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Bible - NT - John: Higher criticism

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I like J. Louis Martyn. His commentary on Galatians is a masterpiece, and the other essays I’ve read are all very stimulating. I begin with a disclaimer because what has been called Martyn’s “seminal proposal” concerning the gospel of John is remarkable mainly for the absence of evidence and argument.

Martyn begins with the common critical assumption that the gospels tell us as much or more about the communities that produced them than about Jesus. On this assumption, he finds evidence that John is written in response to the introduction of the Twelfth Benediction against heretics into the Eighteen Benedictions that are part of Jewish worship.

Here are a couple of pieces of the argument. John 9’s reference to expulsion from the synagogue plays a major role in Martyn’s argument. John 9:8, Martyn argues, introduces new characters, and a new concern with the sabbath. He concludes, “It scarcely needs further to be argued that veses 8-41 present material which someone composed as an addition to the simple healing narrative of verses 1-7.” That’s it; it scarcely needs to be argued, and Martyn doesn’t waste time arguing what scarcely needs to be.

Or this: “John 9 impresses upon us its immediacy in such a way as strongly to suggest that some of its elements reflect actual experiences of the Johannine community.” Of course, if the chapter has a quality of “immediacy,” which is rather difficult to determine in itself, it’s not obvious how Martyn knows whether it’s an immediacy of an eye-witness to events in the life of Jesus, as the text claims, or the immediacy of the Johannine community, whose existence is nothing more than a scholarly construct.

Verse 22 shows that some authoritative Jewish body had determined to exclude confessors of Jesus from the synagogue “prior to John’s writing.” Well, no. It actually says that some authoritative body had excluded confessors of Jesus prior to the time when the blind man was healed. The notion that the “prior to” has reference to the writer’s time rather than the time of the characters is based on the notion that John 9 simply cannot be describing events of Jesus’ lifetime.

Finally, Martyn argues that opposing Moses to Jesus is “scarcely conceivable” in Jesus’ lifetime, since it assumes that Jesus and Moses were somehow comparable, something the Jews would not admit. But would they admit it 50 years after Jesus’ lifetime? It seems that Jews would be much less willing to admit a parity between Moses and Jesus later. At some point, someone pose this dilemma between Moses and Jesus, so it had to be conceivable to someone sometime, because it ended up in the text.

I think Martyn here is pointing to a characteristic Johannine irony. The Jews don’t know what they are saying. They are wrong to think that Jesus and Moses are polarized choices; Jesus says Moses spoke of Him. But the Jews do in fact imply that Moses and Jesus are on the same level, so that one can be a disciple of Jesus in the same way they are disciples of Jesus. They come close to implicitly admitting that Jesus is the prophet of Deuteronomy 18.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 3:59 am

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Bible - NT - John: Higher criticism

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