John

Back in the day, I think the 1960s, Kingsley Amis wrote a book called ‘The James Bond Dossier, or Every Man His Own 007’. This was basically a collection of various bits and pieces from Ian Fleming’s work, which presumably Amis had collected as a way of helping him write his own Bond stories. It purports to be how someone could best imitate James Bond. One of the ruses he mentions is to carry around a book called ‘The Bible Designed To Be Read As Living Literature’, hollowed out to store a gun in it. I don’t know if this crops up in any real Bond story but it’s similar to those “books” you can get which are boringly titled so as to disguise the fact that they’re not actually books but storage for money or keys and the like. Because I’m the way I am, I once picked up one of these books out of interest and was disappointed to find it wasn’t real. It also brings to mind the habit of making a room look like it’s lined with bookshelves by sticking the spines of books to the walls, which is quite saddening I think.

Nonetheless, there is a real book out there called ‘The Bible Designed To Be Read As Living Literature’, published in the 1930s by someone called Ernest Sutherland Bates. It’s the King James Version of the Bible typeset as a single column, like a novel, with various omissions such as the “begats”, and with different forms of writing set out to highlight the fact that they’re meant, for example, to be verse or prose. It’s been said that there’s something deadening about reading a book organised into columns. The Bible, encyclopædias and dictionaries are laid out that way, and it gives the impression of being a mere reference work and in no way entertaining or engaging on an emotional level. Some of the Bible is, to be sure, like this, but not all. But in this case it’s still the KJV rather than something more engaging to a modern audience.

I want to interject a note at this point, by which time I may already have lost most of my potential audience. Please don’t be boring and turn this into an argument about religion, because this is nothing to do with the topic of this post, and if you do that, it probably means you’re not in a place when you can look at the Bible in this way. That’s understandable because of the likes of the assumption of animal exploitation, hostility to other spiritual paths, homophobia and sexism which seems to inhere in much of Scripture. The Bible is a collection of ancient works of literature and other kinds of text. I’ve noticed that many anti-theist atheists seem, oddly, to accept the historical-grammatical approach to the Bible, which is strange because that’s exactly how fundamentalists see it and it’s fine with them if you do that. I suspect, though, that this arises from ignorance of the Higher Criticism, which has been around since the eighteenth century, and is deployed by most serious Biblical scholars who aren’t fundamentalists. Just as you let conservative Christians have it their own way when you say you aren’t Christian just because you happen to be atheist, you also let them set the agenda by conceding to the historical-grammatical approach. It’s maybe a century older than more intellectually respectable Biblical criticism, but wasn’t the way the early Church or the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches approached the text.

Instead, look at it this way. Over a period of several centuries, people collected an oral tradition into the Torah, most of which wasn’t written down, apparently from four different sources. The creation accounts and other stories in the Book of Genesis seem to originate from such sources as the Sumerians, for example. Then there’s poetry, proverbs, attempts to chronicle, sermons, lamentations and finally, after almost a thousand years, a flurry of activity by an initially Jewish sect over a few decades consisting largely of letters and collections of the sayings of Jesus. You do not have to believe any of it to approach it intellectually, and you can look at it just as literature. Just because you’re neither Jewish nor Christian doesn’t mean you don’t live in a world which is enormously influenced by this corpus of texts, which I think I can be detached enough to judge as an interesting record of the literature and attitudes of patriarchs in the Near East in the late Bronze and early Iron Ages.

Just a few words on the Synoptic Gospels, which are the first three in order. Hypothetically, Mark was the earliest gospel to be written, and the easiest to read. It’s the shortest, mainly covers the Passion and ends with the empty tomb with no suggestion of resurrection. Some versions of the gospel have a bit added at the end which briefly recount the events after the resurrection, but this isn’t in the oldest versions of the gospel and is nowadays excluded. Mark was then used as a source by Matthew and Luke, and both appear to have drawn on a separate source which is referred to as Q – Quelle (German for “source”) – which is a collection of apparent quotes from Jesus. This is remarkably similar to the Gospel of Thomas, which is just such a collection and therefore may actually be either Q or close to it. Mark was written in the 70s and is anonymous. Matthew is the Jewish gospel, that is, it was written for a Jewish readership. Luke is the most approachable gospel and has the most original material. It reads more like a story. It should also be noted that the whole of the New Testament is written in colloquial Greek rather than the higher register used by intellectuals and poets. It always makes me think of Mills And Boon for that reason, which is not a criticism. It just means it speaks directly to people in the language of the street.

