Ep 128: John! With Hugo Méndez

00:00One thing I set out to do in this book was to really press the question, "If John knows

00:06the synoptics," which I argue he did, "then why does he want to change them in the way

00:12that he does?

00:13What does he add to them that's different?

00:15Something new that I do is I put together a very different theological vision of the

00:20gospel of John than I think has really existed in any other book that's out there right now

00:26on the market."

00:27Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

00:33And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:34And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to

00:40the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation

00:45about the same, again, in those pleasing baritone voices, mine a little more so than usual.

00:53Well, your voice is a little nasally baritone today because you're a-

00:56It's pleasant.

00:57Alas, you're sick.

00:58Yes.

00:59I'm just- I'm sympathizing with you.

01:01I brought home from DragonCon in Atlanta.

01:04I brought home a number of comic books, a number of t-shirts and a head cold, which I'm

01:10not happy about, but-

01:11Apparently, you're allergic to dragons.

01:14Anyway, we should introduce our guest.

01:17We have a guest this week on the show.

01:19Please say hello, everybody, to Hugo Mendez, who is Associate Professor of Religious Studies

01:24at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in case you were wondering.

01:31Thanks so much for being here, Hugo.

01:32We appreciate your time.

01:34Thank you all so much for having me on.

01:36Yeah.

01:37We're looking forward to this conversation.

01:39The book is called The Gospel of John, a new history and it's a fun one, especially since

01:46the Gospel of John is a fun thing to be looking into.

01:53We've definitely, you know, we saw the world of biblical scholarship can get incredibly

01:59granular and can get into some very, like, some stuff that's fascinating to scholars,

02:06but not particularly interesting to the rest of us.

02:09But you can say Septuagint studies if you want.

02:14I said nothing of the book, but I will say that John is really interested.

02:21Like, there's a lot going on with the ideas surrounding this Gospel and subsequent epistles

02:31and who won't know what else is also attributed to the name John.

02:41And so I'm looking forward to getting into this.

02:43Should we just dive right in here?

02:46Well, I wanted to bring something up real quick.

02:48You mentioned the epistolary of John, what is frequently referred to as the Joe Hennine

02:55community, but you've been, you've published a handful of things in recent years.

03:00You have a problem with the notion of a Joe Hennine community.

03:06What is your beef with the Joe Hennine community?

03:08Well, before we get into what is the beef, let's, let's, let's not define because Dan

03:13will yell at me to find, but let's understand what, what we mean when we talk about it.

03:18Joe Hennine community and, and then move from there.

03:21Yeah.

03:22Take it away.

03:23Yeah, that's perfect.

03:24No.

03:25So in the New Testament, we have four books that historically were attributed to a figure

03:33named John, really five, if you add revelation, but, but the four that were really interested

03:37in his scholars.

03:38Oh, yeah.

03:39Yeah.

03:40The four that were interested in his scholars today are the Gospel of John and the letters

03:44that are called first John, second John, and third John.

03:48John is one of the big gospels.

03:50First, second, and third John.

03:51They're tucked away in the back of your New Testament right before you hit the book of

03:55Revelation.

03:56Take a left it Jude and you're there.

03:59So these books are really interesting because they share a number of similarities between

04:06them.

04:07I mean, the moment you open up the gospel of John and the moment you open up first John,

04:11it just smacks you in the face that these texts have some sort of relationship.

04:17You'll hear a lot of key words beginning word life.

04:21It talks about this word, this logos, which is somehow a communicated truth and the authors

04:28of each of these texts present themselves as people who have seen this word in this world

04:34somehow become flesh in the words of John.

04:38And so the consistencies between these texts, the similar language, the similar themes, the

04:43similar ideas have been for 2000 years nearly, a real source of interest for Christians.

04:53In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, the explanation that was given for the profound similarities

04:59between these texts was that they must have shared a single author, that they must have

05:05been written by a single hand.

05:07And that author, not surprisingly from the titles that later scribes put on these texts,

05:12was thought to be John, the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, one

05:18of the closest disciples of Jesus.

05:21What happened in the 20th century is that scholars thought examining these texts more

05:26closely, in fact, there are subtle differences in the language.

05:30There are subtle differences in the themes and ideas.

05:34And so instead of just imagining one author, they imagined multiple authors, but you have

05:39to explain why are these texts so similar, why the same language, why the same ideas,

05:45and what scholars developed was the idea of a Johannine community.

05:50The idea that even if we're looking at multiple authors, these must have been authors that

05:56were somehow connected to one another, that we're all in the same community or something.

06:01Yeah.

06:02One of the things that I wanted to ask or to clarify here is that when these texts first

06:06appeared, they didn't have any names attached to them.

06:10Is that right?

06:11Yeah.

06:12No.

06:13So for various reasons, I think the majority of scholars think it's very likely that, you

06:19know, the biblical texts as we have them simply didn't have titles at the beginning.

06:23It's not hard to understand this in most cases, right?

06:27Usually at the top of a letter you write to someone, you don't write second Hugo at the

06:32top, right?

06:33This is very clearly the kinds of titles that later scribes would affix for the letters

06:39and then also for the gospels we think as well.

06:42Right.

06:43Okay.

06:44So that explains why there is some question as to who wrote these things.

06:49So sorry, I just wanted to get that out there.

06:51Go on with what you were saying about this community.

06:56Now if I may jump in real quick, do you think this community concept was a way to maintain

07:03the unity while also acknowledging the diversity?

07:06Or do you think it has other origins?

07:10Yeah, totally.

