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

10: THE JOHANNINE COMMUNITY AMONG JEWISH AND OTHER EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES

182 DAVID RENSBERGER happened is not the same as explaining it away. If I wanted to say “only what profits” me, I would say that Christianity parted amicably with Judaism in the late first century and that both sides behaved nobly and justly. But the discomfiting truth is that some Christians behaved horribly, and some non–Christian Jews probably acted badly as well. I don’t know if that’s a grand narrative or a little story, but I think it’s a human story, and I don’t think it becomes merely a “fiction” simply because its tellers are not pure of ideological interest. My plea, then, is simply that we always consider the other side of the other side. “We do not violate the nature of language when we say it means so–and–so. However, we do violate it when we claim that it only means so–and–so.” There I agree with Bob Kysar, and for precisely that reason I disagree with much of the rest of what he says. If people are to be changed by a sermon or a text, they require what can only be called a moral or ethical quality of openness to that which is outside themselves and their interests. That same openness to what is “other” is the thing that makes scholarly dialogue and historical study possible. If we renounce the quest for any reference point outside ourselves (even an imperfect, constructed one), insisting that we only tell ourselves what we already know and want to hear, then nothing new—no learning and no change—is imaginable at all. Because responding to Tom Thatcher’s gracious invitation to participate in this volume necessarily involves a bit of reminiscence, we find ourselves briefly at Yale University in the 1950s. To a large extent, the period was marked in Protestant American Biblical Studies by a concentration on issues handed across the Atlantic, so to speak, from Germany and Switzerland . We knew that there was genuine learning in England and Scotland , but the interpretive work that exercised our minds came our way largely from the continent. So when the time arrived for proposing a dissertation topic (1954), I thought in European terms without noticing it. I turned first to Johannine matters, partly because Rudolf Bultmann’s commentary on John seemed to me both enormously impressive—it is still worth reading!—and seriously inadequate. I found it impossible to avoid ambivalence while paying close attention to the writings of this scholar, a true giant and also imperfect. Timeless and Placeless Reading of the Fourth Gospel in the Post–Enlightenment Western University As I reflected on Bultmann’s work, I saw, on the one hand, that there was an uncanny congeniality (Verwantschaft) between the first–century Johannine Evangelist and this twentieth–century interpreter. At juncture Chapter 10 THE JOHANNINE COMMUNITY AMONG JEWISH AND OTHER EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES J. Louis Martyn 183 after juncture, one came to a deeper understanding of a passage after pondering and wrestling with Bultmann’s comments on it. On the other hand, there were what impressed me as direct and unqualified reflections of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Noting earlier a linguistic habit of Bultmann—equally evident in his books and articles on Jesus, Paul, and John—I had concocted a humorous story for the amusement of my fellow doctoral students. Bultmann’s publisher, I said, had ordered a special typesetting machine for the production of his works: the depression of a single key brought up the word Möglichkeit (“possibility”); the depression of another produced the term Entscheidung (“decision”). But were possibility and decision actually central categories in the teaching of Jesus, in the theological systems of Paul and John, and in the thinking of many other early Christian authors as well? Or were those categories borrowed from Heidegger and imposed on the ancient texts? I noted, for example, in John 6:44 that the evangelist puts the verb e9lku/w (“to draw”) in Jesus’ mouth in a way that seems emphatically to deny the human capacity of autonomous decision: “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me” (cf. 12:32). There was no doubt that the Gospel of John evidences patterns of dualistic thought; but did Bultmann’s expression “decision dualism” really stem from that document itself? Those seemed to me weighty questions. Wide reading in the critical literature soon caused...