The Anti-Judaic Strand in John: Estrangement

Abstract

In John’s Gospel we encounter the loftiest, most ornate, and most sublime exaltations of Jesus in the New Testament: “If Jesus is painfully human for Mark, he is serenely transcendental for John.” ¹ In John we also find the most explicit declarations about the divinity of Jesus in the canonical Gospels, the closest affirmations of Jesus’s divinity (i. e., John has the “highest” Christology). When read literally, John’s Gospel is also the most anti-Jewish Gospel. ² This tragic co-occurrence has magnified the impact of John’s anti-Jewish bent:

8:42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. 43 Why do you do not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. 44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. 46 Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? 47 He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.’

There exists somewhat of a consensus that John’s Gospel was written in the last decade of the first century, and that the Gospel and the Johannine Epistles were part of the literary corpus of one community. Most date the Epistles later, to a period of schism within the community. Standing on Martyn,³ the consensus identifies two dramas that were fused into one by the author(s)/editor(s): Jesus’s conflict with the “Jewish authorities” and the conflict of the Johannines with differing believers in Jesus, decades later.