07:13On the one hand, it rested on an assumption that a lot of people had in the mid 20th century,

07:19scholars had in the mid 20th century, that the gospels as we have them must have been

07:23transmitted, that the traditions within them in oral forms, perhaps in written forms, and

07:29if you're going to talk about tradition and handing things down, you kind of need people

07:34to do that.

07:35You need a community.

07:36But even more so, in the case of the community we're talking about here, this Johanine community,

07:43there was a real need to explain why the gospel and epistles look so similar to one another.

07:49And so the common language, common ideas led people to suggest a common community.

07:53The way that I explain this to my students is, you know, if you hear two people say they're

07:58going to mass, I can promise you they're not southern Baptists probably.

08:04Right.

08:05You know, it's the kind of language that is very closely associated with a particular

08:10religious group.

08:11The reality is that different religious groups develop their own social dialects, right?

08:17Their own kind of ways of speaking as a group that represents something of their distinctive

08:23vision, distinctive outlook.

08:25And so when scholars looked at the gospel of John and the letters of John, which are

08:29texts that are very similar to one another, but somewhat dissimilar, sometimes very dissimilar

08:36from other texts in the New Testament, they imagined that somewhere on the landscape of

08:40first century Christianity, there was some group that spoke this way.

08:48The common expressions are things like word and life abiding in Jesus, themes like doing

08:55the truth, et cetera.

08:56These are very distinctive of these texts.

08:59And so the idea was these must come from some Christian movement that articulated their

09:04faith in this way, a Johannine community, a community that is John-like.

09:09That's really what that adjective means.

09:13So, but I take it from your book that you're moving away from that idea, from the idea

09:21of the community writers.

09:23Yeah.

09:24So in the year 2020, I published an article called, "Did the Johannine community exist?"

09:31You can find it online.

09:32It's open access.

09:33So anybody who's listening to this can easily pull up that academic article.

09:38And the abstract for that probably should have just been one word, no.

09:42I don't think that the Johannine community existed.

09:46And the reason is that when I'm looking at the gospel letters of John, it strikes me

09:52that the similarities between them are not simply a matter of coincidence, of the idea

09:59that maybe these authors had a common extraction.

10:03The best way to understand these similarities is that one author is very clearly, each author

10:08really, is copying from other authors.

10:12So in antiquity, you know, there are, and we can find instances of this in the New Testament

10:17in the Bible, right, where individuals have access to earlier texts.

10:22And what they decide to do is to imitate the style of those earlier texts, often in an

10:28attempt to try to look as if they are writing texts written by the same author as some other

10:34work.

10:35So this is the phenomenon we call pseudopigraphy in ancient Christianity and beyond, right,

10:42classics, other fields.

10:44So pseudopigraphy, you know, kind of, you know, my colleague, Bart Ehrman, prefers the vocabulary

10:49of forgery, but something where an author is using another person's name for some reason.

10:55Forgery tends to be a little negatively loaded, so we don't tend to use that as a field.

11:01But that's basically what I see happening in first, second, and third, John.

11:04I think the authors of first, second, and third, John, knew the gospel.

11:09I think they loved the gospel.

11:10I think they also saw how attractive and popular the gospel was.

11:14And I think they also, in some ways, saw what the gospel of John didn't do when it was

11:19first published.

11:20And so they wrote letters that present themselves as if their work, supplemental works, by that

11:27original author, but addressing new sorts of challenges, exploring new sorts of directions.

11:34And we would have plenty of analogs for this in ancient Christianity.

11:37You know, Paul wrote letters, and we know that other people wrote letters in the name

11:42of Paul, some letters that probably made it into the Bible and some letters that definitely

11:47did not.

11:49And I think that's likely what's happening with these texts.

11:51They're not necessarily from a single community.

11:54Instead they're from authors who read one another's work, who might have been located

11:58in actually very different communities, geographies, settings.

12:02Now, real briefly, Robin Walsh has written a bit on the origins of early Christian literature,

12:12and she contends that we should be talking more about literary communities rather than

12:18communities of faith anyway.

12:20I'm curious where you stand on what social level the authors of these texts are operating.

12:29Yeah, so I'm very sympathetic towards the work of Robin Faith Walsh.

12:35And before her write her doctoral advisor, Stanley Stowers, in suggesting that when we

12:40think about where a lot of early Christian literature comes from, the go-to historically

12:47in scholarship has been to think of ancient Christian churches as being a very formative

12:53place.

12:54And I don't want to detract from the idea that, you know, oral and written traditions

12:58about Jesus did flow through these communities.

13:01But the writers that we see working in the New Testament are individuals who had higher

13:07than the Christian average, higher levels of literacy.

13:12They're people who had been trained to be literate.

13:15They had read really kind of gulp down large amounts of ancient literature, just as part

13:22of even their training and writing, and they formed networks of people who interacted

13:28engaged with one another, if not personally, sharing writings, sharing drafts, improving

13:35one another's work, then at the very least, they were definitely at least reading the

13:39work of others, reading the work of famous writers from the past, reading the works of

13:44contemporary writers, and these two are important and powerful influences for the texts that

13:50became part of the Bible.

13:53Let's talk a little bit about the gospel of John, you know, since we're on this track,

14:00let's talk a little bit about the authorship of that because, you know, we've been talking

14:06about authorship.

14:08You mentioned in the book that the character of John in the other gospels or in the New

14:14Testament was a fisherman who was very unlikely to be literate at all.

14:21So the attribution of this book to that character remains unlikely also.

14:29Yeah.

