The Gospel of John and Christian Origins

Introduction

Introduction One day in early August 1942, when a German nun called Sister Benedicta was at prayer in the chapel of the Carmelite convent in the Dutch town of Echt, members of the German SS presented themselves at the convent door. They told the prioress to inform Sister Benedicta, whose original name was Edith Stein, that she had ten minutes to pack all that she needed for a journey to Germany. From Germany she was transported to Auschwitz, in Poland, where she was murdered. She was fifty years old. Ten years earlier she had entered the Carmelite order. Edith Stein was Jewish; but one day in 1921, at the age of thirty, she had picked up and read from cover to cover a copy of the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She had been interested in Christianity for some time, but for her this book was the last step in her long search for truth. On finishing it she said to herself, “Das ist die Wahrheit!”—“That is the truth.” Looking back, she realized that this was the moment both of her decision to become a Catholic and of her vocation to the Carmelite Order. She went to tell her mother, a fervent, practicing Jew, who was horrified, and wept. Edith was very close to her mother, but she had never seen her in tears before. Shortly afterwards, on Yom Kippur, the two women went together to the synagogue. When the rabbi intoned the words, “Höre O Israel, Dein Gott ist ein Einziger” (“Hear, O Israel, your God is One”), Edith’s mother leaned over and whispered to her daughter, “Hörst Du? Dein Gott ist ein Einziger”—“Do you hear? Your God is One, and only One.” Here is the boundary line: one God. Christianity also proclaims one God, but its two central doctrines, Incarnation and Trinity, sharply differentiate it from the other “religions of the book,” Judaism and Islam. These two doctrines are found in the Gospel of John, the first spelled out explicitly on its first page, the second clearly adumbrated in the part of the Gospel we call the Farewell Discourse (chs. 14–16). They situate it poles apart from Judaism, further away than any other writing in the New Testament, and consequently make it the hardest of all to explain. Even considered in isolation, with no consideration of its relation to Judaism, it is an astonishing, bewildering, mysterious work. So we should not be surprised that the great German scholar Adolf Harnack declared in 1886 that “the origin of the Johannine writings is, from the standpoint of a history of literature and dogma, the most extraordinary enigma which the early history of Christianity presents.”1 What Harnack actually wrote was “das 1 wundervollste Rätsel,” the most marvelous riddle, or a puzzle full of mysteries. The Gospel of John is indeed “a puzzle full of mysteries.” How are we to explain it? The Jewish religion as we see it today is far from uniform. But although there are considerable differences between the Ashkenaz and Sephardic traditions, and between the three main groupings, Orthodox, liberal, and Reform, the differences are not great enough to warrant our speaking of a plurality of Judaisms. Similar differences between the two great branches of Islam, the Sunni and the Shia, and between the various regions of the world where Islam has taken hold, are too small to justify our talking of a plurality of Islams. The differences today between some branches of Christianity are great enough, in my opinion, to make them into different religions. Yet we never hear people speaking of different Christianities any more than we do of different Judaisms or Islams. No branch of Christianity could possibly have emerged from any of the modern varieties of Judaism. Why? Fundamentally because the two religions, though both profess belief in one God, have completely opposed conceptions of God’s definitive revelation to humankind. For Jews this can be summed up as the Torah, the law revealed to Moses. For Christians it is summed up in the very person of Christ. One of the best summaries of the ineradicable difference between the two religions comes in the Prologue to the Gospel of John: “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17). This statement, bleak, blunt, uncompromising, illustrates more clearly than any other in the whole of the New Testament the incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism. It announces a new religion...