Jesus preaches the Bible in the Temple (Notes on John 7:14-24)

Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. He went to the feast secretly, after first telling his brothers that he wasn't going, and didn't make a public appearance until the middle of this seven-day celebration.

[14] Now about the midst of the feast Jesus went up into the temple, and taught.

[15] And the Jews marvelled, saying, "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?"

From the reaction, it is clear that Jesus' teaching involved reading aloud from the Torah or other scripture.

The literacy rate among Jews of Jesus' time was very low -- estimates are generally in the neighborhood of 3% -- and was probably nearly zero in a small town like Nazareth. The Talmudic Tractate of the Scribes explains how Torah readings are to be done in a town with only one literate citizen (he reads seven times, rather than having seven people read), so that was apparently not an uncommon situation. If Jesus had been a carpenter (Mark 6:3) or a carpenter's son (Matt. 13:55), his illiteracy would have been taken for granted.

The Gospel offers no answer to the Jews' question. I suppose the text is trying to imply that Jesus was miraculously able to read without having been taught. It is also possible that he had been taught to read (perhaps by someone who recognized him as an extraordinary child) but that this was not public knowledge. Another possibility is that he was not reading at all but reciting from memory texts that he had surely heard read in the synagogue many times. (This is apparently what John the Baptist did; he quoted Isaiah, but in a way that suggests he was illiterate.)

It will of course be tempting to try to deduce precisely what text Jesus read in the temple, though this is probably a fool's errand.

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[16] Jesus answered them, and said, "My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. 

Jesus says, just after surprising his audience by reading from the Bible, that his teachings are not his own but God's. This implies that the text he chose showed that the distinctive teachings for which he was being criticized were actually not new but were in the Bible.

At this time Jesus is under attack for healing a cripple on the Sabbath and telling him to pick up his mat and walk, violating the injunction to "bear no burden on the sabbath day" (Jeremiah 17:21). Worse, Jesus defended himself by saying, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work" (John 5:17) -- a reply which seems to reject the whole principle of not working on the Sabbath and "said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God" (John 5:18).

My best guess, then, is that Jesus read from the second chapter of Malachi.

[1] And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you.

[2] If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart.

[3] Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it.

[4] And ye shall know that I have sent this commandment unto you, that my covenant might be with Levi, saith the Lord of hosts.

[5] My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared me, and was afraid before my name.

[6] The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips: he walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn many away from iniquity.

[7] For the priest's lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth: for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts.

[8] But ye are departed out of the way; ye have caused many to stumble at the law; ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the Lord of hosts.

[9] Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people, according as ye have not kept my ways, but have been partial in the law.

[10] Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us? why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?

This is one of the few possible references to God as Father in the Old Testament. My own reading is that "one father" referred to is Abraham, not God. The other reading is also possible, though, and in any case Jesus was not exactly a stickler for "original intent." Later during this same visit to Jerusalem, when Jesus calls the Jews children of the devil, they retort, "we have one Father, even God" (John 8:41). It would be appropriate if they were throwing Jesus' own proof-text back at him.

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[17] If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.

A closer translation would be "If any man wants to do his will." The noun and verb translated will are forms of the same Greek word (θέλῃ τὸ θέλημα αὐτοῦ ποιεῖν). You don't have to do God's will in order to know of the doctrine, which is fortunate, since none of us consistently does God's will; you just have to want to do God's will. Once you have that sincere intention to do the will of God, God will enable you to know what that will is.

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[18] He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.

This is another reason for my choosing Malachi 2 as Jesus' probable text. Malachi has the Lord insist that the priests "give glory unto my name" (Mal. 2:2) and holds Levi up as an example because "the law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips." The word translated iniquity is ἀδικία in the Septuagint, the same word translated unrighteousness in John 7:18.

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[19] Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill me?"

[20] The people answered and said, "Thou hast a devil: who goeth about to kill thee?"

Malachi wrote, "Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?" (Mal. 2:10). Jesus calls his antagonists out for breaking the Law of Moses by treacherously going about to kill him.

