Stylistic Unity and the Johannine “Community”
Stylistic Unity and the Johannine “Community”
Although Bultmann and Fortna 38 and others have in the past attempted detailed source-critical analyses of the fourth gospel, it has increasingly been recognized that the retrieval of sources from this gospel is an extremely problematic endeavor. 39 There is no reason to doubt that John used sources: his fellow evangelist Luke certainly did (Luke 1:1-4), and there is no need to think that the fourth evangelist followed some different course. Even here, however, caution is needed: Luke does not purport to be the result of eyewitness testimony, while John does. But regardless of who wrote the fourth gospel, the presumption that the evangelist used written sources is quite different from the assumption we can retrieve them. One of the features of John’s gospel on which virtually all sides now agree is that stylistically it is cut from one cloth. There are minor differences between, say, the vocabulary of Jesus’ speech and the vocabulary of the rest of the fourth gospel, but they are so minor that they present us with a quite different problem: How accurate is John’s presentation of Jesus if Jesus sounds so much like John? We shall address that problem in a moment; meanwhile, the fact that it is a problem should also serve as a warning flag against those who think they can distinguish separate sources buried in the text. The stylistic unity of the book has been demonstrated again and again as concrete evidence against this or that source theory. 40 Even the prologue (1:1-18) and the epilogue (ch. 21) exhibit a style remarkably attuned to the rest of the book. 41
Even the delineation of the so-called signs source has fallen on hard times. 42 Several scholars have postulated the existence of such a source of signs stories, suggested, it is argued, by the enumeration of the first two (John 2:11; 4:54), and climaxed by 20:3031. But the enumeration ("first,” "second”) has been plausibly accounted for as a rhetorical feature within the text as it stands. Even if there were documents relating signs stories circulating in the early church, it is very doubtful that any of them was regarded as a "gospel of signs,” 43 since in the first century the gospel form, so far as we know, was rapidly associated with a balanced account of Jesus’ ministry, including some of his teaching, and climaxing in his death and resurrection. Hengel rightly questions the likelihood that the evangelist took over something like the alleged signs source, which all sides admit (if it ever existed) boasted a theology radically different from that of the evangelist, and incorporated it so mechanically that it can be retrieved by contemporary scholarship. 44
One of the more recent and creative attempts to use stylistic features to probe the unity of the fourth gospel is the statistically informed and understated study by Poythress of the Greek conjunctions δέ (de, G1254), καί (kai, G2779), and ουν (oun, G4036), along with the syntactic phenomenon of asyndeton. 45 The frequency of the conjunctions is abnormally low in John; the frequency of asyndeton is unusually high.
He demonstrates, as far as such evidence will take him (and he is aware of the pitfalls of small samples and the like), that this test argues for unified authorship of the fourth gospel and common authorship between the fourth gospel and the Johannine Epistles.
It is this sort of evidence that has convinced commentators such as Brown, Lindars, and Haenchen that the pursuit of separable sources in the fourth gospel is a lost cause. 46 That is why Brown prefers his pursuit of separable traditions that have allegedly evolved over the length of a certain trajectory of theological development, and Lindars prefers to think of a series of homilies that were collected, published, edited, and added to over a period of time. But as influential as is, say, the five-step theory of Brown, it is important to see that it too is a kind of source theory, compounded with speculation about the "setting in life” (Sitz im Leben) of each source—only in his case the sources are much fuzzier around the edges than the source postulated by Fortna. Brown prefers to talk about the development of traditions rather than the delineation of sources. Still, someone has to enter John’s text with a literary scalpel and retrieve those traditions. Some of these lie on the surface and are tied to certain words and expressions (which make them very similar indeed to literary sources), while others are the reconstructions Brown offers to explain what he thinks must have generated this or that bit of text.
In other words, the source criticism of Bultmann and Fortna has fallen on hard times because their hard evidence turns out to be patient of far simpler explanations, while the tradition probing of Brown (for example), which is far more speculative and much less controlled than Fortna’s work, has exerted wide influence—presumably, one has to say, because it is self-coherent and therefore satisfying, but also utterly untestable. It must be remembered that the six groups Brown thinks the gospel of John is confronting are mere inferences from the gospel’s text. Again and again, other inferences are possible. And all of Brown’s six groups, inferences as they are, are based on a prior inference, namely, that it is relatively easy to read off from a text that purports to be about Jesus the life and circumstances and opponents of the group that produces the document. Small wonder that Kysar concludes, "If the gospel evolved in a manner comparable to that offered by Brown and Lindars, it is totally beyond the grasp of the johannine scholar and historian to produce even tentative proof that such was the case.” 47
It is this stack of inferences heaped on inferences that bedevils most discussions of Johannine authorship. A consensus has arisen that the history of the Johannine community can largely be delineated by the careful analysis of differentiable Johannine "traditions,” each of which has its easily inferred setting-in-life. In the dominant view, these culminate in a situation toward the end of the first century when the church is locked in debate with the synagogue, and John’s gospel, as we have it, more or less reflects that debate. We discuss this view further in the next section. For the moment it is sufficient to say that if this reconstruction is adopted, it is hard to see how the reader can take seriously the claims of this book to be the witness of the beloved disciple, most plausibly the apostle John himself, to Jesus Christ. Thus the harder literary and historical evidence is displaced by the softer inferential evidence of interlocking reconstructions. One should not object to historical reconstructions; one worries, however, when they are used to set aside large swaths of the actual literary and historical evidence.