14:30But that's not the only reason to believe that he's not the author, right?

14:35Talk a little bit about why we don't believe that the character of the disciples of John

14:41would have written this.

14:43Yeah.

14:44So right from the start, when you read the gospel of John, you'll see in chapter one,

14:49verse 14, that the author seems to present himself as someone who has seen Jesus in his

14:55lifetime.

14:56He says that the word became flesh and dwelled among us, and he's talking about Jesus becoming

15:02a human being.

15:04And he says, and we have seen his glory.

15:08He positions himself as someone who's seen this figure.

15:10If you keep reading the book, you start to see this character show up, this disciple whom

15:16Jesus loved, who seems to be Jesus's closest disciple.

15:20On the night of the Last Supper, this disciple is leaning on Jesus himself.

15:26He's the very first person to essentially be at the empty tomb.

15:31He stands under Jesus cross when everyone else abandons Jesus.

15:35He's everywhere in the book by the end of the book.

15:39And then at the end, very end of the book, in chapter 21, verse 24, you hear the text

15:46say that this disciple, this disciple whom Jesus loved is the one who has written this

15:51book, the one who has written these things.

15:54So the question is, who is this disciple?

15:58Now there are great reasons for thinking, historically, that maybe it could have been

16:02someone like John, the son of Zebedee, one of the apostles of Jesus.

16:07If you turn to Mark, Matthew, and Luke, he's one of the three closest disciples to Jesus.

16:12Well, you know, this disciple whom Jesus loved is very close to Jesus.

16:15He would make sense as, you know, potentially being John, they could be related that way.

16:24But that's kind of almost as far as it goes.

16:27There are lots of other attributes of this disciple that don't quit, don't fit pardon

16:32quite neatly with John, the son of Zebedee is presented in the Bible.

16:36So one of them, as you mentioned, is the fact that, well, for one thing, John is presented

16:42to us in Acts, chapter four, as someone who was illiterate, someone who didn't know how

16:47to write, someone who was never trained to write a gospel.

16:51So the idea that John would be the author of an entire complicated work, let alone a

16:57work that says theologically sophisticated, as philosophically sophisticated as John,

17:03you know, kind of seems a little different.

17:06Other details about this disciple don't seem to match up either.

17:09In chapter 18, it seems that this disciple, who in that chapter is called the other disciple,

17:16is someone who's supposed to be a friend of the high priest who has special access to

17:21the high priest's home.

17:24The John we know for Matthew, Mark, and Luke is a simple fisherman living in Galilee, working

17:30on the Sea of Galilee.

17:31He lives nowhere near Jerusalem, let alone is he involved with the highest echelons of

17:37Jerusalem society.

17:39So for various reasons, you know, by the 20th century, scholars looked at the traditional

17:44attribution of the gospel to John, the son of Zebedee, and thought that this isn't quite

17:50the fit we want for authorship.

17:52We need to be looking for another author.

17:56Now, something that I've frequently said when I'm talking about at least the compositional

18:05unity of John is you've got some weird, what I've called perhaps editorial seams.

18:11And in the past, I've pointed out you've got things like Jesus is sermonizing in Jerusalem

18:16and then the next verse says, and then they crossed over to the other side of the Sea of

18:20Galilee, which is at quite a distance from Jerusalem or Jesus says, all right, let's

18:27go.

18:28And then he sermonizes for three more chapters.

18:30And then the next verse says, so they went.

18:34And I think there are some scholars who would say that maybe the logos him at the beginning

18:41of John also is indicative of some disunity.

18:46But you are arguing in this book that there's one main author for John, but you do mention

18:52a few places where you think there has been addition to the gospel of John.

18:58Can you talk a little bit about the unity of John, but also these places where people

19:03have added to the gospel?

19:04Yeah.

19:05So for all the reasons you mentioned, right, there has been this notion for a very long

19:11time, for decades in scholarship, that John might have been a work that might have been

19:17assembled by different authors sequentially expanding a gospel, editing, re-editing a

19:25gospel.

19:26And then in the process of all that, they introduced all of these weird skips, right?

19:30They, like you mentioned, like in chapter five, Jesus is in Jerusalem.

19:34And then in chapter six, suddenly he goes to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which

19:39is nowhere near Jerusalem.

19:40It's the equivalent of saying Jesus is in North Carolina, and then he went to the other

19:45side of Lake Michigan, which really makes no sense geographically, right?

19:50And so scholars thought this is an explanation that could work.

19:54I would say that the trend now over the last several years of Johnine scholarship has been

20:00to say that instead, and this has been something even the last few decades, there's just so

20:07much unity beyond those little skips, though.

20:11If you look at John across so many chapters of the book, you're going to see a very similar

20:18language and style.

20:20You're going to see very simple patterns of Greek and very predictably, John patterns.

20:27You're going to see an impressive unity in the terminology that's used, an impressive

20:31unity of thought, another example you gave where Jesus in chapter 14 says, I can't talk

20:37much longer.

20:38And then he talks for another three chapters is kind of odd.

20:43But if you look at what he's talking about on both sides of that verse, it's actually

20:47a really cohesive, coherent, rich, continuous, basically speech.

20:54So the way that most scholars I think today think about it and the way that I argue in

20:59the book, I think it happened, is that we're probably instead looking at really one author,

21:05one author that had a very clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish in the gospel,

21:09one author who had a very distinctive style that is impressed all across the gospel.

21:15But an author who developed his gospel gradually, you see, one thing we don't quite understand

21:21sometimes is, you know, modern readers of these texts is that ancient authors developed

21:27these gospels, these very large books in stages and steps and they worked and they reworked

21:35manuscripts.

