place and how closely the "Trypho" character reflects the views of the historical rabbi for whom he is named, but it seems likely that an apologetic text would, for practical reasons, address current beliefs, even if the dialogue itself is a fictional device.

In Chapter 8 of the dialogue, Trypho says,

But Christ -- if he has indeed been born, and exists anywhere -- is unknown, and does not even know himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint him, and make him manifest to all. And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves, and for his sake are inconsiderately perishing.

This is interesting -- the idea that the Messiah would not even know himself until he was anointed by Elijah. The Synoptics identify John the Baptist with Elijah. This identification is not present in the Fourth Gospel (in fact John specifically denies being Elijah in John 1:21), but it is interesting in the context of this Jewish expectation that John first says "there standeth one among you, whom ye know not" (John 1:26) and then later identifies this person as Jesus, saying, "I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water" (John 1:31). John believed that his role was to make the unknown Messiah known -- perhaps even to himself?

Was anointing part of John's baptismal ceremony? It is never explicitly mentioned as such, but ceremonial washing and anointing go hand in hand in the Old Testament (e.g. Ex. 29:4-7).

Later, in Chapter 44, Trypho makes this curious comment (the brackets are not mine but the translator's).

For we all expect that Christ will be a man [born] of men, and that Elijah when he comes will anoint him. But if this man appear to be Christ, he must certainly be known as man [born] of men; but from the circumstance that Elijah has not yet come, I infer that this man is not He [the Christ].

According to Trypho here, the Jewish expectation was not that the Messiah was to be of unknown birth or parentage; on the contrary, "he must certainly be known as man born of men." It seems likely that this was a genuine Jewish expectation, since Justin (a proponent of the Virgin Birth) would have gained nothing by putting it in the rabbi's mouth.

If the Dialogue with Trypho is any guide to the beliefs of Jesus' contemporaries, "when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is" means not that the Messiah would be a man of mysterious origin, that no one would know where he was born or who is parents were; but that until Elijah actually anointed him, no one would be able to predict who he would be. It would come as a surprise to everyone, including the newly anointed Messiah himself! The meaning of the criticism may have been: This man (presumed not yet to have been anointed by Elijah and thus not yet the Messiah) is already famous, and there are already lots of rumors that he may be the Messiah; but we know that the true Messiah will "come out of nowhere," a previously unknown figure suddenly elevated to that position by Elijah.

Why was it believed that Elijah would anoint the Messiah? The only hint of this I can find in the Old Testament is in Malachi.

Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts. . . . and he shall purify the sons of Levi (Mal. 3:1, 3).

There are two messengers here: The first prepares the way for the second, and this second is "the Lord" (ha-adon), possibly the Messiah. Later in Malachi, we read,

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse (Mal. 4:5-6).

Reading these two passages in light of each other, it is natural to conclude that the first messenger is Elijah, and that "the great and dreadful day of the Lord" is the coming of the second messenger, the Messiah.

Which of the two "shall purify the sons of Levi"? Perhaps it is Elijah. (I discuss this vis-à-vis the idea that Elijah would baptize in my notes on John 1.) Malachi 2 holds up the patriarch Levi as an example of righteousness and enjoins the priests (a subset of the "sons of Levi") to return to the ways of their great ancestor. Thus, purifying the sons of Levi could involve turning "the heart of the children to their fathers," which is what Elijah is to do. In the Torah, mere Levites (descendants of Levi but not of Aaron) were purified by water, but priests (descendants of both Levi and Aaron) were both washed and anointed. Thus we might conclude that Elijah will be washing and anointing people and preparing the way for the Messiah. Since the Messiah must himself be anointed (that being what the word messiah means), it is natural to assume that Elijah would do it.

Since Malachi 3-4 is the source of this whole "return of Elijah" thing, Malachi 3:1 remains the only convincing source of the idea that the Messiah would appear "suddenly" and not be known in advance.

As usual, Jesus is not really interested in "Bible-bashing" or refuting his critics on their own terms. He could have said, "Actually, no one knew who I was until Elijah -- who is John -- discovered me, and here I am appearing suddenly in the Temple just as prophesied." Instead, he only uses the criticism as a point of departure, and zeroes in on what is really important: You don't accept me because you don't know God.

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[30] Then they sought to take him: but no man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come.

The Greek could mean that they tried to seize him but couldn't, or that they wanted to seize him but didn't dare. I think the latter reading is more probable. Jesus continues teaching after this, apparently still in the Temple. There is no indication that he ran away, or that anything happened to stop those who were trying to take him. My reading is that they wanted to arrest him right away but thought, as the chief priests are reported to have said on another occasion in the Synoptics, "Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people" (Matt. 26:5, cf. Mark 14:2).

The author adds, though, that the real reason Jesus was not yet arrested was providential: "his hour was not yet come." Only the Fourth Gospel has these references to Jesus' hour or time not yet having come. In John 2:4, Jesus is at first unwilling to provide wine for wedding guests because his "hour is not yet come"; however, he ends up providing the wine miraculously anyway, seemingly right away. In John 7:6-8, he says he's not going to the Feast of Tabernacles because his "time is not yet come," but he ends up going anyway a few days later. Here (John 7:30) and in John 8:20, Jesus' arrest and execution are providentially postponed until his hour has come.

It is evident that the timing of everything Jesus did was extremely important, and that a few days (going to the feast) or even hours or minutes (providing wine) could make a difference.

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[31] And many of the people believed on him, and said, "When Christ cometh, will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done?" 

[32] The Pharisees heard that the people murmured such things concerning him; and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him.

The basis of the people's belief was simple: He did lots of miracles, so he must be the Messiah. Why did the Pharisees so confidently disbelieve? Because they were steeped in scripture and the interpretative traditions that had grown up around it, and they had a long list of highly specific expectations regarding the Messiah. We saw this in John 6:30, where they could still say "What sign showest thou?" after witnessing miraculous healings and the feeding of the 5,000, because Jesus had not yet produced the omer of manna their fathers ate in the wilderness, a specific requirement derived very indirectly from Deuteronomy.

