Abstract
John’s gospel presents the challenge of belief in an especially insistent way. As Edward Schillebeeckx says, the entire action is governed by a dialectic of belief and unbelief.1 Jesus testifies repeatedly to what he has seen and heard with the Father (3:32), and those who accept his testimony will not perish (3:15), but those who do not are condemned already (3:18). A pervasive use of court-room images keeps before us the sense of critical decision,2 and John never uses the noun (pistis), but only the verb (pisteuo):3 belief, he implies, is not only a judgement made from within ourselves, but also an active relationship.
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Notes
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: the Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1983) p. 335.
See also John Painter, John. Witness and Theologian (London: SPCK, 1975) p. 77: ‘The emphasis in John on believing is clear. In twenty-one chapters we have almost half the uses in the New Testament and more than three times the total number of uses in the Synoptics.’
See Alison A. Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness (Cambridge University Press, 1977) ch. 8, ‘The Concept of Witness in the Fourth Gospel’, p. 78: ‘The Fourth Gospel … is of particular importance for it presents a sustained use of juridical metaphor’,
and George Johnston, The Spirit-Paraclete in the Gospel of John (Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 155.
For John’s use of the verb ‘to believe’ see C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge University Press, 1968) pp. 179ff. Dodds discusses the moral and intellectual senses, and the connection between faith and vision (the detection of God’s glory), and the unusual use of the verb with eis, which re-enforces the personal nature of belief.
R. H. Strachan, The Fourth Evangelist: Dramatist or Historian? (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925) p. 93: ‘We shall, therefore, be prepared to find that “faith” or “belief” is a dominant idea in the Fourth Gospel. One point, however, is deserving of notice. The noun “faith” (pistis), as has often been observed, is never used in the Gospel. The verb “to believe” alone is found. That can only indicate that the Evangelist conceives of faith as dynamic, and not as static; as a relationship between God and man, through Jesus Christ, which is either tragically conspicuous by its absence, or grows and deepens with increasing knowledge of Jesus Christ, the great object of faith.’
The modern tendency is to emphasise the Jewish background to the gospel, and to play down the Greek. See Robert Kysar, ‘Community and Gospel: Vectors in Fourth Gospel Criticism’, ed. James Luther Mays, Interpreting the Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981) pp. 266ff., and 274;
and Robert Kysar, The Fourth Evangelist and His Gospel. An Examination of Contemporary Scholarship (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975) chapter III, ‘The Johannine Dualism’, pp. 215–21, and esp. p. 221: ‘It is, therefore, to be judged more likely for a number of reasons that the redemptive content of the symbolism of the positive pole and the corrupting content of the symbolism of the negative pole should be emphasised.’
John Donne, zz The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) p. 11.
See Lucio P. Rustolo, ‘The Trinitarian Framework of Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV’, Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966) pp. 445–6.
See David K. Cornelius, ‘Donne’s “Holy-Sonnet XIV”’, Explicator 24, no. 3 (1965) Item 25.
C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to John (Philadelphia: Westminster. Press, 1978) pp. 76ff.
Norman Perrin and Dennis C. Duling, The New Testament. An Introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982) p. 336.
The complex textual problems indicated here are beyond the scope of this chapter, but are dealt with by most of the major commentators. On the church situation, see for instance C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, pp. 100ff.; R. H. Lightfoot, St. John’s Gospel: a Commentary, pp. 4ff.; Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, 3 vols (New York: Crossroad, 1982) I, 75ff.;
Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible: the Gospel According to John, 2 vols (New York: Doubleday, 1966) I, lxvii ff. On the textual traditions and interpolations see C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, pp. 21ff., and especially p. 22: ‘I take it that if the gospel makes sense as it stands it can generally be assumed that this is the sense it was intended to make. That it may seem to me to make better sense when rearranged I do not regard as adequate reason for abandoning an order which undoubtedly runs back into the second century — the order, indeed, in which the book was published.’
See also Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: a Commentary, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971) pp. 3ff.;
W. Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament, trans. G. Buswell (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968) pp. 252ff.; Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, I, 59ff.
For a summary account of the sources, see Robert Kysar, The Fourth Evangelist and His Gospel: an Examination of Contemporary Scholarship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975) pp. 13ff.
For an assessment of Bultmann’s influential theory and reconstruction of the Fourth Gospel, see Dwight Moody Smith, Jr, The Composition and Order of the Fourth Gospel. Bultmann’s Literary Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965).