21:36An excellent book that's just been recently published on this is James Barker's writing

21:40and rewriting the gospels.

21:43And in chapter one, James notes that, you know, oftentimes what we should imagine gospels

21:49as in terms of how they were written is that authors were sketching out potentially particular

21:54stories on one tablet, maybe another tablet, maybe reworking them before they ever actually

22:01hit their final scroll.

22:03And so we can imagine an author who, over the course of developing a manuscript, worked,

22:09reworked, put his drafts together, reworked even those drafts and gradually compiled something

22:16that, yeah, ended up having a skipper seam or two.

22:19I mean, my book has a skipper seam or two, if you look very closely in the occasional

22:24typo that missed the press and all the kinds of things that modern books have, ancient

22:29authors were just as prone to those sorts of things in antiquity.

22:32I mean, they didn't even have the advantages of clippy, let alone the we had so, so yeah,

22:40it makes sense that editing might have been a little more cumbersome of a process back

22:44then.

22:45Yeah.

22:46And so that can lead to these kinds of issues.

22:47Yeah.

22:48And I, and I like bringing this up in videos from time to time as well, you mentioned earlier

22:55toward the end of John 21, this is the disciple who wrote these things, but you skipped over

23:00the very next clause because it wasn't relevant to the point you were making, but the very

23:04next thing that the author says is, and we know his testimony is true, and who's we?

23:13Now you bring up that you think the entirety of John 21, and many of the scholars think

23:20this as well, is a secondary addition to the gospel of John that it originally would have

23:26ended at the end of chapter 20, ties it off with a nice little rhetorical bow that gets

23:32repeated again at the end of chapter 21, but what about these additions to John?

23:37What can you say about those?

23:38Yeah, so, so in the book, I identify two passages as additions to John.

23:44So even though I think one individual is responsible for most of this gospel, which of course

23:48is what tradition says, and again, what a lot of scholars today would say, there are two

23:53passages that are problematic.

23:55The first is begins in chapter seven, verse 53, and goes on into chapter eight.

24:01It's the story of the adulterous, the pericape adulterate.

24:05This is a story where Jesus is presented with a woman who apparently has been caught in

24:10the act of adultery.

24:12She's dragged before Jesus, and Jesus is presented with this test of whether or not we should

24:17stone this woman.

24:19It's a kind of test that reminds you a lot of the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke,

24:24where Jesus is put on the spot, and then he comes up with the brilliant one liner that

24:28gets him out of the situation.

24:30And that's exactly how it works in John.

24:32The problem with this passage is that we don't find it in any manuscript before the 5th century.

24:39And so it's just, you know, we have lots of manuscripts of John.

24:42We can date many of these earlier than the 5th century, and this story doesn't appear

24:47in there.

24:48It seems to be a later edition that someone added to the text.

24:51It doesn't help that one early reference to probably this story places it in a different

24:57gospel altogether, the gospel of the Hebrews supposedly.

25:01But there's another passage, right, chapter 21.

25:03It's the final passage of the book, the final chapter of the book, where if you've read

25:09the gospel of John and you've gotten to the end of chapter 20, the disciple who's narrating

25:15this book, or the author of the book anyways, the narrator of the book, goes ahead and tells

25:19you that there are actually lots of other things that Jesus did that I didn't have time

25:23to talk about in the book, but I wrote these things so that you may believe that Jesus is

25:29the Christ, the Son of God.

25:31He kind of puts this beautiful bow on everything he's done in 20 chapters.

25:36It's appropriate ending for a book.

25:39We know this because we see other ancient books that have this kind of ending in antiquity.

25:45But another reason why we know it's a good ending for a book, it is literally the ending

25:49of the book, a chapter later.

25:51What happens is after chapter 20, after the author has told you there are lots of other

25:56things that Jesus did, he starts confusingly narrating something else that Jesus did, right?

26:04When you don't expect it.

26:05And then the chapter wraps up with yet another one of these, oh, there's so much more that

26:11we could talk about, but not all the books in the world could contain all these things.

26:15It's a very unusual thing.

26:17Scholars have also noted that there are some other features of this passage that are unusual,

26:22but that's another chapter where even though some scholars have argued that it could be

26:26part of the original book, I'm still on the side of those people who think that it's

26:31probably by a later hand, a later scribe who added to the gospel of John.

26:38Now to your earlier question, which is what's going on with that he and we language.

26:45So Dan's bringing up how in chapter 21 verse 24, right at the end of this extra chapter

26:53of the gospel, in that very same verse where the narrator explains who's actually writing

27:01this, the narrator says, this is the disciple, this disciple whom Jesus loved, this is the

27:06disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them.

27:12And then the narrator says, and we know that his testimony is true.

27:17And one of these big kind of questions is, well, what's going on in this verse?

27:23The author has just said, supposedly, that this one disciple has written these things,

27:29that there's one author to the book and here he is, the disciple whom Jesus loved, but then

27:34suddenly we get this we language at the end of the verse and we know that his testimony

27:40is true.

27:41And I know many scholars who think that that verse probably means that there might have

27:48been an author of something like a core of the gospel, but that there's like a we, some

27:53maybe group of people who have completed the gospel or who are editing the gospel or who

27:59are doing something here to compile all this material.

28:04And that's certainly one way that we can understand this we, but one of the things that I argue

28:08at length in the book in chapter four is that there actually is, I think, a simpler

28:14explanation for this.