I feel this has the makings of a good bell curve midwit meme.

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[33] Then said Jesus unto them, "Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me. [34] Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come."

It seems inarguable that v. 33 refers to Jesus' coming death and subsequent ascent to Heaven. What, then, is meant by v. 34?

Since recent references to the Jews "seeking" Jesus (vv. 1, 25, 30) have referred to their seeking to kill or lay hands on him, the most natural reading is, "I'm going somewhere where you won't be able to catch me." As William W. Phelps wrote after the assassination of Joseph Smith, "Traitors and tyrants now fight him in vain . . . Death cannot conquer the hero again." Upon reflection, though it's a pretty strange thing to say before one’s death, to the very people who are going to have one killed. "You'll never be able to kill me -- I mean, you will, but only once! After that, you'll never be able to kill me again!" More to the point, why would anyone even be seeking to kill Jesus after he had already been publicly executed and was known to be already dead? He rose from the dead, true, but his enemies didn't believe that. He made several private appearances to his disciples after his resurrection, but he wasn't waltzing around Jerusalem as a public figure, inviting a second round of attempts on his life. There were plots to kill the risen Lazarus (John 12:10) but none to kill the risen Christ.

Another possible reading is that the same Jews who now want him dead will later have a change of heart and seek him as disciples, to follow him and be saved -- but that it will be too late. That can't be right, though. Repentance is always possible, and "he that seeketh findeth" (Matt. 7:8, Luke 11:10). Also, empirically, it doesn't appear that any of the Jews who plotted against Jesus had a change of heart after his death and resurrection. And if they had, the example of the anti-Christian Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul, suggests that they would have been forgiven and accepted as disciples.

Perhaps Jesus means that they will not seek him, Jesus of Nazareth, as such, but rather "the Messiah" (who is Jesus, though they do not recognize him as such). In the catastrophes to be poured out on Judaea in the decades after Jesus, particularly the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, the Jews will cry out for the Messiah to come and save them -- but no Messiah will come, because he already came, and they rejected him. This interpretation is strengthened when Jesus repeats this statement in the next chapter: "I go my way, and ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go, ye cannot come. . . . for if ye believe not that I am he" -- i.e., that I, Jesus, am the Messiah -- "ye shall die in your sins" (John 8:21, 24).

Jesus later says much the same thing to his own disciples: "Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me: and as I said unto the Jews, 'Whither I go, ye cannot come'; so now I say to you" (John 13:33). The crucial difference is that he only says, "ye shall seek me" -- without adding "and shall not find me" or "and shall die in your sins."

In fact, "Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me" may well be an allusion to Jeremiah.

For thus saith the Lord, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. . . . Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the Lord: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the Lord; and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive (Jer. 29:10-14).

In Jeremiah, "seek me and find me" refers to the Israelite exiles in Babylon praying to be returned to their homeland and God answering their prayers. After the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, the Jews must have prayed similar prayers, and their hope must have been that "the Messiah" would deliver them -- but those prayers were not answered.

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[35] Then said the Jews among themselves, "Whither will he go, that we shall not find him? will he go unto the dispersed among the Gentiles, and teach the Gentiles? [36] What manner of saying is this that he said, 'Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come?'"

Roger Hathaway maintains that the word gentile in the Bible never means "any non-Israelite" and often specifically refers to the Israelites.

The Greek word, "ethnos" (,θvoς) means exactly the same as the Roman word, "gens." When "ethnos" (,θvoς) was used by Jesus or others, they didn't mean "non-Jews;" they meant "those of our own ethnic group: Israelite tribes." Occasionally the word referred to some other specific ethnic group, but it never meant "all nations of the world other than the Jews!"

When I first read v. 35 above, I thought it was a bit of evidence in favor of Hathaway's theory. If we understand gentile in the usual way, as meaning "non-Israelite," then the Jews are wondering if Jesus will go the those Israelites who are dispersed among the non-Israelites -- and teach the non-Israelites! Surely he would teach the dispersed, not the gentiles themselves; and if not, why mention the dispersion at all? Using Hathaway's understanding of gentile, though, they are wondering if he will go to those among their own Israelite ethnos who are dispersed and teach them. A much easier reading!

This led me back to Hathaway's article, linked above, to see if he mentioned John 7:35. Au contraire, it turns out.

The Gospel of Mark uses the word "gentile" only two times and those passages are already covered above, in Matthew. Luke uses the word five times and most are repeats of uses in Matthew. John never uses the word in his Gospel.

Checking the original Greek, I see that this is true. The word translated Gentiles in the KJV is Ἕλληνας -- "Greeks," a word which definitely can't mean "Israelites." So much for that idea!

Reference works say that the word was used broadly to refer to anyone who spoke Greek, even those who were not ethnic Greeks. Some dictionaries specify that it referred only to Greek-speaking non-Jews, but it doesn't seem as if that can be true. The only way v. 35 makes sense is if Greeks included Greek-speaking Israelites of the diaspora. (Even in Palestine, there seems to have been a great deal of Greek influence. We find plenty of Greek names in Galilee and Judaea -- Andrew, Philip, Nicodemus -- and of course the New Testament itself was written in Greek.)

It is interesting that these skeptics would have guessed that Jesus was going to go abroad and teach the dispersed Israelites in Greece and elsewhere. This suggests that they were thinking in Messianic terms despite themselves, since bringing the dispersed back to Israel was supposed to be one of the main missions of the Messiah.

When Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is (Notes on John 7:25-27)

Jesus is in Jerusalem, having made a surprise visit in the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, despite his general policy of "not walk[ing] in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him" (John 7:1). He is preaching in the Temple and has just read a biblical text, possibly Malachi 2:1-3:1.

