PURPOSE
PURPOSE
Much of the discussion on this topic during the twentieth century has turned on questionable assumptions or procedures, of which four are particularly common.
1. Many treatments at the beginning of the century depended on the assumption that John is parasitic on the Synoptic Gospels. 79 That means the governing purpose of John should be uncovered by contrasting what John does with what the synoptists do. He wrote a "spiritual” gospel, it is argued; or he wrote to supplement the earlier efforts, or even to supersede or to correct them. These theories refuse to let John be John; he must be John-compared-with-Mark, say, or with another synoptist. This approach has faded in recent decades, largely owing to the revised estimate of John’s relation to the synoptics.
2. Many modern proposals have sprung from a reconstruction of the Johannine community that is alleged to have called this book forth. Inevitably a degree of circularity is set up: the community is reconstructed by drawing inferences from the fourth gospel; once this background is sufficiently widely accepted, the next generation of scholars tends to build on it, or to modify it slightly, by showing how the fourth gospel achieves its purpose by addressing that situation so tellingly. The circularity is not necessarily vicious, but the final picture is much less well substantiated than is often assumed, owing to the very high number of merely possible but by no means compelling inferences that are invoked to delineate the community in the first place.
Meeks, for instance, argues that the Johannine community is sectarian, an isolated conventicle struggling in opposition against a powerful synagogue. 80 The fourth gospel, then, is a summary of these polemics, possibly even a handbook for new converts, certainly something to strengthen the community in its continuing conflict. Martyn’s reconstruction is a modification of this: the church is aggressively evangelizing the Jews, and this book not only reports the conflict but helps the church in its task. 81 But at least some components of these reconstructions may be called into question. To think of the Johannine community as isolated and sectarian is to miss the grand vision of John 17, not to mention the fact that John’s Christology finds its closest parallels in the New Testament in the so-called hymns (e.g., Phil. 2:5-11; Col. 1:15-20), which suggests that the evangelist is thoroughly in touch with the wider church.
3. Many statements of John’s purpose depend rather narrowly on a single theme, feature, or even literary tool. Mussner, for instance, examines all expressions dealing with knowledge, hearing the word of Jesus, and the like, and suggests that the evangelist is effecting a transfer of reference from the time of Jesus to his own time.82 In this merged vision, the past is not annulled, but the angle of vision is from the present. This merging of visions, however, is so strong, in Mussner’s view, that the distinctive word of the historical Jesus cannot be distinguished at all.
Whence, then, the evangelist’s constant distinction between what Jesus’ disciples understood at the time and what they understood only later? What starts off as a suggestive entry point for considering the purpose of the fourth gospel ends up disowning too many features integral to the book.
In the same way, Freed wonders if John 4 does not constitute evidence that the fourth gospel was written, at least in part, to win Samaritan converts. 83 One may well ask what methodological steps warrant the leap from circumstances ostensibly set in Jesus’ day to identical circumstances set in the evangelist’s day. Again, Malina attempts to locate the Johannine community by reading the fourth gospel in the framework of two models provided by sociolinguistics. 84 However, as subsequent debate demonstrated, not only the adequacy of the sociolinguistic models may be questioned, but also the extent to which data on the Johannine community are obtained to feed into the models by "mirror-reading” the text and seeing only what is being projected onto it. In David Rensberger’s reading, the fourth evangelist is a kind of prototypical liberation theologian. 85 At some point, the text of the gospel is swamped by the rush of inferences. 86
4. Finally, several commentators adopt what might be called a synthetic, or additive, approach. What appear to be the best suggestions of others are blended together, so that the purpose of John’s gospel is to evangelize Jews, to evangelize Hellenists, to strengthen the church, to catechize new converts, to provide materials for the evangelization of Jews, and so forth. 87 Part of the problem is the confusion between purpose and plausible effect. Just because John’s gospel can be used to offer comfort to the bereaved in the twentieth century does not mean that is why the evangelist wrote it. In the same way, just because this gospel could help Jewish Christians witnessing to unconverted Jews and proselytes in the nearby synagogue does not itself mean that is why the evangelist wrote it. To think through all the plausibly good effects various parts of this book could have does not provide adequate reasons for thinking that any one of them, or all of them together, was the purpose the evangelist had in mind when he put pen to paper.
