Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  We know nothing of the author of this Gospel apart from what we can glean from his text. The texture of its language, making it appear at times an alien body within the corpus of the New Testament, has sometimes driven scholars to fantastic theses about its composition. There have been those, for instance, who have maintained that this Gospel’s philosophical complexity indicates that it belongs to the second half of the second century. Others have noted that its accurate use of detailed Palestinian Jewish information argues for a date in the 40s of the first century. The second-century hypothesis, based on an assumption of sophisticated Greek influence on the conceptual framework of the Fourth Gospel, lost ground when the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that concepts once thought to have derived from Greek philosophical circles—such as “the Word” and the cosmic divisions between light and darkness—were current among the Essenes of the Judean desert even prior to Jesus’s day. A growing scholarly consensus puts the composition of the gospel as we now have it in the last decade of the first century (or the first decade of the second century, at the latest). The Palestinian elements of this gospel, however, indicate that it was, to begin with, a work based on the testimony of an eyewitness to Jesus, but revised and expanded over the course of the first century by later hands. What we have today is a pastiche of early testimony and late theological reflection. The seams of the pastiche are almost invisible because this gospel has been given its present form by a refined and subtle editor. John’s Gospel gives evidence, therefore, of being both our earliest and our latest gospel.1

  The Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke—the Synoptic Gospels, so called because they are so similar that their texts can be read in parallel columns—does not make himself central to his teaching. He is modest, even self-effacing, calling himself the “Son of Man”—a fellow human being—and only occasionally drawing attention to himself as having a special role, as when he prays so familiarly to God, his Abba, and when he tells his closest disciples that he is destined to suffer and die. In John’s Gospel, however, Jesus makes the claim that “the Father and I are one.” Whereas the Synoptic Jesus expects to be vindicated after his death, this hoped-for vindication may be little more than the hope of resurrection expressed by Jewish saints, such as the seven brothers tortured to death in Second Maccabees; and Jesus’s “foresight” may be no more divinely prophetic than the foresight of any man who knows himself to have stirred up deadly political opposition. In John’s Gospel, Jesus “the light” is in the dark about nothing and knows at all moments where his life is headed and that his cross will be the beginning of his being “lifted up,” his cosmic exaltation. The theology of Jesus the New Adam (who initiates the New Creation, which is his Mystical Body, the Church) that Paul constructed so carefully is elevated to new heights in John’s thought. Jesus is now seen to be “the Word” of God—that is, God’s meaning—present with God “in the beginning” and originally expressed in the Creation of the universe and then in the Incarnation, the taking-on-of-flesh of the human Jesus.

  For the first time, Jesus is called, in this opening passage of John’s Gospel, “God” and “only son”; and the sound and the stately movement of this gospel, replete with repetitive and nearly interminable speeches delivered by Jesus, is so different from the pithy, anecdotal Synoptics that it would be easy to exaggerate how odd John’s Gospel is. But these references may be slightly more ambiguous than might at first appear. Certainly, the phrase “as of a father’s only son,” though clearly intended as an assertion of Jesus’s unique sonship, is less bold than the later theological term “God’s Only-Begotten Son” will be.

  More than this, there is a continuity between the earlier theologies of Paul and the Synoptics, on the one hand, and the more developed reflections of John, on the other. Whether earlier or later, Jesus is seen to be human—made of flesh—and not the ghostly apparition of the Gnostics; he is raised from the dead and given supreme status over the universe; he is the culmination of all God’s purposes, his definitive revelation. But if God can so reveal himself in flesh, Jesus must be God’s self-revelation and, therefore, of God in a far more integral and essential sense than any previous (and merely human) prophet. It is this last thought that forms the bridge between the early theologies and the grand Christological assertions of the second century; it is John’s Gospel more than any other document of the New Testament that gives us a picture of this bridge as it is being built, almost a snapshot of this novel theology in the process of construction. By the end of the first decade of the second century, Ignatius of Antioch, one of the first of the great bishops, will speak without equivocation of “our God, Jesus Christ.”

