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"Unity" in John's Gospel

Baptist TrainfanBaptist Trainfan Shipmate
in Kerygmania
In another thread, @ThunderBunk has stated, "The interpolation of the disquisition on unity into John's gospel is one of the most baleful editorial decisions in the whole of the gospels, because it has led to many centuries of injustice, and of minorities holding the rest of the church to ransom". This forum probably isn't the right place to discuss the second part of this statement. But is it an "interpolation" and a "baleful editorial decision"? I can't say that I've come across this suggestion before.

Comments

  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    I find it impossible to believe that any of the lengthy poetic speeches given to Christ in John's gospels ever literally came out of his mouth. To me, they are poetic works, describing what the author of the gospel felt was the important part of his message, based on priorities at the time. The questions of what constituted a Christian, and the fracture of the Christian community as a whole, were vital issues at that time. It makes no sense as an utterance before the church existed, before there was any idea what church life might be like. Well, that's my conclusion after much consideration anyway. I have no particular authority for this, and many will dismiss it, but that's where I'm coming from.

    And as for the damage it has done? It has left liberal Christians in particular looking like complete hypocrites, because condemning the inhumanity of loud conservative voices has to be sacrificed to the maintenance of unity. This destroys the credibility of our faith, because the institution is always put before our vision of the truth.
  • Baptist TrainfanBaptist Trainfan Shipmate
    Thank you for elaborating.
  • Merry VoleMerry Vole Shipmate
    I've often been slightly dubious that the long discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of John were seemingly memorised so well.
    But I've never heard about this controversy or injustice. Can anyone say a bit more?
  • Alan29Alan29 Shipmate
    One step along the path would be for people with opposing views to acknowledge the positives in the others viewpoint, rather than pointing fingers and name-calling. The current NCR has a profile of Timothy Radcliffe where this approach is discussed. https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/radcliffe-resurrection-meet-pope-francis-synod-preacher
  • agingjbagingjb Shipmate
    In "Jesus on Stage" the late Philip Oakeshott developed the idea that John's Gospel was, in effect, a novel adapted from the original material of a play.
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    The trouble is, you can come up with all sorts of scenarios, but without any manuscript evidence, how much good are theories?
  • MPaulMPaul Shipmate
    Lamb Chopped wrote: »
    The trouble is, you can come up with all sorts of scenarios, but without any manuscript evidence, how much good are theories?
    Precisely. Is there a passage in particular?
  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    I'm not sure how on God's green earth we will ever get MS evidence at this point. We know what has been put together, because it's in the MS. How it got there is always going to be a matter of speculation, ultimately. That can be close textual analysis, but that's as close as it will ever get, short of time travel, as far as I can see. We don't, to the best of my knowledge, have any drafts.
  • Alan29Alan29 Shipmate
    The text we have is the text we have. The manner of its compilation is a bit of a red herring.
    It is worth reflecting that it prays for unity, not uniformity. And it is put into the same setting as the washing of the disciples feet, an act of love and of putting the other first.
  • MPaulMPaul Shipmate
    Well the phrase ‘interpolation of disquisition’ seems to belong in the quotes file. It is certainly beyond my pay grade to critique.

    I remember being really impacted by a series of lectures on John’s gospel by Riki Watts, an Australian theologian who was then teaching at Regent College in Canada. (1990’s). He seemed to be able to clarify the genre aspects of it as well as being very relevant to his audience of students. He focused on Exodus parallels that seemed to resonate.

    Here was Jesus as a new Moses figure performing wonders, supernaturally feeding and proclaiming a new Exodus into a new promised land..the kingdom of God. John, in his view, was very aware of all the parallels with the OT journey of Israel but selected and arranged incidents in a literary manner to emphasise the ‘Son of God’ where the other accounts were more about ‘son of Man.’

    I think the point, if there is one, is that the whole gospel is designed and shaped towards a purpose that is symbol and sign focused but it has a literary architecture which signals that it needs to be read within the terms of the authorial intention.
  • MPaulMPaul Shipmate
    Sorry, Rikk Watts ..
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    The reason I mention MS evidence is because the lack of it is .... well, evidence of a sort. I mean, when the author I did my dissertation on decided to revise and add to his original ms, I found copies of mss. based on three different stages of the text circulating all over the place. You could stack them in piles based on whether they came from pre-1628, 1628 itself, or 1629 and forward... The variants made it obvious. Granted, we're looking at a much shorter time period with an English Renaissance text, but given the huge number of manuscripts for the New Testament, you'd expect to find at least a few reflecting earlier stages of a very revised text. At least, if there was any revision...
  • Baptist TrainfanBaptist Trainfan Shipmate
    edited July 20
    MPaul wrote: »
    The whole gospel is designed and shaped towards a purpose that is symbol and sign focused but it has a literary architecture which signals that it needs to be read within the terms of the authorial intention.
    I think that is true, albeit differently, for all four Gospels - and often ignored by readers.

  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    Lamb Chopped wrote: »
    The reason I mention MS evidence is because the lack of it is .... well, evidence of a sort. I mean, when the author I did my dissertation on decided to revise and add to his original ms, I found copies of mss. based on three different stages of the text circulating all over the place. You could stack them in piles based on whether they came from pre-1628, 1628 itself, or 1629 and forward... The variants made it obvious. Granted, we're looking at a much shorter time period with an English Renaissance text, but given the huge number of manuscripts for the New Testament, you'd expect to find at least a few reflecting earlier stages of a very revised text. At least, if there was any revision...

    I dispute your underlying axiom, that the starting point is a collection of sayings. The starting point is clearly literary in nature, and an examination of its themes and construction does not suggest to me a collection of sayings from public gatherings. All of the settings are intimate and highly charged, making such poetic coherence unlikely in a verbatim account, and where do our witnesses come from?