For at least some contemporary scholars, this matrix of inherited beliefs, judgments, and commitments about the provenance of the fourth gospel makes it difficult to postulate apostolic authorship without abandoning the inherited web. As we have seen, this matrix turns on the existence of a Johannine circle or school, 48 the core of a Johannine community whose existence and history can to some extent be delineated by inferences drawn from layers of tradition that are peeled back. But attempts to place this chain of inferences on a secure footing by positing ostensible parallels are not reassuring. For example, Culpepper attempts to delineate various schools in the ancient world: the Pythagorean school, the Greek academy, the lyceum, the school at Qumran, the house of Hillel, Philo’s school, and so forth. But Culpepper’s understanding of "school” is undifferentiable from that of "sect,” except that a school has the additional characteristic of being preoccupied with studying, learning, teaching, and writing. 49 Even here, of course, his model runs into difficulty. Culpepper is forced to admit, for instance: "Nothing is known of the history of the synagogue-school in which Philo worked, and none of the names of his students has survived. The inference that his writings continued to be studied arises from the use made of them by the later Christian school in Alexandria and the evident popularity of allegorical exegesis there....Perhaps the reason for the complete silence of our sources on the history of Philo’s school is that he actually exerted little influence on his community.” 50
Here, then, is speculation on the reason for the silence of the sources regarding a school the existence of which is an inference drawn from the later use of an earlier Jewish writer! Out of this model emerges the construct of a Johannine school, with the beloved disciple serving as its head, functioning for the community as the Paraclete does in the gospel of John. 51 But Culpepper offers no criteria whatsoever to distinguish how this school could be distinguished from a group of Christians who simply cherish the evangelist’s writings and commend them to others. The history of the Johannine community (he now flips back and forth between "community” and "school”) will, he assures us, be traced when there is greater consensus on the "composition-history” of the fourth gospel. 52 The assumption is massive. He adds that the Johannine Epistles constitute evidence for the existence of "more than one community of believers which shared the same traditions, vocabulary, doctrines, and ethical principles”—though on the face of it this too invokes a major assumption about community participation in the writing, for the simpler inference is that the Johannine Epistles constitute evidence that their author wrote several pieces to several communities that were known to him. They may have constituted a collegial grouping of churches around one authority figure; it is entirely plausible to suppose that they did. But that is still a long way from delineating a school of writers and students who were responsible for the composition of the fourth gospel. Even the "we” in John 21:24, a difficult pronoun on any view, 53 does not unambiguously argue for a school of writers. It could as easily refer to a group of attesting elders.
This is not to argue that there is no self-conscious recognition of development within the fourth gospel itself. From the perspective of the evangelist, there was a remarkable development in the disciples’ understanding of who Jesus was, and much of this took place after the resurrection and exaltation of their Lord. But it is a development of understanding (e.g., John 2:22; 20:9), not a fresh theological invention. By constantly drawing attention to the mis understandings of observers and disciples alike during the days of Jesus’ ministry, John shows he is able to distinguish what he and others understood originally and what he came to understand only later. Indeed, he insists on the distinction, and this fact constitutes a remarkably strong piece of evidence that the evangelist was self-consciously aware of the possibility of anachronism and, for his own reasons, studiously avoided it. It flies in the face of such evidence to suppose that the evangelist happily cast the circumstances of his own church and situation back into the third decade, projecting them onto Jesus and his teaching, whether wittingly or unwittingly ignoring the anachronisms this generated.
None of this is meant to suggest that all problems in the fourth gospel are purely in the eye of the beholder. It is merely to suggest that comprehensive source and tradition theories are unacceptably speculative and too frequently end up contradicting the only textual evidence we actually have. Some of the most prominent theories of textual dislocation (such as the view that John 5 and 6 have somehow become inverted) solve some problems—in this case, quick geographic movement—only to introduce others. All things considered, it seems least difficult to believe that the evangelist, himself a Christian preacher, proclaimed the gospel for years. Doubtless he made notes; doubtless he learned from others and incorporated the work of others. But whatever he took from other sources, he made his own. Eventually he put the material together and published it as a book. It is quite conceivable that he produced the work in stages; it is unlikely that the work was released in stages, at least in stages with long delays between them, since there is no textual evidence of a distinction between earlier and later editions. There is in any case a sureness of touch, a simplicity of diction, and a unity of theme and development that rhetorical criticism rightly applauds and that testifies to a mature Christian witness and theologian.