In the following paragraph I summarise Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word. Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967) pp. 128–9, 166 et passim, and Interfaces of the Word. Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) esp. pp. 139ff.
See for instance Brown, The Gospel According to John, I, 337, and the bibliography on p. 338; Lightfoot, St. John’s Gospel: a Commentary, p. 347; C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, 2nd edn, p. 592, who summarises several of the main opinions and concludes: ‘In fact it is fruitless to ask what Jesus wrote on the ground.’ An interesting interpretation is that Jesus was being tested in the same manner as in the incident about paying tribute to Caesar (Matt. 22:15–22): if he disagrees about stoning the woman, he is against the Mosaic law; if he agrees, he is against the Roman law. T. W. Manson suggests that, following Roman legal practice, Jesus first writes the sentence and then reads it, and that his judgement is a careful evasion. See ‘The Pericope de Adulterio (John 7, 53–8, 11)’, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentltiche Wissenschaft 44 (1952–53) pp. 255–6. I am not concerned here with the debate on whether or not the story really belongs in the Fourth Gospel. For a summary of the textual tradition, see Edwyn Clement Hoskyns, zz The Fourth Gospel, ed. Francis Noel Davey, 2 vols (London: Faber, 1940) II, 673ff.
G. Wilson Knight, The Christian Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1962) p. 147. See also John Painter, John. Witness and Theologian, pp. 50ff.
See Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, I, 419ff., for an example of the general idea that ‘the presence of a deeper symbolism always arises in John from the fact that the narrative also includes theological themes which are intrinsically connected with it’ (421). See also J. Bligh, ‘Jesus in Samaria’, Heythrop Journal 3 (1962) pp. 329–46. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, divides the scene into two sections (I, 176ff.), and sees in the story of the Samaritan woman ‘the drama of a soul struggling to rise from the things of this world to belief in Jesus. Not only the Samaritan woman but every man must come to recognise who it is that speaks when Jesus speaks. …’ (I, 178).
There is no scholarly consensus on relationships between John and the synoptics, though the claim that John knew any of the synoptics directly (as distinct from knowledge transmitted orally and by tradition) is held by a minority, among them C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, pp. 42ff. See Robert Kysar, ‘Vectors in Fourth Gospel Criticism’, ed. James Luther Mays, Interpreting the Gospels, pp. 269–70; Robert Tomson Fortna, The Gospel of Signs. A Reconstruction of the Narrative Source Underlying the Fourth Gospel, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 11 (Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 226.
A. Feuillet, ‘La signification théologique du second miracle de Cana (Jo. IV, 46–54)’, Recherches de sciences religieuses 48 (1960) pp. 62–75, argues that this periscope is not the last section of what preceded, but the beginning of a new section, thereby establishing two Cana-Jerusalem incidents. As Raymond E. Brown (citing Feuillet) points out (The Gospel According to John, I, 198), it could fulfill both functions.
See for instance E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel: Its Purpose and Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2nd edn, 1908) pp. 21–2: ‘It even seems probable that the structure of the Gospel as a whole is determined by these two numbers, three and seven.’
See T. Francis Glasson, Moses in the Fourth Gospel, Studies in Biblical Theology 40 (London: SCM, 1963), and Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ, pp. 314ff.
Literally, the imperative me mou aptou means ‘stop touching me’ (Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, II, 992). Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, III, 318, says: ‘the negative present imperative can also mean, Do not hold on to me any longer, let me go’. See also Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: a Commentary, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971) p. 687: ‘she thinks that the old relationship has been renewed, and in her joy she wants to embrace him — as a friend would do to a friend who has come back again’.
See John Painter, John. Witness and Theologian, pp. 50ff (on glory in humiliation), and p. 56 (on the cross as enthronement); R. H. Lightfoot, St. John’s Gospel. A Commentary, p. 316: ‘The Lord is king indeed; the cross is the manner of his exaltation and glorification’; J. Terence Forestell, The Word of the Cross: Salvation as Revelation in the Fourth Gospel (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1974) p. 73: ‘The fourth gospel views the cross as the visible sign of the exaltation and glorification of the Son of Man in the presence of God … the elevation of Jesus on the cross is the visible sign of this triumph.’
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© 1989 Patrick Grant
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Grant, P. (1989). John: Seeing and Believing. In: Reading the New Testament. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09310-6_5
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