Other purposes have been suggested; the proper place to begin, however, is with John’s own statement of his purpose: "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” (John 20:30-31). The words rendered "that you may believe” hide a textual variant: either Ινα πιστεύητε (hina pisteuete, present subjunctive) or Iva πιστεύσητε (hina pisteusete, aorist subjunctive). Some have argued that the latter expression supports an evangelistic purpose: that you may come to faith, come to believe. The former, then, supports an edificatory purpose: that you may continue in faith, continue to believe. In fact, it can easily be shown that both tenses are used in John for both initial faith and continuing in faith, so that nothing can be resolved by the appeal to one textual variant or the other.
It is worth comparing these verses with the stated purpose of 1 John: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). This verse was clearly written to encourage Christians; by the contrasting form of its expression, John 20:30-31 sounds evangelistic.
This impression is confirmed by the firm syntactic evidence that the first purpose clause in John 20:31 must be rendered "that you may believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus.” Thus the fundamental question the fourth gospel addresses is not Who is Jesus? but Who is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God? 88 In its context, the latter is a question of identity, not of kind: that is, the question Who is the Christ? should not here be taken to mean "What kind of Christ are you talking about?” but "So you claim to know who the Christ is. Prove it, then: Who is he?”
Christians would not ask that kind of question, because they already knew the answer. The most likely people to ask that sort of question would be Jews and Jewish proselytes who know what "the Christ” means, have some sort of messianic expectation, and are perhaps in dialogue with Christians and want to know more. In short, John’s gospel not only is evangelistic in its purpose (which was a dominant view until this century, when relatively few have defended it) 89 but aims in particular to evangelize Diaspora Jews and Jewish proselytes. This view is gradually gaining influence, 90 and much can be said for it. It may even receive indirect support from some recent studies that try to interpret the fourth gospel as a piece of mission literature. The best of these 91 display generally excellent exegesis but give no attention to the fact that with very little adaptation the same exegesis could justify the thesis that the gospel of John was not written to believers about mission but to outsiders to perform mission.
It goes beyond the limits of a brief introduction to show how this stated purpose of the evangelist sheds a great deal of light on the rest of his gospel: that is the work of an entire commentary. The constant allusions to the Old Testament show that John’s intended readership is biblically literate; his translation of Semitic expressions (e.g.,
John 1:38, 42; 4:25; 19:13, 17) shows he is writing to those whose linguistic competence is in Greek. His strong denunciation of "the Jews” cannot be taken as a mark against this thesis: John may well have an interest in driving a wedge between ordinary Jews and (at least) some of their leaders. The fourth gospel is not as anti-Jewish as some people think anyway: salvation is still said to be "from the Jews” (4:22), and often the referent of "the Jews” is "the Jews in Judea” or "the Jewish leaders” or the like. "Anti-Semitic” is simply the wrong category to apply to the fourth gospel: whatever hostilities are present turn on theological issues related to the acceptance or rejection of revelation, not on race. How could it be otherwise, when all of the first Christians were Jews and when, on this reading, both the fourth evangelist and his primary readers were Jews and Jewish proselytes? Those who respond to Jesus, whether Jews, Samaritans, or "other sheep” (10:16) to be added to Jesus’ fold, are blessed; those who ignore him or reject him do so out of unbelief, disobedience (3:36), and culpable blindness (9:29-41).
Within some such a framework as this, further inferences can usefully be drawn from the content of his gospel about the people to whom John was writing and the topics that interested them. But these inferences are secondary, always in principle to be challenged by other (and possibly competing) inferences and never capable of more than confirming John’s purpose, which we must establish on other grounds.