[25] Then said some of them of Jerusalem, "Is not this he, whom they seek to kill? [26] But, lo, he speaketh boldly, and they say nothing unto him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is the very Christ? [27] Howbeit we know this man whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is."

When Jesus said the Jews were trying to kill him, he was ridiculed: "Thou hast a devil: who goeth about to kill thee?" (John 7:20). Here we see that they did in fact know that people were trying to kill him. The fact that Jesus does not seem to be afraid, and that no one is doing anything to stop him, makes them think that perhaps he is the Messiah and that the rulers know it.

What was the scriptural basis for the belief that "when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is"? Commentaries generally cite Isaiah 53:8, Daniel 7:13, and Malachi 3:1 as possible sources.

Isaiah 53:8 says of the Suffering Servant figure, "who shall declare his generation?" The word translated as generation is at least as vague in Hebrew as in English. It could mean his ancestry, his contemporaries, or his descendants; or it could refer to an "age" or period of time, either in the past or the future. "Who can say who his ancestors are?" is one possible reading among many. More importantly, though, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 was not generally understood by Jews to be the Messiah, who was expected to be a triumphant king. The Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 thought Isaiah might be referring to himself; the medieval rabbi Rashi thought the nation of Israel as a whole was the Suffering Servant. Not until the Christians reinterpreted the idea of the Messiah in the light of Jesus' actual life did anyone think of the Messiah as someone who would suffer. I don't think the Jews of Jesus' time would have disqualified an otherwise promising Messiah claimant for not fitting the description in Isaiah 53.

Daniel 7:13 reads in part, "I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven" -- implying that the Son of Man would just appear out of the clear blue sky, rather than being born, growing up, etc. However, Daniel's Son of Man, like Isaiah's Suffering Servant, was not universally understood to be the Messiah. The text of Daniel 7 itself seems to interpret the Son of Man -- the last of five symbolic figures that represent kingdoms -- as "the saints of the Most High" rather than as a specific individual. Some rabbis, including Rashi, do interpret the Son of Man as the Messiah, though.

What did Jesus' contemporaries think about the Son of Man? This passage from John 12 perhaps sheds some light on the question.

[23] And Jesus answered them, saying, "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. [24] Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. . . ."

[34] The people answered him, "We have heard out of the law that Christ abideth for ever: and how sayest thou, 'The Son of man must be lifted up?' who is this Son of man?" (John 12:23-24, 34)

Jesus strongly implies that the Son of Man will die, and the people protest that "Christ abideth for ever" -- so they apparently assumed that the Son of Man was identical to the Messiah. Their final question, "Who is this Son of man?" -- not "How can the Messiah die?" -- suggests that they were also open to other interpretations of Daniel's prophecy, though. They're saying, in effect, "Well, if the Son of Man is going to die, he can't be the Messiah. If he's not the Messiah, who is he?"

Because the Son of Man prophecy is not unambiguously about the Messiah, it seems that failure to fit its description would also not be disqualifying.

That leaves -- how appropriate! -- Malachi 3:1. Those who have read my last couple of posts will know that I first speculated, based on indirect textual evidence, that Jesus might have read part of Malachi 2 (I suggested vv. 1-10) in the Temple.  Later, after rereading Malachi and realizing how appropriate the rest of the chapter and Malachi 3:1 were, I revised my hypothesis to include those verses. This speculation had nothing to do with John 7:27, and I did not connect the two at all. Then as I was writing the present post, I checked several Bible commentaries and discovered that Malachi 3:1 just happens to be one of the three verses commonly cited to explain the expectation that "when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is."

Here is the text of the verse in question:

Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord (ha-adon), whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts (YHWH sabaoth).

The King James Version, and many other translations, translates the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) as "the LORD," using all capitals to distinguish this from the common noun lord (adon), which can refer to human lords as well as to God. For example, Psalm 110 begins, "The LORD (YHWH) said unto my Lord (l'adoni) . . . ." In the KJV, both instances of Lord in Malachi 3:1 are in all caps, so I had always assumed that it was the Tetragrammaton both times. But in fact the first instance is literally "the Lord," ha-adon. There are only six instances of adon with the definite article ha in the Bible. The other five are all in Isaiah, and are all used in the phrase ha-adon YHWH sabaoth (KJV "the Lord, the LORD of hosts"). Malachi 3:1 is the only reference to ha-adon which does not immediately identify him with the Lord of Hosts. The Lord of Hosts also appears in this verse, but as if a separate figure: "he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts" -- not "I shall come." The characterization of ha-adon as "the messenger of the covenant" also seems incompatible with his being the Lord of Hosts. Men and angels can be messengers of God, but how could God himself be anyone's messenger?

On the other hand, who else could ha-adon be but the Lord of Hosts? The two titles are inextricably linked, the former never occurring without the latter; and of whom but God himself could we say that the Temple was "his temple"? As for the "messenger" reference, we might compare it to the Old Testament concept of the "theophanic angel" ("angel" and "messenger" being the same word in Hebrew), the "angel of the Lord" which is somehow also the Lord himself. There are many instances of this in the Bible, but the most famous is in Exodus:

And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. . . .

God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said,  ". . . I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."

And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God (Ex. 3:2, 4, 6).

From a Christian perspective, Malachi 3:1 is a supremely appropriate verse to apply to Christ -- who was both the Messiah, the messenger of God, and in some sense God himself -- one with God and yet distinct from God -- an ambiguity which Malachi seems to capture perfectly. And since this whole conversation is taking place after Jesus suddenly appeared unexpectedly in the Temple, it would be supremely ironic if the Jews' reason for dismissing him was that he did not fulfill Malachi 3:1 -- the very verse he was at that moment fulfilling!

That's from a Christian point of view, though. The question is whether the Jews of Jesus time would have seen Malachi 3:1 as a Messianic prophecy at all. Rashi understands ha-adon to be God himself, not the Messiah (only in Christianity are the two in any sense one and the same), but Rashi lived centuries after Christ. Might Jesus' contemporaries have understood ha-adon to be the Messiah?