There is, of course, a converse problem. Why should the evangelist impose so uniform a stamp on his work that there is so little distinction between what he writes and what he ascribes to Jesus during the days of his flesh? Several observations may be helpful.
1. Although the style of the fourth gospel is remarkably uniform, the point must not be overstated. Reynolds lists about 150 words that are placed on Jesus’ lips in John but are never used elsewhere by the evangelist. 55 Not a few of these are sufficiently general that they would have been as appropriate in the evangelist’s narrative as in Jesus’ discourse.
2. Many have argued, rightly, that fair reporting can be accomplished with other than verbatim quotations. A many-sided writer who is also an advocate will wisely choose the form of the reportage, especially if the communication is cross-cultural. If we also suppose that much of this material was first of all sermonic, the general point is strengthened. A number of features are probably best explained by supposing we are listening to a preacher’s revised sermons. The doubled "Amen!” on Jesus’ lips, for instance, found only in John, is just such a homiletic device and causes no umbrage unless for some strange reason we suppose that preachers in the ancient world could appeal only to verbatim quotations. Some of what is included in or excluded from John’s gospel is much better accounted for by reflecting on the evangelist’s situation as a Christian preacher, so far as we can reconstruct it from both internal and external evidence, than by supposing that the evangelist is including all he knows, or is attempting to correct some other gospel, or is simply ignorant of some vital fact preserved elsewhere. The absence of narrative parables, especially parables about the kingdom, suggests this preacher’s audience is not steeped in apocalyptic and not linguistically Semitic. The prevalence of so much terminology that has almost universal religious appeal (see comments below) suggests the evangelist is trying to use language that will present the fewest barriers.
This does not mean that John is uninterested in, say, the kingdom of God. Quite apart from the few crucial places where he does use the expression (John 3:3, 5; cf. 18:36), the theme of the kingdom is very powerfully presented in certain passages (e.g., it dominates the plot line of chs. 18-19). Moreover, the kingdom in the Synoptic Gospels is often a "tensive symbol” that can bear an extraordinary number of overtones. 56 This ensures that in some passages, for instance, "entering the kingdom” is indistinguishable from "entering into life” (e.g., Matt. 7:14, 21)—and John certainly has a great deal to say about life. In short, the fourth evangelist is interested in presenting certain truths to certain people, and he exercises the preacher’s prerogative of shaping his message accordingly.
It has often been remarked that John’s gospel, however profound it may be, is narrower in focus than the synoptics. When this narrowness of focus fills the entire page, certain things come to light that would not otherwise be seen, but a certain sense of dislocation in the reader is understandable. Once what the preacher (i.e. the evangelist) is doing becomes clear—that is, when the scale of his vision is clarified—the sense of dislocation largely evaporates.
3. Of course, this preacher is not just a preacher. He presents himself as an eyewitness, a reliable intermediary between the events themselves and the people who now need to hear them. Nor is he alone: he is conscious of the continuity of Christian truth (John 1:14-18) and especially of the Spirit’s role in equipping him for this task (15:26-27; 16:12-15). So far as John’s understanding of his task goes, we may speak of the liberty he felt to use his own language, of the principles of selection that governed his choices of material, of the nature of the audience that he envisioned, of the focus of his interests, of his remarkable habit of getting to the heart of an issue. But we may not glibly suppose that one who felt so strongly about the importance of fidelity in witnesses (10:40-42) could simply invent narrative and dialogue and pass them off as history.
4. Several of the discourses have been shown, with some degree of plausibility, to be modeled on midrashim, or the rabbinic commentaries of the day. These discourses are so tightly knit that it is very difficult to believe they are nothing more than a pastiche of isolated (and retrievable!) sayings of Jesus onto which Johannine commentary has been patched. This leads to one of two conclusions. Borgen, who has demonstrated the finely wrought nature of the bread of life discourse (6:26-59) as in part an exposition of Exodus 16, argues for the unity of the discourse but does not attribute it to Jesus. 57 Hunter likewise recognizes the unity but thinks there is no evidence to prevent us from concluding the discourse is authentic. 58 What must be added is that, granted its essential authenticity, the discourse has been cast into its shape and place in the gospel by the evangelist, whose style so largely stamps the whole. Similar things could be said about the midrashic nature of parts of John 12, the chiastic structure of 5:19-30, the cohesiveness of the dialogue with Nicodemus, and much more.
In short, the most straightforward reading of the evidence is still the traditional one: it is highly probable that John the son of Zebedee wrote the fourth gospel. In itself, this makes no difference whatsoever to the authority of the book (after all, Luke’s gospel does not purport to be by an eyewitness; the epistle to the Hebrews is anonymous). It does, however, make a considerable difference to how we think the book came to be written and therefore to the situation to which it was addressed, the purpose of the writing.