Speaking of John

Our text is this post by Thought Criminal.  Behind that text is the historical (well, since WWII) problem of John, which it is in many ways the historical foundation for Christian (read European) anti-semitism (I can't speak to anti-semitism in Russia or in the areas culturally dominated by the Orthodox churches.  Ignorance prevents me from sounding knowledgeable.).  I have to start by noting how recently this has changed.  Rudolf Bultmann, who worked alongside Martin Heidegger and who owes much of his thought to that relationship (they were professors in university at the same time) wrote a rather dismissive work on the synoptics, and wrote his magisterial work on The Gospel of John. I still recommend it because it is a seminal work.  It is a work of true German scholarship, replete with footnotes (not endnotes!) which take over pages of the text and constitute a midrash on his own discussion of the scholarly discussion of the gospel, and incorporates a truly brilliant discussion/application of the thought of Kierkegaard.  But it doesn't much address anti-semitism, which really became a "thing" in the '60's and beyond; not so much in even post-war Germany (not in Biblical scholarship, I mean.) You'll think me anachronistic and point out the book was published in 1964 (the copy on my shelf, in translation, was published in 1971), but I would point out Bultmann moved from Biblical scholarship to "demythologizing" work aimed at fundamentalists, and their ire is where I first encountered Bultmann and knew him as a friend (actually I first heard of him in Robert Short's The Gospel According to Peanuts, where Short freely referenced Bultmann and Karl Barth.  I owe the Germans a huge intellectual debt I have never come close to repaying.).  His work on John is still his magnum opus.  It is the product of work that began long before the war, when antisemitism wasn’t enough of a topic, especially around the gospel of John.

As I say, he devotes an entire volume to the verses in John, lumping all the verses of Matthew, Mark, and Luke into one much shorter work. The appeal of John to Bultmann is another topic entirely.

But let's start with the English word "Jew."

According to my Young’s Concordance (I went there to find incidents of the word in the KJV translation, and what word was so translated.  Hang on, I'll come back to that) I found this extraordinary headnote, unlike anything I'd seen in Young’s before:

1. A descendant of Judah; in later times also an Israelite. in 2 Kings 16:6 this appelation is applied to the two tribes; in later days the twelve tribes.  Strictly speaking, the name is appropriate only to the subjects of the kingdom of the two tribes after the separation of the ten tribes, B.C.[sic] 975. In 605 Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzer's first dream; in 561 Evil-merodach releases Jehoaichim from captivity; in 539 Daniel interprets the handwritinig to Belshazzar; in 536 the decree of Cyprus in favour of the Jews; in 535 the second temple is founded; in 516 it is finished; in 463 Artaxerxes stops the rebuilding of the city; in 458 he marries Esther; in 457 Ezra comes; in 444 Nehemiah becomes governor; in 332 Alexander the Great enters Jerusalem; in 320 Ptolemy Soter storms Jerusalem; in 312 Antigonus wrested Judea from Ptolemyl in 285 the Septuagint translation began; in 203 Antiochus the Great invades Judea and Phenicia [sic]; in 200 the sect of the Sadducees arises; in 199 the country is recovered by the Egyptian general Scopus; in 198 Scopas is defeated; in 170  Antiochus Epiphanes massacres 40,000 in Jerusalem; in 1168 Appolonius takes Jerusalem and dedicates the temple to Jupiter Olympus; in 165 Judas Maccabeus rises in arms; in 163 Judas made governor; in 160 he makes the first treaty with the Romans; in 156 the Syrians withdraw; in 144 Jonathan put to death; in 130 Hyrcanus subdues the Idumeans; in 95 the Pharisees rebel; in 75 Hyrcanus is defeated; in 63 Hyrcanus is restored; in 54 Crassus plunders the temple; in 49 Aristobulus poisoned; in 42 Herod marries Mariamne; in 40 the Parthians invade Judea;, and Herod proclaimed King by the Romans; in 37 the Romans take Jerusalem; in 31 a dreadful earthquake; in 29 Mariamne put to death; in 17 Herod begins to rebuild the temple; on Friday, April 5th, four years before the Common Era, Jesus is born.