Let's go back to Psalm 110, which I briefly referred to above. In the Synoptics, Jesus apparently takes it for granted that the Jews will understand "my Lord" (adoni) to be the Messiah.

[35] And Jesus answered and said, while he taught in the temple, "How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David? [36] For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool. [37] David therefore himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then his son?" (Mark 12:35-37; cf. Matt. 22:42-45, Luke 20:41-44)

Normally, if David said "my Lord," we would assume that a sovereign king could have no lord but God himself. Here, though, "the LORD" and "my Lord" are clearly separate characters, and so the Jews of Jesus' time took the latter to be the Messiah. Might they have assumed the same about Malachi 3:1? Doesn't "he [ha-adon] shall come, saith the LORD of hosts" imply a distinction in much the same way that "the LORD said to my Lord" does?

I'm undecided, but I do find it very attractive to think that at this point in the Gospel, Jesus has just quoted Malachi 3:1, is fulfilling Malachi 3:1, and is being dismissed because of Malachi 3:1!

The parentage and birth of Jesus in the four gospels

As the title of this blog indicates, I consider the Fourth Gospel ("of John") to be by far the most authoritative. Of the Synoptics, I consider Mark the most trustworthy, accepting the textual evidence that it is the oldest of the three and that Matthew and Luke are dependent on it.

The idea that Jesus had no biological father but was miraculously born of a virgin occurs only in Luke and Matthew. Let's look at what each gospel has to say about Jesus' parentage and birth.

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John

The Fourth Gospel refers several times to "the mother of Jesus" but never names her. His father is apparently dead or otherwise out of the picture by the time Jesus' ministry begins, because he never appears in the story.

Jesus is twice identified as "the son of Joseph," with no indication that Joseph was his father in anything other than the ordinary sense of that word. After becoming a disciple of Jesus, Philip tells Nathanael,

We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. (John 1:45)

This indicates that Jesus was known publicly, and presumably identified himself, as the son of Joseph. Philip was willing to accept the son of Joseph as the Messiah; he did not expect the Messiah to lack a human father.

Later, Judaeans ("Jews") who had followed Jesus to Galilee said,

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? (John 6:42)

As far as the public knew, there was nothing at all unusual about Jesus' parentage. They knew who his father and mother were, and his father was Joseph.

The only possible hint that Joseph may not have been Jesus' biological father comes from this interchange with the "Jews."

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" (John 8:39-41).

Bruce B. commented,

I've heard people say that this statement was Jesus' opponents referring to his illegitimacy through Mary's "sin" (as they would have assumed). That it represented an escalation of the verbal sparring that was taking place in this passage.

I don't know if this is true.

It's possible that "We be not born of fornication" was a dig at Jesus, who they supposed was born of fornication, but I think it's more natural to read it as a response to Jesus' implication that they were not true children of Abraham. They meant that each of the fathers recorded in their genealogy was the real father, and therefore they were biological descendants of Abraham. The idea that Jesus was widely considered to be "born of fornication" and not Joseph's true son seems to be inconsistent with his being called "Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know."

The Fourth Gospel also contains Jesus' most explicit identification of himself the the "Son of Man." Jesus always speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, and it appears as if his disciples did not conclude until after the Resurrection that he had apparently been referring to himself all along. Even in the Fourth Gospel, confusion about the Son of Man is evident: "How sayest thou, 'The Son of man must be lifted up?' Who is this Son of man?" (John 12:34). However, I think the following passage establishes beyond doubt that Jesus did in fact see himself as the Son of Man.

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day (John 6:53-54).

Son of man -- singular of children of men -- was simply an expression meaning "man." It is far from being the only way of expressing "man," though, and it is curious that Jesus should have adopted that particular label for himself if he was the only man in the history of the world to whom it did not literally apply.

Of course Jesus also repeatedly called himself the Son of God and referred to God as his Father -- more so in the Fourth Gospel than anywhere else. A literal interpretation of this -- as meaning that Jesus had been miraculously begotten by God himself, in the same way that Alexander was rumored to have been miraculously begotten by Zeus -- is the only ground in the Fourth Gospel for supposing a Virgin Birth. However, I think the Gospel makes it tolerably clear that such expressions are not literal. This is most clearly expressed in the prologue:

But as many as received him [Jesus], to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12-13).

Here it is stated that anyone who receives Jesus can become a Son of God -- though obviously, as Nicodemus pointed out (John 3:4), no man can "enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born" to a different biological father. This passage also refers to being "born of" God -- an expression which, taken literally, would make God the mother rather than the father. I believe this makes it clear that being the "Son of God" has nothing to do with the circumstances of one's biological conception or birth.

Near the end of the Gospel, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, "go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God" (John 20:17). Bruce Charlton has suggested that he said this because Mary was his wife and thus God's daughter-in-law. However, the word translated your is plural and refers to Jesus' "brethren." Whether he meant his biological brothers or his disciples, the implication is clear: that God was their Father, too, and that therefore having God as one's Father does not preclude having an ordinary biological father as well.

All in all, nothing in the Fourth Gospel supports the idea of a Virgin Birth. It does not prove that Jesus was not born of a virgin, of course, but if the Fourth Gospel were all we had, we would never suppose that he had been.

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Mark

The Fourth Gospel mentions Joseph by name but not Mary. In Mark, the reverse is true.

"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?" And they were offended at him. (Mark 6:3)

The fact that Jesus is identified as the son of his mother, rather than of his father, does imply that his biological father's identity may have been unknown. Another possibility is that his father had died when Jesus was young, so that he was more closely associated with his mother -- much as Hiram of Tyre was called "the widow's son."