This is one of the few references to demon possession in the Fourth Gospel. "Thou hast a devil" clearly means something like, "You're crazy." The insincerity of this retort is evident a few verses later, when the people ask each other, "Is not this he whom they seek to kill?" (v. 25).

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[21] Jesus answered and said unto them, "I have done one work, and ye all marvel. [22] Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision; (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers;) and ye on the sabbath day circumcise a man. [23] If a man on the sabbath day receive circumcision, that the law of Moses should not be broken; are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit whole on the sabbath day? [24] Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment."

This passage from Malachi also says religious leaders have "caused many to stumble at the law" and "corrupted the covenant of Levi." Part of the Levitical law is that when a baby boy is born, "in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised" (Lev. 12:3) -- even if the eighth day happens to be the Sabbath, even though circumcision is "work."

It is not clear if the parenthetical remark is Jesus' own or that of the author, but the fact that circumcision was not "of Moses, but of the fathers" was a key part of the rabbinical justification for performing circumcisions on the Sabbath. The command to circumcise on the eighth day, though reiterated by Moses, was originally given to Abraham as part of an "everlasting covenant" (Gen. 17:7).

And God said unto Abraham, "Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations. This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child . . . that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations" (Gen. 17:9-12).

The rabbinical reasoning was that the Sabbath was not instituted until Moses, and so the commandment to Abraham could not have included any exception for the Sabbath. Since it was an "everlasting covenant," it could not have changed later; therefore, babies born on the Sabbath could and must be circumcised on the Sabbath, even though this violated the ban on "work."

Jesus' point is that the circumcision exception shows that the Sabbath laws are not absolute and can be overridden by higher duties. Malachi has God say of Levi, "My covenant was with him of life and peace." Surely healing a man who needed healing was in keeping with the overall purpose of the Law, even if it violated some legalistic details. One should keep in mind that the original complaint was not that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, but that he had commanded the healed man to carry his mat. Jesus tries to shift the focus of attention from this insignificant point to the bigger picture.

I have to say I'm feeling pretty confident about this Malachi 2 guess. I began this post with no idea what text Jesus read and little expectation of figuring it out, but now I honestly can't think of anything that fits the context better than Malachi 2.

Jesus arrives late for the Feast of Tabernacles (Notes on John 7:1-13)

I find this episode confusing, which is one of the reasons I've delayed writing about it for so long. I'll give it my best shot.

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[1] After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.

"These things" -- feeding the 5,000, walking on water, the Bread of Life discourse -- all took place in Galilee, not "Jewry" (Judaea), but the crowd that witnessed these things apparently included "Jews" (Judaeans) who had followed him from Jerusalem after witnessing his miracles there. They would not try to kill him in Galilee, where he was among his own people and they themselves were strangers, but they would be bolder if he returned to Judaea.

Or perhaps "these things" refers to earlier miracles wrought in Jerusalem. Later, when Jesus does after all return to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles, he says to the hostile crowd, "I have done one work, and ye all marvel" (7:21), and what follows makes it clear that he is referring to his healing of a man at Bethesda on the Sabbath.

Although I don't know enough Greek to suggest this with any confidence, perhaps μετά is here being used in the sense of "with, among" rather than "after." Perhaps the correct reading is, "As he was doing these things (feeding the 5,000, walking on water, etc.), Jesus walked in Galilee, for (ever since the healing at Bethesda) he would not walk in Judaea, because the Judaeans sought to kill him (for breaking the Sabbath)."

Or perhaps this whole verse has been transposed from its proper place in the text? As I have noted before, John 5 ends with Jesus in Jerusalem (and the Jews there seeking to kill him), and then John 6 begins with his crossing the Sea of Galilee, which is nowhere near Jerusalem.

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[2] Now the Jew's feast of tabernacles was at hand.

[3] His brethren therefore said unto him, "Depart hence, and go into Judaea, that thy disciples also may see the works that thou doest. [4] For there is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou do these things, shew thyself to the world."

