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Conclusion
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Conclusion More than once in the course of this book I have observed that despite what seems to be a general consensus among Johannine scholars the fourth evangelist was not a theologian, at least if we understand by this term a person mainly occupied with rational reflection about God. He did not spend most of his time endeavoring to work out a consistent and satisfactory Christology. Nor of course was he a biblical scholar, hunting for sources, either Jewish or Christian, to be used in complementing or supplementing his own ideas. And although he was certainly familiar with at least one of the Synoptic Gospels, so that the gospel form (sayings, stories, and a passion narrative) supplied him with a framework for his own composition, and although too he must have inherited many treasured memories of Jesus’ words and deeds, his use of these was incidental rather than systematic. Like Paul, he had received a revelation, and that revelation, again like Paul’s, concerned Christ. Paul, brought up as a Pharisee, did think theologically; but I have argued at length elsewhere that what was primary for Paul was not theology but religious experience;1 and the same is surely true of John. In the last chapter I suggested that the evangelist’s thrice-repeated statement concerning Jesus’ exaltation on the cross is better explained as stemming from a visionary experience than as a clever piece of wordplay. And what of the assertion in the Prologue that “we have seen (or gazed upon) his glory”? Rudolf Bultmann actually notes that “Δόξα in the LXX, the NT and in the literature of magic, the mysteries, and related Hellenistic literature, refers to the epiphany and the manifestation of the Godhead.”2 But then he immediately asserts that “the revelation clearly does not occur, as some might naively wish to imagine, in a divine demonstration, visible to the natural eye of the body or the soul,” and goes on to speak instead of “the vision of faith,”3 an expression neither argued for nor explained: Bultmann is stating a theological conviction. Would it not have been better, methodologically speaking, to turn for assistance to other statements in the Gospel that refer to the manifestation of Christ’s glory? The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that of the Synoptists is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ, constantly present to 1. John Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 2. Rudolf Bultmann,The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 67 n. 2. 3. Bultmann, Gospel, 68–69. 201 him and to his community, that has all but obliterated the memory of a human Jesus subject to the weaknesses of ordinary mortals—so that, above all else, his uncertainty about his own fate and, in his dying moments, his failure of faith, were completely forgotten. Why is it then, it might reasonably be asked, that there is no mention of this in the commentaries? Why is it that one scholar after another speaks of John’s theology rather than of his religious experience? There are two, complementary, answers to the question. The first answer must be the crushing weight of a tradition that has been piling up ever since the patristic era, when the Greek church gave John the honorable title of Theologian—largely because the great doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity were elaborated mostly on the basis of texts drawn from the Fourth Gospel. In the modern era other great figures emerged—first Friedrich Schleiermacher and then, towering above all the rest, Ferdinand Christian Baur, whose unremitting emphasis on the theological achievement of John paved the way for what was to follow. In the twentieth century no one could match the astonishing learning and insight of the great Bultmann, to whom we owe the clear perception, put forward in the “Bedeutung” article I mentioned earlier, that the basic theme of the Gospel, its Grundkonzeption, was revelation: “Precisely what though,” he asked, “does the Jesus of John’s Gospel reveal? One thing only, though put in different ways: that he has been sent as the revealer.”4 The commentators who succeeded Bultmann, also men of considerable learning, could not but stand in his shadow. In Britain, C. H. Dodd and C. K. Barrett did their best, without admitting it, to confront Bultmann; but they too were equally convinced that the Fourth Gospel was the work of a theologian. Raymond E. Brown...