Note that Mary is the mother not only of Jesus but of James, Joses, Juda, and Simon. Later in the Gospel, reference is made to "Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses" (Mark 15:40), "Mary the mother of Joses" (Mark 15:47), and "Mary the mother of James" (Mark 16:1). It seems highly unlikely that this is a different woman -- it would be just a bit too much of a coincidence if Jesus just happened to be have a female follower with the same name as his mother who also happened to have two children with the same names as his brothers!  Assuming this is the same Mary, why is she not identified in these passages -- where she witnesses Jesus' crucifixion and then visits his tomb -- as the mother of Jesus, that surely being the most relevant fact about her in this context? Is the text possibly trying to hint that Mary may not have been his real mother at all? There may have been an expectation that the Messiah would appear mysteriously, without human father or mother. "We know this man whence he is," said the citizens of Jerusalem, "but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is" (John 7:27).

Now that I've noticed this, the idea does seem to have some support elsewhere in Mark.

And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, "Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee."

And he answered them, saying, "Who is my mother, or my brethren?"

And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, "Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother" (Mark 3:32-35).

These are just faint hints, of course, but insofar as the Gospel of Mark hints at anything unusual about Jesus' parentage, it is not so much a matter of a virgin birth as of having no ordinary birth at all.

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Matthew and Luke

These are the only two gospels that tell the story of the conception and birth of Jesus, and there is virtually no overlap between their two accounts.

In Matthew's version of the story, Joseph finds Mary pregnant and plans to break off the engagement, but an angel appears to him in a dream and tells him to go ahead and marry her, because "that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost" (Matt. 1:20). He is also told by the angel to name the child Jesus. Jesus is born in Bethlehem in Judaea, apparently because that was where his parents lived. A year or two after his birth, magicians from the East come looking for the newborn "King of the Jews," having followed a new star. Herod the Great determines to kill this potential rival, and Jesus' family flees to Egypt for safety. An angel again appears to Joseph in a dream to inform him of the death of Herod, and they return to Israel. Finding that Herod Archelaus, Herod the Great's son, now rules Judaea, they settle instead in Nazareth in Galilee.

In Luke's version, Joseph and Mary are already living in Nazareth when the angel Gabriel appears -- to Mary, not Joseph -- and tells her that she will miraculously conceive while still a virgin and that she should call the child Jesus. (The text of the Hail Mary is mostly drawn from Luke.) Later they have to travel to Bethlehem for a census because Joseph's distant ancestor King David was from there, and Jesus is born during their stay there. He is laid in a manger, visited by shepherds, etc. -- the traditional "Christmas story" (with the exception of the "wise men") is from Luke. They stay in Judaea for a short time to do the traditional ceremonies associated with the birth of a firstborn son, and then they return to their hometown of Nazareth.

These are two completely different stories. All they have in common in this:

1. Mary became pregnant as a virgin, while engaged but not yet married to Joseph, and an angel said (to someone!) that the conception was "of the Holy Ghost" and that the child should be named Jesus.
2. "Jesus of Nazareth" was actually born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth.

On the one hand, the many differences between the two nativity stories obviously casts doubt on all the details. It appears as if there were several different legends and rumors in circulation about the birth of Jesus, making it less likely that any particular one of those stories is true. On the other hand, the differences are evidence that the stories told by Matthew and Luke are textually independent -- that neither copied from the other -- giving added weight to the points on which they are in agreement.

That there should be various stories in circulation explaining how Jesus was actually secretly from Bethlehem is not surprising at all. There was an expectation that the Messiah would be from Bethlehem, and one of the arguments against Jesus' messianic claims was that he was not from there. The Fourth Gospel reports:

But some said, "Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?" (John 7:41-42).

The Fourth Gospel lets this criticism go unanswered -- it never says that Jesus actually was from Bethlehem -- but it is only natural that rumors to that effect would spread through the early Christian community. I therefore do not think Matthew and Luke's (mutually contradictory) stories about the birth in Bethlehem have much value as evidence that Jesus really was born there. I assume that he was born in Nazareth.

As for the other point they have in common, it's not surprising that people would take "Son of God" literally and conclude that Jesus could not therefore be the biological son of Joseph. I do find it intriguing, though, that both Matthew and Luke have Mary conceiving as a virgin, before her marriage was consummated, but apparently that was normal for people who were secretly the sons of gods. Similar rumors circulated about Alexander, as reported by Plutarch: "The night before that on which the marriage was consummated, the bride dreamed that there was a peal of thunder and that a thunder-bolt fell upon her womb," meaning that Zeus was the true father of the child.

In Matthew's case, he tells us that Jesus was born of a virgin "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet" in Isaiah 7:14 -- "Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel" (Matt. 1:22). In context, though, Isaiah was clearly talking about a child (named Immanuel, not Jesus!) who was to be born during the reign of Ahaz of Judah, more than seven centuries before Christ; and the word that means "virgin" in Greek has the more general meaning of "young woman" in the original Hebrew of Isaiah. This is not a Messianic prophecy and does not say there will be a virgin birth.

Not -- let me be clear -- that that necessarily invalidates Isaiah 7:14 as having anything to do with Jesus. I can hardly blame Matthew for finding that verse and noticing its applicability to Christ, without reference to the authorial intentions of Isaiah himself -- because it's exactly the sort of thing I do all the time! It would not be a "prophecy" in the strict sense but a synchronicity. If Matthew had not done so first, I could easily see myself discovering it: "In Isaiah's prophecy of the overthrow of Rezin and Pekah, he predicts the birth of a child named Immanuel. When the Septuagint translation was made centuries later, but still long before the birth of Christ, they translated it in such a way as to suggest that Immanuel would be born to a virgin. And what does the name Immanuel mean in Hebrew? 'God is with us.' What are the chances?"

The question is which came first for Matthew, the "prophecy" or the fulfillment? Did Matthew already know that Jesus had been born of a virgin, and then find that this was foreshadowed in Isaiah? Or did he read Isaiah in Greek, find that a virgin birth had been prophesied, and assume that therefore Jesus had been born of a virgin?