[5] For neither did his brethren believe in him.

The Feast of Tabernacles was (together with Passover and Pentecost) one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, when all Jews who were able were expected to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem.

The advice to "go into Judaea, that thy disciples also may see the works that thou doest" seems strange, since John 6 (which takes place in and around Galilee) is full of references to Jesus' disciples being with him. (Simon, Andrew, Philip, and Judas are mentioned by name.) It seems that his disciples "followed" him in a very literal sense, accompanying him in all his peregrinations. He must have had other disciples as well who stayed in Judaea, and his brothers must have meant "that they disciples there also may see" -- and I see that many modern translations insert that word.

As Mark tells the story, when Jesus began preaching, working miracles, and drawing crowds, his friends and family "went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself" (Mark 3:21). Not believing that Jesus was who he said he was, they very understandably wanted to stop him from embarrassing the family by making a public spectacle of himself. In the Fourth Gospel's account, we have the opposite situation: Jesus is lying low in Galilee, and his unbelieving relatives are urging him to make more of a public spectacle -- to "go into Judaea" and "shew thyself unto the world."

What could their motive have been in urging this? I can think of three possibilities:

1. They just wanted to get rid of him. They lived in Galilee, and their brother was embarrassing them, so they wanted to get him out of Galilee. I don't think this is a plausible reading. First, they must have known that the Judaeans wanted to kill him, and it seems unlikely that they would have sent their own brother to his death. Second, they were encouraging him to go to Judaea during the feast, at a time when all the Jews went to Judaea -- "shew thyself unto the world," they said. If it was embarrassing to have Jesus raising a ruckus in Galilee, how much more embarrassing to have him do so before all Jewry -- including all their friends and neighbors, who would come back to Galilee full of talk about Jesus! Finally, they themselves also intended to go to Judaea for the feast; they were urging Jesus to go with them. If their motive was to save face by hushing up their brother's scandalous claims about himself, they would have said the opposite of what the Gospel records them saying; they might have said something like, "I know you're supposed to go to Jerusalem for the feast, but the Judaeans want to kill you. I think you'd better just stay here in Galilee and keep a low profile, and we'll go to the feast without you."

2. They were calling his bluff, or trying to use reverse psychology. They were trying to cure Jesus of his "delusions" by pushing them to their natural conclusion and forcing him to realize that he didn't actually believe what he was saying about himself. "You're the Messiah, are you? Well, in that case, you should have no problem waltzing into Jerusalem and announcing that fact to the Pharisees and the Roman governor, right? What's that, you're afraid they might kill you? You don't actually believe you're the invincible Messiah after all? Yeah, that's what we thought." I can't rule out this reading, but it doesn't sit well with me.

3. They believed, at least tentatively, that Jesus was the Messiah and were genuinely troubled by his reluctance to go to Jerusalem. They were urging him to do what they thought the Messiah ought to do, and to prove thereby that he was in fact the Messiah. In this reading, "neither did his brethren believe in him" might be better translated as "even his brethren had doubts," or "even his brethren lacked confidence in him." They didn't disbelieve him in the sense of thinking he was an impostor or mentally ill, but they couldn't understand why he was hanging around in some Galilean backwater instead of going to Jerusalem to announce his identity and claim the throne of David.

It is this third reading that seems most likely to me. Although we never hear anything else about Jesus' brothers in the Fourth Gospel, his brother James is later referred to as an apostle (Gal. 1:19); and Jude, the author of the epistle, may also have been Jesus' brother (see Jude 1:1, Mark 6:3); so it appears that his brothers were not out-and-out unbelievers but merely struggled with doubt at times, when Jesus' behavior seemed inconsistent with what the Messianic prophecies had led them to expect.

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[6] Then Jesus said unto them, "My time is not yet come: but your time is alway ready. [7] The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil. [8] Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up yet unto this feast: for my time is not yet full come."