28:16If you look closely, that verse for one thing is very clearly modeled on a few other verses

28:24in the gospel of John.

28:26And one of them is 114, where the author of this gospel, who seems to be closely identified

28:31with his disciple, has also used we language.

28:34He says, we have seen his glory, and what I do is I kind of break down this verse and

28:39show that actually it answers to a few different verses in the gospel of John linguistically.

28:45I think what the author has done is he's smushed together language from different parts of

28:50a gospel, some language coming from parts where the author is used to referring to himself

28:56in the third person, somewhere he's used the first person plural, we.

29:02But in this case, it's kind of jarring that he skips from a third person he referenced

29:08to a first person plural we reference.

29:11And then in the very next line, verse 25, he skips to a first person singular I way of

29:16talking about himself, but we actually see this a lot in antiquity.

29:21We see this in Polybius, we see this in Josephus, we see writers who kind of moved between he,

29:29we, I language, they language when speaking just about themselves as narrators, sometimes

29:35in really tight spaces.

29:37And so I think the traditional interpretation that suggested there's just one author for

29:42this entire book, we language be damned, I think is actually close to the truth.

29:48Okay.

29:49Now, and that brings up the chapter one, verse 14, part of the logos, him, which I see.

29:58I don't know if some people have said this is a pre Johan nine, him that was just picked

30:04up other people think it's secondary.

30:06What are your thoughts on, on the logos, him, which is, which another indicator that, that,

30:12you know, the fishermen, John is not like, well, I was reading in Philo, and you know,

30:17how Philo likes this logos theology, and this is the, this is the, the logos pro forty coasts

30:22that we're talking about here, like this, this is not the, the language of a, of a fisherman,

30:27but what are your thoughts on the logos, him and Johanna or the singular authorship?

30:34Yeah.

30:35So in chapter one, if you read the gospel of John, chapter one has a little bit of a different

30:41style than other chapters of the book.

30:44It honestly feels more poetic than the rest of the book.

30:48And you know those words very famously that begin the book in the beginning was the word

30:53and the word was with God and the word was God.

30:56He was in the beginning with God.

30:58It's, it's, it's very beautiful, kind of repetitive, and again, kind of poetic.

31:03And, and scholars have looked at that chapter and thought, well, you know, it's different

31:09in style a little bit.

31:10It feels a little more elevated in style than the rest of the book.

31:13They've also noticed that in that first chapter, the author talks about Jesus as the word,

31:20as the logos.

31:21This is a concept from Greek philosophy that becomes important in Hellenistic Jewish philosophy,

31:28right?

31:29Like the writings of Philo.

31:30What they know though is that this word, logos word, doesn't really seem to be distributed

31:38across the entire gospel.

31:40It's pretty much just there that Jesus is described as the logos or word.

31:45And so some scholars have thought, okay, so this is yet another sort of seam in the gospel

31:50where maybe this part in the KitKat bar of the gospel of John can break off neatly.

31:56And you can treat this as maybe something that was added later because it's poetic

32:00and style people have thought, okay, so maybe this is like some early Christian, him or

32:04something like that that was added to the text.

32:08In the book, what I argue is, and not even actually really an argument in the book, this

32:13is really something that I think a lot of other scholars are really talking about right

32:18now is, you know, those arguments are interesting, but the reality is when you read the gospel

32:25of John, A, that prologue, that introduction is really critical for how the gospel develops

32:34all sorts of themes and ideas.

32:37It's often considered even something like a hermeneutical key to the rest of the gospel.

32:42Scholars like Adele Reinhardt's bring this out.

32:45To the point where if the hymn wasn't originally there, it doesn't quite feel like the gospel

32:50of John would be as complete as it is in its current form.

32:54Another thing that numerous scholars have noted, and I really try to bring this out in the book,

32:58is that it's true that Jesus is only called the word or logos directly right at the beginning

33:03of the text.

33:05He's also, by the way, only called God really right there at the beginning of the text.

33:09But you would be hard pressed to read all kinds of verses in John without the knowledge

33:15that Jesus is divine and that Jesus is on some level the word of God, the logos of God.

33:22And at least the words that Jesus speak, the logo that Jesus speaks in Greek are actually

33:28a really critical theme in the rest of the gospel.

33:30So I'm one of those people who has been persuaded that we want to keep chapter one with the

33:37rest of the book.

33:38You know, the fun of scholarship is the debate is the fact that we can have these different

33:43opinions.

33:44But yeah, that's right.

33:45Yeah.

33:46Well, and that's one of the things that I've, I've always wondered about that because it

33:49feels so different, but in my own work on John 10, and what Jesus's argument is, why is

33:57he bringing up Psalm 82, where he, and I've argued in print that, that what's going on

34:04here is he's appealing to a specific interpretation of Psalm 82.

34:10This is the, the Israelites at Sinai.

34:12And he says to whom, uh, halo is to say, who again, until the, the word of God came and

34:18he's, you know, the word made flesh standing in front of them.

34:22It is, it does kind of bring out the full import of his argument.

34:27If we, if we use that as an interpretive lens, so I've always, that's always been a challenge

34:31for me.

34:32Like, it doesn't feel like the rest of John, but at the same time it is so important to

34:37John.

34:38And you talk a bit in the book about, um, Theosis, divinization, uh, deification as part of what's

34:45going on in Joanna and Soteriology.

34:49And that's John 1 12, where he gives them power to become, uh, the children of God.