This is Matthew, so I tend to assume the latter. The key to Matthew's method is the episode where Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the backs of two animals, an ass and her colt, the author explaining that "this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying . . . thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass" (Matt. 21:4-5). Jesus very obviously did not ride two animals at once like some kind of circus performer -- or if he had done such an outlandish thing, the other gospel writers would have noted it as well. Therefore, for Matthew, fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy is a premise, not a conclusion. Jesus fulfilled prophecy; therefore, he must have ridden an ass and a colt, in accordance with a ridiculously literal reading of Zechariah 9:9. (Had Matthew had access to the works of Kipling, he would surely have concluded that Bobby Wick divided into two Bobby Wicks when he "became an officer and a gentleman"!) Every time Matthew writes "This was done that the prophecy might be fulfilled," we should read it as, "I assume this to have been done, on the grounds that prophecy -- translated into Greek, ripped from context, and interpreted literally -- must be fulfilled."

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My conclusion for now is that I lack any positive belief in the Virgin Birth. It could be true, but I haven't seen any good reason to think so.

The Bread of Life (Notes on John 6:26-58)

Jesus is speaking to the crowd that has been following him back and forth across the Sea of Galilee. He has recently fed 5,000 of them miraculously in the Golan Heights and encounters them again in Capernaum. Not knowing that he got there by walking on water, they ask, "Rabbi, when camest thou hither?"

[26] Jesus answered them and said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.

This seems unfair. These people had already been following Jesus around for some time before he fed them, and many of them very likely came from as far away as Jerusalem. We are told that originally they "followed him, because they saw his miracles which he did on them that were diseased" (John 6:2; emphasis mine) and it seems unlikely that their motivation changed after the feeding of the 5,000. If they just wanted bread, surely there were easier ways of getting it than following Jesus around, over seas and up mountains, in the hope that he would happen to work that particular miracle.

What did Jesus mean to convey by making what, taken literally, is an unjust accusation? I suppose his purpose was to make the people ask themselves why they were following Jesus around. They started following him after seeing him effect paranormal healings, but why? It seems unlikely that any of them literally thought, "This guy can heal the sick; I bet he can produce food out of thin air, too!" but perhaps they were thinking something like that. Perhaps some were sick and wanted to be healed. Perhaps some had sick relatives or friends and wanted them to be healed. Perhaps others, seeing that Jesus had preternatural powers, hoped that he would be able to grant them some other material benefit. They were interested in the miracle-worker, not because the miracles were evidence of his divinity, but because they hoped to be the beneficiaries of some particular miracle. In essence, Jesus is asking whether their following of him is disinterested.

How many of us do follow Jesus disinterestedly, at least in the beginning? Don't people generally turn to God because of some urgent need? Not in my own case, I think. I was quite happy as an atheist and have embraced Christianity only because I find it interesting and true. Oddly, I feel a little bad about saying that, as if it could only be a pose, as if I must really have some deep need that I am ashamed to admit. Or, if it is true, how dare I not need religion? How dare I take up Christianity as if it were geometry or something? Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst! Nevertheless, here I am, with such motives as I have. God knows if they deserve credit or blame.

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[27] Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed."

As always in the King James Version, meat means "food," not specifically animal flesh. No material benefit lasts and is thus not worth working for; only eternal life is of ultimate consequence. This may also prefigure the references to manna which follow, as manna was proverbially perishable.

The "son of man" is, as usual, spoken of in the third person, but Jesus makes it fairly clear later in this chapter that he is referring to himself: "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life" (vv. 53-54).

This is the only occurrence of the phrase "God the Father" in the Gospels.

What is meant by the statement that God has "sealed" the Son of Man? There are no other references to people being "sealed" in the Gospels or in the Old Testament, though the expression does occur in some of the Epistles of Paul and, most famously, in the Revelation of John. (In Mormon usage, sealing refers to ceremonially making familial or spousal relationships permanent, but it is hard to read the Bible as using the word in that sense.)

Paul writes that Abraham "received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised" (Rom. 4:9). Apparently this means that circumcision was outward or visible sign "certifying" Abraham as faithful and righteous, just as an official seal serves to certify the validity of a legal document. Elsewhere, Paul writes "Am I am not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord? If I be not an apostle unto others, yet doubtless I am to you: for the seal of mine apostleship are ye in the Lord" (1 Cor. 1:9). Again, seal seems to refer to a sign or certification. Paul's status as an apostle is disputed, but the Christians of Corinth -- apparently taught and led by Paul -- are living proof that his claim to the title is legitimate. In both of these instances, seal seems to mean something like "visible proof."

Elsewhere, Paul speaks of God sealing people, coming closer to the language of Jesus: "Now he which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God; Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts" (2 Cor. 1:21-22). The meaning of sealed is not entirely clear here, but "marked us as his own" (as if with his signet ring) seems a probable reading.

This connection between sealing and the "earnest of the Spirit" (earnest meaning something like "down payment" or "security deposit") occurs again in Ephesians. "Christ . . . in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory" (Eph. 1:12-14). "And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4:30). These passages suggest that when 2 Cor. says "sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit," the meaning is "sealed us, that is to say, given the earnest of the Spirit." The expression "sealed unto the day of redemption" possibly alludes to Daniel: "But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end" (Dan. 12:4). However, if so, there must be some shift in meaning; Daniel is speaking of sealing a scroll (with sealing wax) so that it cannot be opened until "the time of the end," and it does not make much sense to apply that to a person. What Paul appears to be saying is that God has marked us as his own by putting his Spirit in our hearts, and that this is a sign that we will be saved in the end.

Finally, there is the famous sealing of the 144,000 in Revelation: "And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, Saying, 'Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads'" (Rev. 7:2-3). The context suggests that seals are to mark the faithful, much as lamb's blood marked the doorposts of Moses' people, so that they may be spared the destruction about to be unleashed on the world.

