Conceptual Provenance
Conceptual Provenance
John’s Religious World
The wealth of suggestions that various scholars have offered as to the background of the fourth gospel has an important bearing on how we view John’s ostensible setting, the Palestine of Jesus’ day, and how we understand his message. From the end of the last century until about the 1960s, the history-of-religions movement tied John’s gospel to the Hellenistic world. As the gospel stretched outward from Jerusalem through the Jewish Diaspora and into the broader streams of Hellenistic culture, it was progressively transformed both in vocabulary and in substance. Typically, this Hellenistic culture was judged to be some combination of four influences.
Philo. Scholars have seen an influence from Philo, especially with respect to John’s use of λόγος (logos, “word”, G3364) in John 1:1. Philo borrows the Stoic concept of the word as the principle of reality, the medium of creation and governance. Numerous other parallels can be observed.
The Hermetic writings. Alleged to be the instruction of Hermes Trismegistos (= the Egyptian god Thoth), these writings in the Gnostic tradition display some distinctive features by mitigating the dualism of Gnosticism. The cosmos is related to God and may be called the son of God. Regeneration is an important theme in some Hermetic tractates: a person is born again when he or she gains the proper knowledge of God and thereby becomes divine. Dodd was the greatest defender of the pervasive influence of the Hermetic literature on John.
Gnosticism. Sometimes (and rightly) described as an amorphous "theosophical hotchpotch,” Gnosticism sprang out of neoplatonic dualism that tied what is good to the ideal, to the spiritual, and what is bad to the material. In full-blown Gnosticism, the Gnostic redeemer comes to earth to inform those with ears to hear of their true origins. This "knowledge” (γνωσις [gnosis, G1194]) brings release and salvation to those who accept it.
Mandaism. This is a peculiar form of Gnosticism whose origins are much disputed. Probably it originated in one of the Jewish baptizing sects, but the form in which it has come down to us, in which the rite of baptism, oft repeated, is the key step by which the myth of the descent of the "knowledge of life” (Manda d’Hayye) is reenacted and release from the demonic powers secured, is exceedingly late. 59
Quite apart from considerations of dating (all but the first of these are attested by sources that come from the second or third century or later), the conceptual differences between John and these documents are very substantial. Moreover, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and their subsequent publication has shown that the closest religious movement to the fourth gospel, in terms of vocabulary at least, was an extremely conservative hermitic Jewish community. This is not to say that John springs from the Essenes, thought to be represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that the appeal to strongly Hellenistic sources is now much less convincing than it was half a
century ago. Thus another stream of scholarship has attempted to plot the connections between John and various Palestinian movements, including rabbinic thought,
Samaritan religion, the Essenes, and various apocalyptic movements. Whatever parallels can be drawn, it is now virtually undisputed that both John and these movements drew their primary inspiration from what we today call the Old Testament Scriptures.
John’s indebtedness to this primary wellspring is profound, much more profound than the mere number of Old Testament quotations might suggest. The countless allusions to the Old Testament (e.g., references to the tabernacle, Jacob’s ladder, Jacob’s well, manna, the serpent in the wilderness, Sabbath, and various feasts) presuppose both a writer and envisioned readers who are steeped in the Scriptures.
Even so, many scholars would be comfortable with the approaches displayed in the commentaries of, say, Barrett and Schnackenburg, who argue that a rich diversity of non-Christian influences was incorporated into the very substance of this gospel, providing it with its peculiar emphases and form. This is surely partly right, yet potentially misleading. One reason why interpreters are able to find parallels to John in so diverse an array of literature lies in John’s vocabulary and pithy sayings. Words such as light, darkness, life, death, spirit, word, love, believing, water, bread, clean, birth, and children of God can be found in almost any religion. Frequently they have very different referents as one moves from religion to religion, but the vocabulary is as popular as religion itself. Nowhere, perhaps, has the importance of this phenomenon been more clearly set forth than in a little-known essay by Kysar. 61 He compares the studies of Dodd and Bultmann on the prologue (John 1:1-18), noting in particular the list of possible parallels each of the two scholars draws up to every conceivable phrase in those verses. Dodd and Bultmann each advance over three hundred parallels, but the overlap in their lists is only 7 percent. The dangers of what Sandmel calls parallelomania become depressingly obvious.
This does not mean that there is no influence at all on the fourth gospel from other religious forms. The early Christians were certainly aware that they were expanding outward into a frequently hostile set of world views. The evangelist’s efforts to communicate the truth of the gospel to men and women far removed from Palestine ensured that, if he was at all thoughtful in his task, he would not simply parrot the received traditions but try to cast them in ways that would make them most easily understood. The question to be asked, then, is whether his attempt has succumbed, wittingly or unwittingly, to a syncretism that has admitted strands of thought essentially alien to the historic gospel or, better, has simply transposed the good news, as it were, to another key. It is surely here that John has proved to be not only a faithful witness but a gifted preacher.