    None of this is realistic, and it is a waste of time and effort forcing it into a realist straitjacket. If you want to, knock yourself out, but I really can't be bothered with trying to prove that an apple is not a really, really, really special kind of orange. There are fruit other than oranges: deal.
  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    Double posting to say - all such discussion treads on one of my major corns. I'm a literary translation - so languages and textual analysis are very much my academic background - by training. But I've never learned either ancient or NT Greek, or done much theology. I must admit, from a literary point of view, to finding most theological textual analysis I've ever come across feeble to the point of horror, because it is so very much theology with a structurally feeble textual piefrill round it, but that may be purely the penalty of random sampling- in any case it was a long time ago. It just seems to me that institutions can get hung up on particular verses, especially if they are part of the account of particularly important moments in Christ's life, and this has a seriously distorting effect on the life of people within those institutions, and on the institutions themselves.
  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    edited July 20
    Typo - literary translation = literary translator (by postgraduate qualification at least). Oh, for the ability to proofread my own typing accurately in real time.
  • Alan29Alan29 Shipmate
    Whatever the processes by which these texts came together, they are the texts the Church came to accept as authoritative. And they were accepted as whole documents not collections of random bits and bobs. I think each has to be read as a whole not as verses to be ripped bloodily out of context.
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host
    edited July 20
    ThunderBunk wrote: »
    <snip>I dispute your underlying axiom, that the starting point is a collection of sayings. The starting point is clearly literary in nature<snip>
    I’m not sure whether you’re arguing that John is a ‘whole-cloth’ literary work, not based on the teachings of Jesus, or whether you’re saying there’s more to it than simply a redactorial exercise on a collection of sayings. I’d certainly agree with the latter.
  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    edited July 20
    I'm not sure it's exactly whole-cloth - I am more persuaded by the argument that I have read, that it reflects the tradition of a community at a point in time, two or three generations after the resurrection. I can see these traditions being based on sayings, or collections of sayings over time, necessarily put through the filter of the life and experience of that community over time.

    This means I'm positing a kind of double-filtering - the life of the community, followed by the writing process. It is entirely possible that liturgical use intervened between the two, as part of the writing process, as other commentator have suggested.

    This puts the life of the text into the life of the church in its gestation, as well as in its use after it was established.
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    edited July 20
    ThunderBunk wrote: »
    Lamb Chopped wrote: »
    The reason I mention MS evidence is because the lack of it is .... well, evidence of a sort. I mean, when the author I did my dissertation on decided to revise and add to his original ms, I found copies of mss. based on three different stages of the text circulating all over the place. You could stack them in piles based on whether they came from pre-1628, 1628 itself, or 1629 and forward... The variants made it obvious. Granted, we're looking at a much shorter time period with an English Renaissance text, but given the huge number of manuscripts for the New Testament, you'd expect to find at least a few reflecting earlier stages of a very revised text. At least, if there was any revision...

    I dispute your underlying axiom, that the starting point is a collection of sayings. The starting point is clearly literary in nature, and an examination of its themes and construction does not suggest to me a collection of sayings from public gatherings. All of the settings are intimate and highly charged, making such poetic coherence unlikely in a verbatim account, and where do our witnesses come from?

    None of this is realistic, and it is a waste of time and effort forcing it into a realist straitjacket. If you want to, knock yourself out, but I really can't be bothered with trying to prove that an apple is not a really, really, really special kind of orange. There are fruit other than oranges: deal.

    I have no idea how you got the idea that for me, “The starting point was a collection of sayings.” Were you thinking of somebody else? Because i don’t think any such thing.
  • MPaulMPaul Shipmate
    You
    ThunderBunk wrote: »
    I'm not sure it's exactly whole-cloth - I am more persuaded by the argument that I have read, that it reflects the tradition of a community at a point in time, two or three generations after the resurrection. I can see these traditions being based on sayings, or collections of sayings over time, necessarily put through the filter of the life and experience of that community over time.

    This means I'm positing a kind of double-filtering - the life of the community, followed by the writing process. It is entirely possible that liturgical use intervened between the two, as part of the writing process, as other commentator have suggested.

    This puts the life of the text into the life of the church in its gestation, as well as in its use after it was established.

    It also makes the purported author a liar since the beloved disciple claims authorship.
    In the end it is either face value or not as you choose.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    MPaul wrote: »
    You
    ThunderBunk wrote: »
    I'm not sure it's exactly whole-cloth - I am more persuaded by the argument that I have read, that it reflects the tradition of a community at a point in time, two or three generations after the resurrection. I can see these traditions being based on sayings, or collections of sayings over time, necessarily put through the filter of the life and experience of that community over time.

    This means I'm positing a kind of double-filtering - the life of the community, followed by the writing process. It is entirely possible that liturgical use intervened between the two, as part of the writing process, as other commentator have suggested.

    This puts the life of the text into the life of the church in its gestation, as well as in its use after it was established.

    It also makes the purported author a liar since the beloved disciple claims authorship.
    In the end it is either face value or not as you choose.

    That's a very binary approach.

    What we do appear to have in John are long monologues by Jesus, in Greek, which cannot have been remembered verbatim having been delivered once at the time in Aramaic. We inevitably have an invention based on what was recalled, paraphrased and finally committed to writing.
    24This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. 25But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

    This does not read to me as a claim of authorship of the Gospel itself. It points, if anything, to other writings that the compiler of the gospel used which were believed to have been collated by the beloved disciple.

    It raises other questions besides the identity of the beloved disciple - who is "we"? And who is "I"?
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