If Paul and John of Patmos are any guide, then, Jesus likely means that God has marked him as his own, possibly (but not necessarily) in some way that would be visible to others. Given the context, in which Jesus seems to say that the people should have sought him simply because he worked miracles (rather than for the results of those miracles), it may be that Jesus' miracles are the "seal" referred to. By miraculously effecting physical healings and multiplying physical bread, Jesus demonstrated that he had the power of God and could therefore do far more significant things than that.

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[28] Then said they unto him, "What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?"

[29] Jesus answered and said unto them, "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent."

Jesus has just told the crowd to "labour . . . for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life" (v. 27). When they ask how they might "work the works of God," they are using the same Greek word -- which Thayer says "is opposite to inactivity or idleness."

Jesus answers that the work of God is to believe in Jesus. How is that work, though? We think of belief as the passive having-of-opinions, scarcely "opposite to inactivity or idleness." Real belief involves thinking, though, and that is work, as the painter Joshua Reynolds said in his 1784 address to the Royal Academy:

In the practice of art, as well as in morals, it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry, will lull to sleep all suspicion of our want of an active exertion of strength. A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite enquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour, -- the real labour of thinking.

(Ironic, isn't it, that I should present Reynolds's words here undigested, by means of "the mere mechanical labour of copying"!)

Jesus calls us to active, not passive, belief. (See Bruce Charlton's post on this subject.) That is the work of God.

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[30] They said therefore unto him, "What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work? [31] Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'"

Wait, "What sign shewest thou?"? Seriously? Aren't they following him because they've already seen him work miraculous healings in Jerusalem and then magically feed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread? I wasn't exaggerating when I wrote (and the end of this post) that the Jews and Samaritans had a very specific set of expectations, above and beyond a generic demand for "miracles." The Prophet like unto Moses was supposed to "produce the omer of manna which our fathers ate, while in the wilderness, for forty years," and if Jesus couldn't do that, he wasn't the Prophet. Sure, sure, lots of nice miracles, very impressive, but where's the manna?

Manna was, as I have said, proverbially perishable, which was part of the point of this promised miracle. As a Samaritan high priest of the early 20th century put it, "When our ancestors, in the days when manna used to fall, would keep some of it till the morrow, it would become rotten and wormy. Therefore, it would be a proof none could deny if it should appear sound after this long interval and remain in its sound state."

The scripture they refer to about "bread from heaven" could be Nehemiah 9:15 or Psalm 105:40, both of which refer poetically to manna in that way. Real manna was not much like bread at all, but is described as being "like coriander seed, white" (Ex. 16: 31), "a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground" (Ex. 16:14). Various theories as to its identity exist, many of them involving insects.

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[32] Then Jesus said unto them, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. [33] For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world."

[34] Then said they unto him, "Lord, evermore give us this bread."

Jesus is telling them that he's not going to do what Moses did, except in an ad hoc metaphorical sense. While he poetically appropriates the Messianic prophecies and draws some of his key metaphors from them (the good shepherd, for example), Jesus fundamentally offers new wine in new bottles and is not interested in shoehorning himself into a precast role. Those who seek to validate his mission by ticking fulfilled prophecies off a checklist are sure to be disappointed, and those who fight this disappointment will drift further and further from the path of intellectual honesty.

In the King James Version, Jesus seems to be saying clearly that the "bread of God" is a person ("he which cometh down"), implicitly himself, which makes the response ("give us this bread") sound stupid, but the original Greek does not imply that the bread is a person and can also be translated as "that which cometh down." The people's response shows that they still understand Jesus to be talking about some improved Manna 2.0 he's going to produce, not about himself. He hasn't dropped that bombshell yet.

What distinguishes the True Bread from mere manna is that the former "giveth life unto the world." Moses' manna gave life, or sustained it anyway, so the distinguishing feature seems to be that "unto the world" bit.

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[35] And Jesus said unto them, "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

This clearly ties in to Jesus' statement to the Samaritan woman at the well, "whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14).

In that earlier episode, Jesus never explains what this "living water" is, instead changing the subject and never returning to it. Here, he seems to say that "drinking of the water" Jesus gives means believing in Jesus himself, and that he himself is the living water, a title that apparently has the same significance as "bread of life."

Drink the living water, and it will become a well inside you; that's why you will never need water from an external source again. In the parable of the sower in Mark 4, "the sower soweth the word" (v. 14), symbolized as corn. Those who receive this corn do not eat it, though, but plant it in their hearts, where it grows up to "bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some an hundred" (v. 20). This directly parallels the water that becomes a wellspring in the one who receives it. In Mark, what is sown is "the word" -- which can mean either Jesus' teaching or (as in John 1) Jesus himself as the embodied Logos. Elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus says, "He that receiveth whomsoever I send receiveth me" (John 13:20), but the Greek word translated as whomsoever does not necessarily refer to a person; whatsoever would also be a possible translation.

Those who truly receive Jesus do not merely accept him as an authority and give passive assent to his pronouncements. They do the work of believing -- the work of God. They internalize Jesus' word and thereby Jesus himself. They receive the Holy Ghost. Instead of merely eating the bread and drinking the water they are given, they create within themselves a field of corn and a well.

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[36] But I said unto you, That ye also have seen me, and believe not.

As I have already noted, the Gospel is rather unclear on whether and to what extent these people did believe in Jesus. We are told that they started following him because of the miracles he worked, and Jesus accuses them of being after a free meal, hoping for a repeat performance of the feeding of the 5,000. They seem to view him as a religious authority, asking "What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?" -- but when Jesus answers that the work of God is to believe in him, Jesus, they say, "What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee?"

It is to this ("that we may see, and believe thee") that Jesus is perhaps responding here: "Ye have seen, and yet believe not." Although they have seen him work miracles, they still demand further signs -- some proof that will overwhelm them and make doubt impossible. They are passively waiting to be wowed. Although they "believe" in a sense, it is not the sort of belief Jesus is trying to elicit, the sort that -- precisely because it is active and not passive -- he called "the work of God."