[9] When he had said these words unto them, he abode still in Galilee. [10] But when his brethren were gone up, then went he also up unto the feast, not openly, but as it were in secret.

This is the second time in this Gospel we see Jesus refusing to do as requested, saying it is not his time yet, and then almost immediately doing it after all. The first instance of this in in John 2; when Jesus' mother informs him that there is no wine, he replies, "Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come" (v. 4) -- a reply which his mother ignores, telling the servants to do whatever Jesus says, and Jesus proceeds to provide wine miraculously. Did he work this miracle despite the time not being right, because his mother had asked him to? Or was his idea of "the right time" so specific that hours or even minutes after his mother's request the time was right?

As we read later in this chapter (v. 14), Jesus finally appeared "about the midst of the feast" -- meaning around the fourth day of this seven-day festival. Is that because his time was "full come" by then? What difference could it possibly make whether he showed up for the festival on time or three days late?

My best guess is that the delay had to do with the fact that Judaeans sought to kill him for healing on the Sabbath. The first and last days of the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles were Sabbath-like observances on which all work was forbidden, but work was permitted on the other five days. If Jesus, with his reputation as a healer, had arrived in Jerusalem on the first day of the feast, there would doubtless have been people there in need of healing, and he would have to heal them or else refuse to do so. Refusing to heal on the first day of the feast would look like a concession that the Pharisees were right, that it had been wrong to heal on a day when work was forbidden by the Law of Moses. On the other hand, healing on that day, brazenly repeating the offense for which "the Jews sought to kill him," could have put his life in danger -- and, as Bruce Charlton has recently discussed, it was important for Jesus to die at the right time, staying alive until his mission had been accomplished. Jesus may have judged that he was relatively safe during the feast -- in the Synoptics, those who plot his death say, "Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people" (Mark 14:2, Matt. 26:5) -- but openly healing on a mandatory day of rest might have been pushing his luck a little too far.

Against this interpretation, we have the fact that Jesus did again heal on the Sabbath during this visit to Jerusalem (John 9:14). This was after he had already been in Jerusalem for several days, though, publicly saying provocative things and defending his earlier Sabbath healing. That he was able to get away with this was taken as evidence that he was the Messiah: "Then said some of them of Jerusalem, 'Is not this he, whom they seek to kill? But, lo, he speaketh boldly, and they say nothing unto him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is the very Christ?'" (vv. 25-26). When, days later, Jesus finally provoked the Jews to the point that they took up stones to stone him (John 10:31), he "escaped out of their hand" (10:39). This escape was probably possible in part because in the preceding days he had impressed the crowd and built up enough good will that a substantial portion of the citizenry were on his side. If he had appeared on the first day of the feast and immediately started flagrantly breaking the Law of Moses, the reception might have been rather different.

This is all speculative, of course, but it is the only interpretation that makes sense to me. I think Jesus was constantly walking the razor's edge, pondering precisely how provocative he could afford to be and going that far and no further, at least until his mission was accomplished and he could submit to death.

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[11] Then the Jews sought him at the feast, and said, "Where is he?"

[12] And there was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for some said, "He is a good man": others said, "Nay; but he deceiveth the people."

[13] Howbeit no man spake openly of him for fear of the Jews.

Here is more evidence that it was important for Jesus to make his appearance at precisely the right time and in the right way. Everyone was anticipating his arrival and wondering what he would say and do. He delayed his arrival, letting the anticipation build up, and then appeared in the Temple preaching from the Bible -- an appearance calculated to defuse the accusation that he flouted the authority of Moses.

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 feeding of the five thousand echoes one of Elisha's miracles

I just listened to this story in 2 Kings (4:38, 42-44).

And Elisha came again to Gilgal: and there was a dearth in the land; . . . 

And there came a man from Baalshalisha, and brought the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley, and full ears of corn in the husk thereof.

And [Elisha] said, "Give unto the people, that they may eat."

And his servitor said, "What, should I set this before an hundred men?" 

He said again, "Give the people, that they may eat: for thus saith the Lord, They shall eat, and shall leave thereof."