34:56Um, and, and, and these are some of the themes that, that I've talked about a lot and, and,

35:01um, you know, of all the things that I say that, uh, infuriate the public, uh, or at least

35:06the, the people who are unlucky enough to stumble across my videos, uh, my interpretation

35:12of John 1 1 is, uh, is probably the thing that infuriates them, uh, the most, but, um,

35:20and, and I'm sorry, Dan Beacher, uh, to, to be bull guarding, uh, uh, uh, you can hug

35:27the guest, Dan, no, no, go for it though, but I, I think these are, uh, such fun discussions.

35:34Yeah.

35:35Tell me about your thoughts on, on John 1 1 C. K. Theosis, you know, logos.

35:40Yeah.

35:41And the word was God.

35:43Yeah.

35:44So, uh, and particularly the, the anarthrist nature of John 1 was the, I'm just using technical

35:55language to, to make Dan feel uncomfortable, but no, I'm sorry, I'm just doing it to make

36:00our, our whole audience feel uncomfortable and they all, we all thank you, Dan.

36:06That's right.

36:07So there is no question that the gospel of John understands Jesus as higher on the ladder

36:15of life than certainly the average human being who's here below on earth.

36:21Um, there is no question that John even understands Jesus fundamentally is divine.

36:28Um, the question that's kind of coming up is in John 1 verse 1, you have the words in

36:35the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

36:40And in that instance, what you have at the very end of that verse is and the word was

36:46God without a definite article in Greek.

36:49That's what we mean by an arthrist, it doesn't have a definite article.

36:52Now what does that mean?

36:55So if you go to the writings of Philo, who is a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of the

37:00early first century, Philo seems to have a concept of the logos of a word of God, who

37:07is with God, the same kind of thing we're finding in John.

37:12Who else has it before him?

37:13We don't know.

37:14We definitely know at least Philo has it.

37:15Our stobulus clearly had a logos idea, but we don't know much of the particulars of

37:19that, et cetera.

37:21But for Philo, what he does in his writings in one place is make a distinction between

37:27the transcendent ultimate God of Judaism, which he uses a definite article for, if you

37:34will, the God and then the logos, the word of God, which he conceptualizes as something

37:41like the mind, the rationality, the thought of God as an entity, that like anyone's mind

37:51or rationality or thought is with the person who's thinking, but is also on some level

37:55abstractly distinct from that person.

37:59And this entity, the word he doesn't use a definite article for.

38:03He distinguishes the two based on his exegesis of a particular verse in the Old Testament

38:08that he, the Hebrew Bible that he thinks works really well for this.

38:13I think that John is building on the exact same foundation.

38:16I think that John is swimming in the same streams of Hellenistic Jewish philosophy that

38:23understand that there is the God of Judaism, the ultimate God of the universe, but that

38:29this God interacts with his created universe through all sorts of intermediary beings and

38:37the highest of these beings is his own abstractified mind, reason or thought, his word, his logos.

38:45And so it's not surprising to me that at the beginning of the Gospel of John, we have

38:49a reference to this word, we have a reference to how this word is with God, and at this

38:54crucial moment, there's a reference to how this word was God, but the definite article

38:59isn't there.

39:00This word is not, I think in the Gospel of John's conception, the ultimate God of the

39:07universe, but this is a divine being, an entity, a being who has, I think in John's conception,

39:15a subordinate participatory divinity.

39:19It's divine because of its oneness with God, in its oneness with God.

39:25And Christian theology has tried to work out that relationship for centuries, perhaps not

39:31arriving at the same sort of synthesis, that's what I see happening.

39:35So so it's it's not quite nice scene in, yeah, I always tell my students, yeah, I always

39:43tell my students, you know, nice in theology is the cake.

39:46The ingredients are eggs and flour and sugar, and they look nothing like cake, but you absolutely

39:52need them for cake.

39:54I think John's theology wasn't quite that of, you know, Nicaea and first Constantinople

40:00in these sorts of ecumenical councils, but yeah, they're going to play a role one way

40:05or the other, but in synthesis.

40:12Let's dive a little bit into the theological innovations of John, because one thing that

40:19we hear, you know, when I do the show, I don't know anything, but like, you know, Dan talks

40:24a lot about the synoptic gospels, meaning, you know, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and

40:29Luke.

40:30And then distinct from those, and the fact is that John is not included in those synoptic

40:36gospels because it is such a different entity.

40:42Even though like we think of gospel, when you think of the gospels, you think Matthew,

40:47Mark, Luke and John, like you just rattle those off as a thing.

40:50But like, what are the, what are ideas that Christians now take to be gospel that would

40:57be lost if we didn't have the gospel of John?

41:02Oh, that's a great question.

41:04Yeah.

41:05Is that a fair way of wording that?

41:06Yeah, that's great.

41:09If you didn't have the gospel of John, you would possibly not have a Christianity that

41:19viewed Jesus as much divine as Christianity will eventually do it.

41:25I mean, I mean, when it comes down to the councils that define the Trinity, they're reading

41:30John.

41:31They're reading John intensely and closely.

41:32The church fathers like Athanasius who are developing Trinitarian doctrine, the capadocian

41:37fathers, they're intense readers of John.

41:41Because John is the book that blows the whole cosmic cover off Jesus.

41:46If you read Matthew, Mark and Luke, you have the idea that Jesus is a human being.

41:51In different parts, it looks like Jesus is a very special human being, perhaps even a

41:56supernatural human being, perhaps something greater than a human being.

41:59And the transfiguration scene, for instance, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus suddenly appears

42:05as light in front of his disciples.

42:07And if you're a casual reader of that text, you're wondering, well, heck, I can't do that.