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[37] All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.

Jesus' followers are those who actively come to him -- and yet in the same breath, they are also described as being passively given to him by the Father. Both divine grace and the personal exercise of free will play a role. Choosing to follow Jesus is sufficient; no one who makes that choice will be rejected.

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[38] For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. [39] And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. [40] And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day."

I'm not why such emphasis is put on this distinction between Jesus' own will and that of the Father who sent him. Surely they want the same things?

The expression "the last day" is unique to this Gospel (with the exception of Nehemiah 8:18, where it refers to the last day of a seven-day feast), and the intended meaning is not obvious. Does it mean the end of the world? Each individual's dying day? Does it just mean "in the end," a generic way of referring to the final result?

Most of the "last day" references are here, in the Bread of Life discourse, but another prominent occurrence is in this dialogue between Jesus and Martha, in the lead-up to the raising of Lazarus (John 11:23-26):

[23] Jesus saith unto her, "Thy brother shall rise again."

[24] Martha saith unto him, "I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day."

[25] Jesus said unto her, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: [26] And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?"

[27] She saith unto him, "Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."

The most natural reading of this is that Martha misunderstood Jesus' first statement as a reference to the Jewish belief that the dead will be raised in the future, when the Messiah comes. (According to Acts 23, this was accepted by the Pharisees but not the Sadducees. Later it became a universal Jewish tenet and was included in the Jewish "creed" formulated by Maimonides.) This is reinforced when Jesus says, "I am the resurrection," and she replies, "Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ" -- the beginning of a dawning realization that Jesus is the Messiah, that this is the Messianic age, and that the resurrection of Lazarus can occur now.

But if "the last day" is used by Martha to mean the future Messianic age, and if Jesus corrects her and points out that their own time is the Messianic age, then what can the expression mean here, in John 6? Is this a reference to the "second coming" (a doctrine of which I am skeptical, and which I do not find clearly expressed in this Gospel) or to the end of the world?

Anyway, whatever time frame is intended by "at the last day," the thrust of this passage is that all those who believe in Jesus will be resurrected, because they have been "given" to him by the Father. I am not sure what exactly this "giving" refers to, or what the Father's role in this is.

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[41] The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, "I am the bread which came down from heaven." [42] And they said, "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?'" 

 [43] Jesus therefore answered and said unto them, "Murmur not among yourselves. 

There is no hint of a virgin birth in the Fourth Gospel. Jesus is simply "the son of Joseph."

What is the answer to this question of the Jews'? If Jesus was born in the ordinary human way, why did he say he "came down from heaven"?

Well, if you accept the doctrine of the premortal life (as I do), then every human being is a spirit which came down from "heaven" to incarnate in a mortal body. Perhaps Jesus had gained access those premortal memories and remembered coming down from heaven.

Another possibility is that this has to do with John's statement that "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him" (John 1:32). If a Spirit from heaven came down and remained on Jesus, permanently, becoming part of him, then there was an aspect of him that came down from heaven rather than being born.

Jesus' only response to this is "Murmur not among yourselves," and then he goes right back to what he was saying, offering no answer at all to their question. He is being deliberately provocative here, saying things that sound impossible and refusing to explain himself. (This will become even more obvious shortly, when starts talking about cannibalism and alienates even many of his own followers!) The method appears to be akin to that of a Zen master, whose koans -- seemingly absurd riddles -- force the student to engage his own thinking and intuition rather than passively accepting the pronouncements of the teacher.

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[44] No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. [45] It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall be all taught of God.' Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me.

Again, no response to the "murmuring." Jesus picks right up where he had left off at the end of v. 40.

The quotation, attributed only to "the prophets," is apparently a paraphrase of Isaiah 54:13, "And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children." In both texts, the use of of in the King James is archaic and potentially confusing. The meaning is not "taught about God" but rather "taught by God." Similarly, "hath learned of the Father" means "has learned from the Father."

Those who come to Jesus have been "taught" to do so by God himself (perhaps because it is the divine spark within that responds to Jesus?). Therefore they have been "given" to Jesus by the Father, and Jesus cannot reject them.

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[46] Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father.

This reads like an interpolation -- or rather two successive interpolations -- added to grind theological axes that were not Jesus' own.

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[47] Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. [48] I am that bread of life. [49] Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. [50] This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. [51] I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."

[52] The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"

[53] Then Jesus said unto them, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. [54] Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. [55] For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.

The "bread of life" metaphor becomes more graphic and upsetting now, as Jesus tells people they must eat his flesh. When the Jews ask, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" Jesus offers no explanation and makes no concession to their sensibilities, instead repeating the offending statement and adding that they must also drink his blood!

I don't have any deep insight at this point on the intended meaning of this symbolism. It's easy to say it refers to Communion, but that's not really an answer. What does the symbolism of Communion really mean? (Also note that there is no Last Supper in the Fourth Gospel.)

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[56] He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

If you eat and drink Jesus, then Jesus is in you -- but why are you also in Jesus? This has the same paradoxical nature as a couplet attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas (Saying 7):

Blessed is the lion which a man eats, making the lion human.

Cursed is the man which a lion eats, making the lion human.

If a man eats a lion, the lion becomes human, because the matter that had been part of a lion is now part of a man instead. If a lion eats a man, the lion also becomes human, because human matter is now incorporated into the body of the lion.

By the same logic, if you eat Jesus, you are transformed by incorporating Jesus into yourself, and Jesus is transformed by becoming part of you. (Or Jesus could eat you, of course -- but assuming Jesus is the "lion" of the Thomas saying, this Soviet-Russia version of Communion is to be avoided.)

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[57] As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. [58] This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever."

This seems to refer back to Jesus' earlier statement, "My food is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work" (John 4:34). Does "eating" Jesus just mean doing his will, then, and finishing his work? Certainly I think we are meant to connect these two passages, especially given the reference in vv. 38-40 to Jesus' doing the Father's will.