So he set it before them, and they did eat, and left thereof, according to the word of the Lord.

Someone gives the prophet a small number of barley loaves to feed a large number of people. The prophet's servant expresses incredulity, but the prophet insists. The people eat, and miraculously it is enough and to spare. Compare this to the feeding of the 5,000, the only miracle apart from the Resurrection to appear in all four Gospels (John 6:5-13, Mark 6:35-44, Luke 9:12-17, Matt. 14:15-21).

Although the four accounts of the miracle are very similar, there are two ways in which the Fourth Gospel's version more closely echoes the story of Elisha.

First, Elisha's bread was provided by a single person, "a man from Baalshalisha"; and this man offered it unsolicited, without being asked by the prophet. In all three Synoptics, the bread and fish are provided by the disciples collectively; and in Matthew and Mark, Jesus directly asks them to do so. In John, though, the food is volunteered by a single person, as in the Elisha story.

One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, saith unto him, "There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?" (John 6:8-9).

Second, only the Fourth Gospel specifies that they are barley loaves. In fact, 2 Kings 4 and John 6 are the only two places in the entire Bible where barley loaves are mentioned.

Elisha fed 100 people with 20 loaves -- five people per loaf -- which, depending on how big the loaves were, hardly seems like a miracle at all. (A modern loaf of bread typically has about 20 slices; Elisha's must have been much smaller.) Jesus fed 5,000 people with just five loaves -- 1,000 people per loaf -- a feat 200 times as miraculous as Elisha's. Also, while those who ate Elisha's bread "left thereof," those who ate Jesus' left enough crumbs to fill 12 baskets -- surely much more than the original volume of the bread.

Luke's account may contain a subtle reference to Jesus' feeding 50 times as many people as Elisha. Before feeding the multitude, "he said to his disciples, 'Make them sit down by fifties in a company'" (Luke 9:14). Elisha fed 100 people, but Jesus fed 100 companies of people.

The "fake Jew" question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repentance, forgiveness, and damnation in the Fourth Gospel

No form of the word repent, forgive, or mercy occurs anywhere in the Fourth Gospel.

Confess is used only with reference to confessing that Jesus is the Christ, and to John's confessing that he himself was not the Christ. It is never used in the context of confessing sins.

The word sinner is used only by the Pharisees.

Condemn is used only to say that Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn it, and that those who believe are not condemned.

Hell does not occur.

There is only one reference to damnation: "And shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation" (John 5:29).

Hard sayings (Notes on John 6:59-71)

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son."
Abe said, "Man, you must be puttin' me on!"

-- Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"

Jesus has just announced, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you" (John 6:53). Since the most basic meaning of son of man is just "man" (the singular of children of men), this essentially means, "Except ye eat human flesh and drink human blood . . . ." That he later clarified that he meant himself, not just any old human, doesn't really make this statement any less disturbing. He concludes, "he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven: . . . he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever" (John 6:57-58).

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[59] These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum. [60] Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, "This is an hard saying; who can hear it?"

When I started this blog, I actually considered "Hard Sayings" as a possible name.

The disciples' complaint could be translated as, "This is difficult; who can understand it?" or, "This is offensive; who can listen to it?" The latter seems a more likely reading to me. As Mark Twain famously quipped, "It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." Cannibalism, even as a metaphor for something spiritual, is pretty shocking -- and let's not forget that for much of Christendom even today, it's not a metaphor at all; that many of the faithful participate in a ceremony in which they believe they are literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus of Nazareth.

Even Jesus' own disciples balk at such an outrageous statement -- as he must have known they would. And, as usual, Jesus makes no attempt to explain himself or to couch his teachings in more acceptable terms. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was intentionally being offensive and confusing, that these "hard sayings" were a sort of test -- not nearly as extreme as God's commanding Abraham to murder his own son (Gen. 22) or Nephi to decapitate an unconscious man (1 Ne. 4), but not really qualitatively different. His disciples face a stark choice: accept the unacceptable, or stop following Jesus.