Which, to start at the end and work backwards, tells you how old Young’s is.  It's a good resource for finding words in the KJV and the Hebrew or Greek words so translated in the text; but it's scholarship is a bit...archaic, at this point.  I've never seen such a precise date for the birth of Jesus.  It's kind of funny, really.

Anyway, the curious thing about this is, there is no transliteration for the Hebrew word being referenced here. Rather like a dictionary, Young’s lists the word as it appears in the scriptures in translation, in both the original alphabet, then in transliteration, and finally gives all instances of the word(s) being thus translated, from most appearances to least.  Like a dictionary, definitions shift subtly as the number of entries dwindles.  But here the only word is a Hebrew one, without even a transliteration.  There are references to Esther, Jeremiah, and Zechariah, for the word (10 verses in all, 8 from Esther alone), and that's it.  The next entry is transliterated as "yehudim" in Hebrew, ioudaioi in Greek.  I'm assuming the word appears in the Septuagint as the Greek word; this word appears 5 times in Matthew, 6 times in Mark, 5 times in Luke, and almost 70 times (by rough count) in the Gospel of John.  By my (rough, again) count, it appears 78 times in Acts.  So while Luke uses it extensively in the story of the early church, among the gospels, John wins.

From what I remember from Crossan, the Greek word actually indicates a resident of the region of Judea, rather than the specific religious or racial definition we give it today.  Of course, in the 1st century, one couldn't really separate Jews in to religious and secular.  The "definition" was children of Abraham, people of the covenant.  That was, in modern terms, simultaneously a religious and political designation; though both terms are anachronisms when applied to 1st century Palestine.  Politics wasn't about competing parties to power (that would have been anarchy, plain and simple; or treason, even worse).  Politics was about the polis, the common space, and the needs of the community.  We even have to set aside (as if we can!) our understanding of ourselves as individuals, important in our own right.  That's a 19th century European idea, not a 1st century Palestinian one.  When Jesus shows up in the Temple in Luke and reads from Isaiah about setting the captive free and making the blind see, the audience isn't outraged because he says those words apply to him (he doesn't really say that, if you read Luke carefully).  They are outraged that he presumes to pronounce a definitive interpretation of the scriptures, as if he were God (who alone could make such an announcement.  And even then the rabbis would argue over that interpretation for centuries!). The problem there is the presumption of one person to speak for the community (or God!) to the community.  We have a hard time understanding the non-individual nature of human society in the 1st century, and pretty much up to the 19th century.  Sure, Jefferson had slaves, and "all men" were created equal, but not treated that way.  But Jefferson was speaking of, and to, his peers; that community alone mattered.  We create the anachronism when we try to hold Jefferson to our standards of the individual against the world that didn't come into being until Byron and Goethe in the 19th century, ideas that didn't reach America until Whitman and Dickinson in the mid-19th century (and even then Dickinson just wrote for herself, and Whitman identified himself with America ("I am vast, I contain multitudes.").  I’m not excusing Jefferson as a slave owner, I’m trying to say we create anachronisms because of the passage of time, and then use them as clubs to beat up history and create misunderstandings. Of course Jefferson doesn’t meet our standards, but he wasn’t trying to; he couldn’t imagine what they would be.

This is very hard stuff to understand correctly. I'm not sure we can do it even when we try. None of which really addresses the roots of anti-semitism we can find in John's gospel in particular.  But we have to start with the understanding John didn't live in a Christian world (nor did such a thing exist, even conceptually, before Constantine and the 4th century), so a great deal of the "fault" of John is actually our fault, and not his.  He was no more capable of writing for our understanding than we are of writing for the understanding and sensibilities of people in the 40th century.  We imagine the world may have ended by then; or at least the human race; and yet we wonder how people in the 1st century could have reasonably expected the world to end long before the 21st century. See what I mean about anachronism and understanding?

You see how incautious we are about the past, how we treat is as just like the present except more "primitive,"less "advanced" or "Enlightened" than us.  It's our way of masking our ignorance and making ourselves feel superior.  You'll have to watch that, if you want to continue following this discussion.