Then there’s John, and the Johannine literature in other parts of the New Testament.

John is respectably referred to as the “Fourth Gospel”, because at no point is authorship claimed by anyone in the text. Even reading it in English, one gets the impression that something odd is going on. There’s something about the writing style which stands out and reads quite oddly to a modern audience. This of course pales into insignificance compared to the eccentric style of Revelation, also claimed to be John’s work. There are also three letters attributed to John in the New Testament, including the shortest book in the whole Christian Bible, 3 John, which is only two hundred words long. The gospel of John was written later than the others, in about 90, and clearly after a time where lots of people have been able to ruminate over the implications of their new religion and the significance of the figure of Jesus. It uses a fair number of pretty high-flown concepts such as the Logos, which stands out because it’s mentioned in the first sentence of the whole gospel.

I must confess that I haven’t read the whole gospel of John in Greek. However, even without having done so, the distinctive style shows through any translation I’ve been exposed to. It tends to repeat certain key terms over and over again. The word “believe” is used more than eight dozen times, which sounds insignificant until you realise that’s more than in all of the synoptics combined. The word “kosmos”, translated as “world” although there are also other words translated as “world” such as “aion”. “Kosmos” is used six and half dozen times, and in the whole Bible (I assume this means the New Testament plus the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) it only occurs three and a quarter times as many. I personally like the idea of leaving it as “Cosmos”, but “System” might be a better word for it. It also uses words for “name”, “light”, “truth”, “darkness” and “love”, i.e. “agape” which is consummate love combining passion, intimacy and commitment, a lot, and it says “amen” more often than usual as well.

There’s also a strong tendency to use synonyms and double meanings. For instance, when Jesus is lifted up on the cross, the word used also means “exalted”. Consequently, there are lots of misunderstandings portrayed in the narrative, and this is interesting because it’s only the writer of this gospel who includes the ambiguities. Jesus, the main character in this book, tends to speak in spiritual terms while his audience understands him in concrete terms. For instance, he refers to his body as a “temple”, leading people to think he was talking about the idea of restoring the Jewish temple. Altogether there are a couple of dozen examples of this kind of thing. It needs to be borne in mind that the ambiguity and synonyms would sometimes need to carry over into the Aramaic that he would’ve actually been speaking in reality, so it would be interesting to note whether the synonyms tend to be used in the narrative or the dialogue, and whether similar wording also works in Aramaic. Another example is his use of “anothen” to mean “(born) again”, which leads to another misunderstanding that the person he’s speaking to expresses by saying he can’t re-enter his mother’s womb. “Anothen” means “from the top”, “from above” and also “again”, so it’s like the musical phrase “da capo”, and means you have to be born from above, i.e. from Heaven or God, or perhaps God as the Holy Spirit. And this issue with the combination of synonyms, ambiguity and recorded responses to the ambiguity where that’s actually a feature of the writing style suggests one of two things to me. Either this is a fictionalised version of the story of Jesus, which is why I referred to him as the central character here, or it’s a feature of the dialogue which was lost from the synoptic gospels but somehow preserved in an account which wasn’t set down until later, which doesn’t seem to work.

Light, water and bread are used as symbols widely through the gospel, and there are many other symbols, more in fact than in the other gospels. In John 6:22, Jesus refers to the bread of heaven, and the bread of life, alluding also to manna from heaven. Oddly, it doesn’t refer to the blessing of bread in the Last Supper.

The wider structure of the gospel also includes what might nowadays be footnotes and sudden breaks to the flow of the story. In the NIV, chapter 12 verses 30-33 read:

Jesus said, “This voice was for your benefit, not mine.  Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out.  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.

and in chapter 10:

“Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand what he was telling them.

Both of these are basically footnotes, expressed differently due to the different conventions at the time.There are also “aporias”. Jesus is in Galilee in chapter four, Jerusalem in chapter five and back in Galilee in chapter six. Some people have actually rearranged the order of the chapters here to resolve this, but the earliest versions have this ordering. At the end of chapter twenty, it reads like the book is being wound up:

Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

Then chapter twenty-one tells of a miraculous catch of fish (not very vegan but that’s another tale) and carried on with the narrative like it’s tacked on at the end. Some people have gone so far as to suggest that “John” was suffering from dementia at this point, and I think his disorganisation is interesting if one assumes that this is also the author of the Book of Revelation, which of course reads like an acid trip. Is there something going on in his brain? If so, does it matter that he might not be a reliable narrator?