Nephi actually committed the commanded murder; Abraham was spared by a last-minute "just kidding" from God. Had the angel not stopped him, would Abraham have gone through with it? Should he have? I don't want to rewrite Fear and Trembling here, but these are extremely important questions. Trying to put myself in the sandals of Jesus' early disciples, I can think of five possible reactions.

1. Jesus has already shown himself to be good and trustworthy. Therefore, if he says cannibalism is good, cannibalism is good. Pass the human blood.
2. Jesus has already shown himself to be good and trustworthy. Therefore, he can't possibly mean what he appears to mean here. I can continue to follow him, confident that he will never really ask me to eat his flesh or drink his blood.
3. Cannibalism is so obviously evil that this proves Jesus was a fraud all along and that his "miracles" were from the devil. I should stop following him immediately.
4. This shows that Jesus is a complex character, capable of both great good and great evil. I can still learn what I can from him but clearly need to take everything with a grain of salt.
5. This shows that Jesus is beyond good and evil, embodying the extremes of both -- and that's, like deep.

Option 1 is exemplified by Nephi and perhaps Abraham.

Option 2 is generally how I have been approaching Jesus and his teachings on this blog. If the Gospel represents him saying or doing anything clearly wrong, I assume that I have misunderstood or that the text is corrupt.

Option 3 is my usual approach to contemporary religious leaders and institutions. Say or do as much good as you like, but you fail one litmus test and I'm writing you off as a servant of Satan.

Option 4 is my attitude to certain historical figures such as Moses, David, and Joseph Smith.

In my hot youth, when George the Third was king, I would have found Option 5 dangerously attractive. I remember how fascinated I was, when I started reading Stephen King's The Green Mile, by the character of John Coffey -- a seemingly gentle man who had mysterious healing powers but was, equally mysteriously, capable of murdering children -- and how disappointing it was to discover that Coffey was innocent and that the murders had actually been committed by the novel's least relatable character. (It was extremely naïve not to have seen that coming a green mile away.) That was my first and last Stephen King novel. I felt cheated. I think Judas Iscariot may have been an Option 5 guy.

It seems clear, then, that there is no "rule" for dealing with hard sayings; they call for spiritual discernment on a case-by-case basis. That was perhaps Jesus' purpose in saying such things: to jolt his listeners out of their respective dogmatic slumbers and force them to exercise their spiritual discernment.

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[61] When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, "Doth this offend you? [62] What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? [63] It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

Jesus' retort -- "What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?" -- reminds us that the murmurers have been saying not only, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (v. 52) but also, "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?'" (v. 42).

Jesus then proceeds to flatly contradict his other hard saying. He has just said, "If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh" (v. 51) and, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man . . . ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh . . . hath eternal life" (vv. 53-54). Now he says, "It is the spirit that quickeneth [i.e. gives life]; the flesh profiteth nothing."

Is Jesus explaining his hard saying? One way of interpreting v. 63 would be, "I obviously didn't mean flesh literally, since it is the spirit that gives life. The words that I speak are spirit and life, so when I said 'eat my flesh' I really just meant 'hear my words.'"

But then why mention flesh in the first place? If all he wanted to say was that his words, not the manna of Moses, had the power to give life, why not just say so? He could have quoted Deuteronomy, as Matthew (4:4) and Luke (4:4) say he did when tempted by the devil:

And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live (Deut. 8:3).

Again, Jesus is deliberately being offensive and hard to understand, and his purpose is apparently to challenge his disciples. He is demonstrating what he had said earlier (John 6:29): that believing the messenger of God is work and requires active thinking and wrestling, not mere passive assent. Again, one thinks of a Zen master propounding koans.

"To live forever," said the Master, "you must eat my flesh and drink my blood."

"Eat your flesh!" said the student. "But how can we do that?"

"And why would you want to?" said the Master. "Only spirit can make you live forever. Flesh is useless."

At that moment, the student was enlightened.

I'm not enlightened yet, at least not about this.