42:12He's got something going on supernaturally that I do not have.

42:17But it's only the gospel of John that will tell you straightforwardly, Jesus is, and

42:23I agree with Dan again, the best translation is divine that associates him, frankly, with

42:30a pre-existence at all, where right at the beginning of the book, it tells you in the

42:34beginning, in the beginning of this whole world, echoing Genesis, there's Jesus at the very

42:40beginning.

42:41So ideas of Jesus is pre-existence, ideas of his divinity.

42:45These are things that John really gave Christians the tools to articulate very strongly in ways

42:52that supplemented things we find in other biblical texts, and you can find Jesus pre-existence

42:58in Philippians.

42:59You can do things like that.

43:00But John is going to bring it all together.

43:02And John is going to give, I think, Christianity a very proto-ternitarian, if you will, kind

43:10of sense of a father, a son, and a spirit, somehow, who are related, where the spirit

43:17is sent from the son, from the father, different concepts like that flow out of this gospel.

43:25At the very least, the terminology we use flows out of the gospel.

43:28I think it's very interesting to look at John as its own distinct thing.

43:37And see, one of the things that you talk about a lot in the book is the symbolism of John

43:42and how John, other books use symbolism, but not to the extent that this book grabs onto

43:51it and sort of carries it away.

43:53Do you want to talk a little bit about the symbols that John uses to sort of explicate

43:59the theology?

44:01Yeah.

44:02So, let me just start by saying, John is my absolute favorite gospel, and that should

44:07not surprise anybody, because to pick up a book with my name on it, no, but it's such

44:13a brilliant, incredibly fun text to play with.

44:18So the gospel of John knows the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

44:23I think.

44:24I think it's read some of these earlier accounts of the life of Jesus, which is in part why

44:27it looks kind of so similar to them.

44:29It starts with a baptism, ends with an empty tomb.

44:32You know, there's something that feels like earlier gospels about that.

44:37John also knows some of the literary techniques that earlier gospels have used.

44:41If you read good books on Mark, you'll learn that Mark has occasional places where he plays

44:45with symbolism, where just like the parables of Jesus, the stories Jesus tells, symbolize

44:52ideas.

44:54Mark also weaves in a story or two, where Jesus does something that seems to symbolize something

45:00in his teachings.

45:01He flips over the tables of the temple right about the time.

45:05He's also telling you how the whole temple is going to be destroyed, and it seems one

45:09thing symbolizes the other, you know, things like that.

45:13In the gospel of John, whoever wrote the gospel of John, that author took this literary device

45:20and decided to run with it across the gospel.

45:24And did it in, I think, such a rich and creative way, where, as I argue in the book, nearly

45:31every story in the gospel of John, the miraculous ones and the non-miraculous ones, the very

45:37memorable ones and some of those weird transitional sort of things that you just think is just

45:43continuous story have been turned into symbols.

45:47John is not simply interested in telling you that this happened or that happened in Jesus'

45:53life.

45:54He's not here to necessarily say, "Jesus did this miracle, then Jesus did that miracle,

45:58then Jesus did this interesting thing."

46:01John wants you to dwell on each of these stories, to reflect on them, and to see that inside

46:09these stories is something that represents a big idea in Jesus' teaching.

46:14Jesus talks across the gospel of John, and he uses these really important keywords, right?

46:20"Believe our, you know, life is a key word in the gospel, dwell or abide as a key word."

46:28When you turn to the stories in the gospel, these stories are replete with these words.

46:35You'll see that these stories of Jesus' miracles weave in these key words in ways that turn the

46:41miracles themselves into, if you will, sort of parables of sorts.

46:47They're ways in which Jesus, by his gestures, by his actions, actually represents ideas

46:54in his teachings.

46:56And this comes out all the time in the text because Jesus will do something in the gospel.

47:02And it says that his disciples didn't understand what he was doing.

47:05For instance, he washes their feet in chapter 13, and it says that the disciples don't get

47:10it.

47:11Well, the reason if you can look closely at the language of the text is that Jesus is

47:16doing things in ways that are evoking the key words of his teaching.

47:20So in the book, in what is my favorite chapter of the book, chapter 3, I go story by story

47:27in the gospel of John, ones that scholars talk about, ones that scholars haven't even

47:32considered yet, ones that pass the average reader over.

47:36And I show how everything we think about, know about the theology of John is actually

47:41expressed through the gestures of Jesus.

47:46Now you, indeed, the subtitle here is a new history.

47:54You have some new things to contribute to this, and obviously not just a survey of the

47:59events of the gospel of John.

48:03What is the take away from this book?

48:07When we're thinking about the gospel of John, where it comes from, what it's trying to

48:11do, what is the message that you're trying to communicate?

48:14What's the, what did you have to convince the publisher?

48:18Was your contribution to the thousands of years of literature that has been published on the

48:25gospel of John?

48:27Yeah.

48:29So this book was a ton of fun to write.

48:31It was a ton of fun to write because it broke the most essential rule that I always tell

48:35my grad students, which is you should offend the fewest persons possible.

48:42You should, you know, and usually as a scholar, you know, I always kind of tell people you

48:46got to get from pointy to point B while trying to rock as few boats as possible, right?

48:52Do something like that.

48:53And this book doesn't do that.

48:55It's a new history of John in so far as it takes a lot of decades of scholarship.

49:01And it tries to instead really voice a lot of the latest trends in the study of the gospel

49:07of John.

49:09But in the midst of that, it also cuts against even some still very popular ideas in the field.

49:16It gets into just about every issue.