The book also uses irony. For instance, the Sanhedrin express their concerns that if Jesus is permitted to continue everyone will end up taking him seriously, which is of course what actually happened. Incidentally, you don’t have to believe Jesus was the Messiah or a miracle-worker to accept that this is ironic in the context of the belief system of the author. Caiaphas then says “you do not realise that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish”, which is dramatic irony because it alludes to atonement. This all means, of course, that by the time the gospel was written, certain doctrines had already become established which may not be apparent in the other gospels, particularly Mark where there’s no resurrection at all.

John doesn’t talk about Jesus’s birth or childhood, the temptation in the wilderness, the Sermon on the Mount, the Last Supper, the Transfiguration, healing lepers, casting out demons or tax collectors and it only mentions the Kingdom of God twice. On the other hand, the first five chapters are unique, Jesus is referred to as the Messiah, the Lamb of God, rabbi, the king of Israel and the Son of God. He also utters a number of “I am…” statements. All of these features, or their lack, make John unusual.

Now the question arises in my mind of whether a similar style can be detected elsewhere in the books attributed to John. They may not all have been written by the same person, and if they were it’s the only example of a New Testament author who wrote both letters and a gospel, and if Revelation is included he also wrote a unique book of the Bible. Even if this was done by a group of people, as is often concluded nowadays, there’s a certain unity between them.Taken together, there are references to the Logos in Revelation as well, and possibly in one of the epistles. They’re all particularly insistent on the idea of God become human, and they all tend to polarise darkness and light, truth and falsehood, and so forth. Revelation then goes on to dramatise this polarisation through the likes of Babylon and Jerusalem.

This brings me of course to the book of Revelation itself, although I feel I haven’t paid as much attention as I might have to the epistles. I have to say I do think this was written by one person because it reads like a continuous narrative, and of course it lends itself to all sorts of interpretations. There are a number of possible readings of the book, some of which are mutually incompatible, and each has a name:

• The Futurist view sees the book as a prophecy of the End Times. This is the view which everyone seems to think is what it’s “supposed” to be about, Christian and non-Christian alike, and it’s shown, for example, in the Left Behind series.
• The Historicist view can be somewhat broader, and sees the book as covering a period from the time of the author up until the end of the world.
• The Preterist view is that it’s a camouflaged narrative of the history of the persecution of the early church, for instance by Nero, whose name can be made to add up to 666.
• The Idealist view is that it represents the idea that God will always triumph in particular situations.

The futurist and historicist views have a number of sub-categories divided up according to their view of the millennium and tribulation, meaning that there are also three views regarding the millennium:

• Premillennialism: the Second Coming witll usher in a thousand-year age of peace.
• Postmillenialism: the Second Coming will occur after a golden age of Christian dominion.
• Amillennialism: the millennium is not a literal thousand-year period but represents the Church Age.

The first two of these depend on a pre-existing interpretation of the book as futurist or historicist.

I’m not going to offer a view on these except to say that they tend to have political consequences, particularly with reference to Zionism but also elsewhere, and that those who make much of the symbolism in the Book of Revelation tend to lead to specific attempts to link current affairs to the book which go in and out of fashion. For instance, one of the many-headed beasts has been taken to refer to the Common Market and 666 to bar codes. Amillennialism was popular in the nineteenth century but fell out of favour due to the World Wars and the Holocaust, because the idea of progress towards the Kingdom of Heaven is hard to reconcile with these unless you decide you’re a Nazi or something.

I don’t know how far I’ve got with this. The point I’m trying to make is that although the themes in these writings are Christian, it doesn’t follow that you have to believe in any of it to engage with it, and that whether or not you personally might engage, others do, and that has political and perhaps also personal consequences. Also, Johannine Literature is, apart from anything else it might be, actually literature and can be approached in the same way as a novel might be. It’s important to recognise that these are important and influential texts, and to leave your personal beliefs behind when you read them, although of course for some it’s important to do so with these beliefs in mind. But you don’t have to be that person.