Another thought: Is Jesus' confusing statement in v. 63 -- about flesh, spirit, life, and his words -- related to the prologue to this Gospel (1:14) -- "the Word was made flesh"? Not that that really clears anything up.

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[64] "But there are some of you that believe not." For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him. [65] And he said, "Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father."

The assertion that Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him is the author's inference, not something Jesus himself said. Judas was not, I think, one of those "that believed not."

Again Jesus emphasizes that only God -- only the divine spark in man, intuiting and responding to the divine in Jesus, deep calling to deep -- can cause a man to follow him. These hard sayings -- offensive, self-contradictory nonsense by any human standard -- are proof of that. Anyone who had been following Jesus for empirical or intellectual reasons ("the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom") would have been put off by them, leaving only those guided by spiritual intuition.

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[66] From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.

[67] Then said Jesus unto the twelve, "Will ye also go away?"

This is the first mention in this Gospel of "the Twelve," who are introduced without explanation. As so often, the reader is assumed to have basic background information about Jesus. Since there is no explanation, we are left to guess what made the Twelve different from the other disciples.

Mark says that "he ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach, and to have power to heal sicknesses, and to cast out devils" (Mark 3:14-15), and Matthew and Luke say essentially the same thing. The Fourth Gospel says nothing like this. One possible reading of vv. 66-67 is simply that almost all of his disciples left him, so that only twelve remained.

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[68] Then Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. [69] And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God."

[70] Jesus answered them, "Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?"

[71] He spake of Judas Iscariot the son of Simon: for he it was that should betray him, being one of the twelve.

Ignore v. 71 for a moment, since it is the author's interpretation of what was said. Jesus asks the Twelve a question, one of them (Simon Peter) answers, and Jesus' reply is, "Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?" The most Gricean interpretation of this would be that Jesus is referring to Peter, not Judas, and presumably expressing disapproval of his answer. If it seems fantastic that Jesus would have called one of his closest disciples "a devil," keep in mind that the Synoptics record the same thing: "But he turned, and said unto Peter, 'Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men'" (Matt. 16:23, see also Mark 8:33). The author, writing with the benefit of hindsight after Judas's betrayal, may have read into Jesus' remark a meaning that was not intended.

There is a similar ambiguity in John 13:10-11, when Jesus says to the Twelve, "Ye are clean, but not all [of you]"; the author offers the gloss, "For he knew who should betray him; therefore said he, 'Ye are not all clean'" -- but Jesus was once again responding to Simon Peter and not to Judas.

Or the author may have been right, and Jesus may have been referring to Judas in these two instances. After all, it's hard to find anything offensive or "Satanic" in what Peter says in vv. 68-69. I merely bring it up as a possible alternative reading.

Whether or not Jesus had Judas in mind, Judas himself would certainly have understood it that way. In fact, I would assume that each of the Twelve would be thinking to himself, as at the Last Supper, "Lord, is it I?" (Matt. 26:22). This is what I was getting at earlier when I said "Judas Iscariot may have been an Option 5 guy" -- that is, may have embraced Jesus' hard sayings because of their shocking nature. Judas may have heard, "You are a devil, Judas, but I have chosen you. Yes, I have knowingly chosen a devil as one of my associates, for devils too have their role to play in the work of God."

Could Jesus actually have meant that? No, I don't think so. While Jesus certainly needed to die in order to complete his work, I don't believe it was necessary for him to die in the precise manner that he did, and so I don't believe Judas was in any sense doing the work of God by betraying him. What did he mean, then? Well, this may have been one more hard saying, one more unanswerable riddle for the disciples to chew on. I think it's possible that Jesus had no particular disciple in mind at all, but that the purpose of his statement was to make each of the disciples suspect himself as the "devil" and do a little soul searching.

I wonder also what the author -- the unnamed "beloved disciple," apparently one of the Twelve -- thought at the time. Did he think, "Oh, he probably means Judas. I never liked that guy" -- or did he think, "Lord, is it I?"