Let me go back to "iudaioi" a moment.  This is from the notes to John in the translation by the Jesus Seminar:

Only here are the Jewish people spoken of monolithically and from the outside; in the other gospels Pilate alone uses the phrase "the Jews." [According to Young's the word appears in both Matthew's nativity story (2:2), and in all three crucifixion narratives]  The explanation appears to be that this group of Christian Jews has recently been expelled from the synagogue (9:22,34, 12:42; 16:2), and therefore has a highly ambivalent, and frequently hostile, attitude toward Ioudaioi.  Traditionally translated into English as "Jews," the term is indistinguishable in Greek from "Judeans;" at the time, "Jews" were simply those who survived the fall of the Kingdom of Judah [hence that long passage from Young’s] and had their spiritual base, and in many cases their actual residence, in what Rome called Judea.  This gospel has given rise, more than Matthew, to savage Christian anti-Semitism down the subsequent centuries.

The Seminar uses that to explain why they translate the Greek word in John's gospel as "the Judeans," instead.

There's also this, relevant to my previous discussion about faith and trust as two sides of a very thin coin:

If the synoptics' Jesus appeals to the "trust" of those who hear and would follow him, for our gospel [i.e., John] the same term (pistis) means "belief"--in Jesus' divine sonship and in the rescue from the world's stranglehold that he offers.  Jesus' miracles, along that all that he has said and done, are written "so you will come to believe that Jesus is the Anointed, God's son--and by believing this have life in his name." (20:30-31)

And a bit from the Seminar I can paraphrase to help put that long quote from Young’s in context.  

This temple history of Israel divides into three parts:

1) religion of the first temple (ca. 950-586 B.C.E.)

2) religion of the second temple (ca. 520 B.C.E. -70 C.E.)  This is the Temple Jesus would have known.

3) religion of rabbis and synagogues (ca. 90 C.E. and continuing)

Let me back further out for a quick review of the history of Israel.  The kingdom of Israel existed under Saul, David, and Solomon.  When Solomon died, the nation divided into a northern kingdom (Israel) and a southern one (Judah).  Jerusalem was in Judah.  Israel fell in 721 B.C.E after a long seige by the Assyrians, and never recovered.  So the restoration of the temple (the religion of the second temple) centered on Judah and Jerusalem. The central part of the northern kingdom was eventually populated by Samaritans, people of mixed ethnic background who claimed their own Torah and the legacy of the northern Israelite religion as their heritage.  The southern kingdom came to be known as Judah, and its people as Judeans.  Worship in the "religion of the second temple" centered on sacrifices made at the Temple (and so the cleansing during Holy Week, in the synoptics).  The word "Jews" is more properly applied, then, to those belonging to the "religion of rabbis and synagogues."  This begins around 90 C.E.  The gospel of John is generally dated to ca. 90-120 C.E.  Written, in other words, in the interregnum between the fall of Temple worship and the rise of synagogue worship. Which also explains some of the tension in John between his community and the rest of the children of Abraham.

I want to add I'm not offering this as definitive or in rebuttal to any other scholarship on these points.  These are the works I have on my shelves, and that I'm familiar enough with to find easy references in. I'm adding to the discussion TC started, not challenging his sources or ideas. Too much of the internet is about confrontation. This is about collaborating.

TC has a great deal to offer here on the transition of “the Judeans” to “the Jews.” What we can take from this today is that we are victims of bad translations, something we can now correct. John couldn’t conceive of the anti-semitism (I agree with TC, even the term itself is problematic) created across the 2000 years of history, or of how the words of his gospel would be translated into tongues that didn’t exist when he did. This is one case where the fault lies, not in the scriptures but almost solely in us. This is not a thorny matter of interpretation, but a relatively simple matter of translation. Change the word, change the outcome. We can’t correct the past. We can do better in the future.

I mentioned Bultmann, but I never followed up. It turns out that’s yet another conversation about the influence of the gospel of John. That means I should probably spend some time reviewing his work in John’s gospel. Might as well start now. I’ll try to get back to you.