49:18And it puts together, I think, a vision of John that hasn't existed in all of its parts

49:24in any previous book, and even some parts of it are things you haven't seen before.

49:29So in terms of what it does, I think on the first, in the first place, it starts by saying

49:34John knew the synoptics.

49:37This is something that a lot of previous generations of scholars were skeptical of.

49:41There have been great books that have just been published.

49:43James Barker's book has argued that John knew the Synoptics Mark Goodaker's book is coming

49:49out probably by the time this is aired.

49:51The fourth synoptic gospel that will make this argument.

49:54What I'm trying to do, both of those scholars are really great at talking about the fact

50:00that John used the synoptics and demonstrating that.

50:03One thing I set out to do in this book was to really press the question, if John knows

50:08the synoptics, which I argue he did, then why does he want to change them in the way that

50:14he does?

50:15What does he add to them that's different?

50:17And that's where it takes me.

50:18Chapter two of the book, something new that I do, is I put together a very different theological

50:25vision of the gospel of John than I think has really existed in any other book that's

50:31out there right now on the market.

50:34It's a book that I think tries to get people who have never understood John to understand

50:40John and to get excited about a theology that feels very different from many of the ways

50:45that we tend as, for instance, Christians, I position myself as a Christian, the ways

50:51that we read this text, I think, don't capture all of the complexity of it.

50:56I argue in chapter three that the symbolism is so much more pervasive than we think in

51:01the book.

51:02That's something that I think goes beyond some current scholarship that has recognized

51:07the symbolism but hasn't seen it in various places.

51:10As I argue in that chapter, you have to understand all of John's theology to then understand

51:16all of John's symbolism.

51:18And then chapters four, five, and six are really doing this really important work of

51:22saying that John isn't just a gospel in the ways that I think traditionally Christians

51:29have thought of it as scholars have thought of it in recent decades, that it's potentially

51:34one author sitting down recording a history of the life of Jesus or it's an entire community

51:40gathering traditions.

51:41What I argue is that this is fundamentally a pseudo-piggerful work, right?

51:45It's a work by an author who presented himself as something he was not as an eyewitness to

51:51the life of Jesus.

51:53But that's only part of the story.

51:55What's interesting about this gospel is that the author did this and he also drew in other

52:00devices techniques that we find in apocryphal non-canonical gospels.

52:05I argue in the book that the gospel of John is much more like the gospel of Thomas, the

52:10gospel of Mary, some of these so-called Gnostic gospels than it is like the other gospels

52:15of the New Testament.

52:17And the gospel of John had an impact on Christian literature where it would spawn all kinds

52:24of pseudo-piggerful literature in its wake.

52:26I argue that first, second, and third John reflect the gospel of John as pseudo-piggerful

52:31literature.

52:32I argue that perhaps Revelation is a part of this other non-canonical work.

52:36So it's really from cover to cover, chock full of really new ideas that I'm excited

52:42to frankly debate with people.

52:45Yeah, that's one of the most exciting things about publishing something is licking your

52:50chops, waiting for somebody to come at you about something that you get to debate.

52:56Well, I hope you get an opportunity to debate an awful lot of folks about this.

53:02And one final question, are you, I think you said that you prefer a date in the early

53:10second century, late first or early second?

53:13Do I correctly recall that a favoring of the early second century for John?

53:19Yeah, as my last full spiel kind of pointed out, I'm non-conventional on a ton of issues

53:25in John.

53:26I am extremely conventional on this one.

53:28I think it's somewhere between 90 to 110.

53:31I think if you lined up 10 John scholars, they would probably tell you just about 90

53:36to 110.

53:37Okay.

53:38And so you're putting Luke, so you're putting Luke prior to that, including the first two

53:45chapters of Luke.

53:46You think those are late first century?

53:48Oh, that's a different question.

53:49Yeah, I'm actually very, very amenable to the idea that Luke originally did not have

53:57chapters one and two.

54:00Now, is that a factor, I mean, did Luke with chapters one and two predate John?

54:05I would say that if they weren't originally part of Luke, then the answer would be no.

54:09I think they would have come later than the gospel of John.

54:12Okay, awesome.

54:13Well, just a little minutia there, Dan, I just wanted to get out of the way.

54:17I like it.

54:18I like it.

54:19It's fun.

54:20It's fun to hear about.

54:21And I think I think a lot of people are going to want to check out the book again.

54:27It is called the gospel of John, a new history.

54:30Hugo Mendes, thank you so much for joining us.

54:34Thank you all for having me.

54:35This is really fun and friends at home.

54:38If you would like to become a part of making this show happen and potentially here.

54:45Hugo, are you going to stick around?

54:47We do an after party.

54:48We do a, we do some bonus content for our, for our top patrons.

54:55We stick around for that.

54:56Yeah.

54:57I'm game for that.

54:58All right.

54:59So if you want to hear some more Hugo, and I know you do, go to patreon.com/daytooverdog,

55:04where you can become a part of the community that helps keep us going.

55:09And this community exists, by the way.

55:11Yes, this community, you'll hear rumors flying around about this, just not being real.

55:16The Dan Hennine community is real.

55:18So we're, we're going to.

55:20I thought we were the Danites or the triemites.

55:22The tribe of Dan, but yes, they're, that's a real community and you can join and help

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55:32And you get add free version of every show.

55:34It's early.

55:35It's great.

55:36So, so head on over to that.

55:38Thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing the show.

55:42That's it for this week.

55:43Hugo, thanks once more, and we'll talk to y'all next week.

55:47Bye everybody.

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