What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present and Future of Johannine Studies

4: THREE REVOLUTIONS, A FUNERAL, AND GLIMMERS OF A CHALLENGING DAWN

63 On Holy Thursday, 1960, I was struck by a preacher’s description of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. That night I found the account (John 13:1–20) in an old translation and began to read. The account became a long farewell speech, and it captured me like nothing I had ever read before. More than legends or lyrics, soldiers or sailors, saints or scholars, Greeks or Romans, Wild West or Far East, Jesus’ farewell speech gave an extraordinary experience of depth and calm and truth. I decided to learn the beginning of it by heart. Then the entire speech. The wording was somewhat archaic, but it was easier than the wording of the Shakespearean speeches that every high school student in the country had been expected to learn. By autumn, I had memorized the entire Gospel of John. As time passed, the words began to recede. But not completely. Years later, I read in George Steiner that the custom of learning things by heart has great value—that somehow the text lodges deep within a person, in the heart. And so it seemed. The old words became a kind of treasure, an underlying joy. In an earlier age, that treasure might have remained essentially undisturbed until I went to my grave. But it was not to be. Three succeeding decades—the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—all brought benign revolutions to my understanding of the Bible, including the Gospel of John, and having expressed much of what I have learned, especially Chapter 4 THREE REVOLUTIONS, A FUNERAL, AND GLIMMERS OF A CHALLENGING DAWN Thomas L. Brodie, O.P. 64 THOMAS L. BRODIE, O.P. through five books (Brodie 1993a; 1993b; 2000; 2001; 2004), I now seem to be facing a further change. It is appropriate then to summarize my reflections around these changes. The First Revolution The first revolution in my thinking about John was started by a creature called the historical-critical method, including eventually “social” history. I first encountered this phenomenon in the shape of a throwaway remark. One day an older person said casually that the words in the Gospels were not the exact words of Jesus. My heart sank. Later, the evidence was inescapable. In my formal studies in the 1960s, I was taught in the tradition of Jerusalem’s Ecole Biblique with its emphasis on history and archaeology—my parents’ present on my twenty–first birthday was the Bible de Jerusalem—and from Genesis, Jericho, Isaiah, and Jonah to the quest for Jesus’ life and words, the historical method showed that the Bible was not the solid building I had imagined. It was necessary, therefore , to give special attention to history and sources. And when in 1968 I was catapulted prematurely into teaching almost all aspects of Biblical Studies, Old and New Testament, in the regional seminary of the West Indies in Trinidad, I did indeed try to do justice to the bold theories of Wellhausen, Noth, and Bultmann, but I also sifted the meticulous historical research of scholars such as de Vaux, Albright, Bright, Benoit, Dodd, and Brown. Teaching John was a challenge. The Fourth Gospel had earned Saint John the title “The Theologian,” but, as Westcott lamented, the historians had driven the theologians from the field. Raymond Brown often recounted how when he was embarking on his Anchor Bible commentary on John, his mentor, William Foxwell Albright, urged him to deal with history rather than theology. Brown had replied that, given how the Gospel begins, he would have to engage theology, which he did. But Brown also engaged history, so that Albright’s emphasis tended to dominate the commentary. John’s differences from the other Gospels, when combined with the idea of oral tradition, contributed to the notion that John had an independent link to the original events. John’s Gospel, after all, was somehow deeply historical. Brown’s commentary seemed extraordinarily comprehensive and helpful, and also reassuring. I read it over and over. The Second Revolution In September 1972, a second benign revolution struck. To prepare for examinations, I had gone into virtual seclusion in a village in Normandy. THREE REVOLUTIONS, A FUNERAL, AND GLIMMERS 65 My custom was to study the Old Testament in the morning and the New Testament in the afternoon and evening, and I had spent much of the previous day with Matthew, a Gospel I knew well from teaching it in Trinidad. Now I...