  Are we observing, in this theological development, the dismantling of monotheism, Judaism’s most precious possession? Certainly rabbinical Judaism in its articulated form would see it so. But, once again, we are throughout the course of the first century watching the two branches, rabbinical Judaism and Christianity, grow out of ancient Judaism—at first entwined, then gradually defining themselves against each other into separate entities. For Jews of the evolving rabbinical tradition, no modification of God’s Oneness is tolerable. For Christians, God’s Oneness is not denied but startlingly reaffirmed—and made more palpable—in Jesus, who can ultimately be understood only as God incarnate: “I am,” proclaims John’s Jesus, deliberately echoing the formula of God’s own self-descriptions in the Hebrew scriptures. As he declares his eternal existence, prior to all Jewish history, to the scandalized worshipers within the precincts of the Temple itself: “Before Abraham was, I am.” As he reminds Martha and Mary: “I am—the Resurrection and the Life.” As he teaches his disciples at the Last Supper:

  “I am—the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

  No one can come to the Father save through me.

  If you know me, you will also come to know my Father.

  Henceforth you do know him—

  for you have seen him.”

  Who sees him sees the Father; who hears him hears the Father; who touches him touches the Father. As the author of John’s Gospel will say elsewhere (in the first of the three Johannine letters): the ancient reality “that has existed from the beginning, that we have heard, that we have seen with our own eyes, that we have observed and touched with our own hands, the Word of Life—this is what we have to say.” In other words, Jesus himself is the Gospel.

  The church that gave this gospel to the world followed its own peculiar path, its evolution unique within the scattered first-century Christian communities of Roman Eurasia. Its principal elder seems to have been a minor follower of Jesus, one whom the gospel never names but calls the “Disciple Whom Jesus Loved.” Despite the later attribution of this community’s gospel to the apostle John, the Beloved Disciple is someone who was “known to the high priest” and therefore a resident of Jerusalem, not a provincial Galilean fisherman like the John who was called by Jesus, along with his brother James, from his father Zebedee’s fishing boats. The most reasonable way to look at the evolution of the Johannine corpus in the New Testament is to assume that John’s Gospel went through three stages: first, as the oral testimony of the Beloved Disciple to his followers; then, as the work of a writer who set down this testimony, now colored by later controveries within the Johannine community (or church of the Beloved Disciple); and, lastly, in the form in which we now have it, given by an editor who added some final touches and smoothed away many of the wrinkles that this course of development had left within the text.

  A similar development may be assumed for the three New Testament letters attributed to a John who calls himself hos presbyteros, “the Elder.”2 The Greek presbyteros, or “presbyter,” turns, after centuries of elided pronunciation, into the English “priest,” meaning originally not a hierarch who offers sacrifice (like a pagan priest) but an older resident who dispenses wisdom to a community. Whether this John the Elder is to be identified with the Beloved Disciple or with the writer who subsequently set down the Beloved Disciple’s testimony is still
argued by scholars. But it seems most prudent to assume that both the gospel and the letters are substantially the work of the same writer, a man who was known in his day as John the Elder, who wrote at the turn of the century as the faithful disciple and successor of the now-dead Beloved Disciple and that this writer’s work, at least in the case of his gospel, was then revised by a final editor.

  Whoever the Beloved Disciple was—that is, the Johannine church’s original eyewitness—he had a sharp eye and a keen ear, for he picked up on details ignored by the other evangelists. In many of Jesus’s encounters, the dialogue has the quick, prickly humor of Greek theatrical comedy. After Philip is called by Jesus, he runs into Nathaniel (to be identified perhaps with the Bartholomew of the Synoptic tradition) and exclaims:

  “We’ve found the One that Moses wrote about in the Torah and the prophets wrote about, too—he’s Jesus bar-Joseph from Nazareth!”

  “Nazareth! Please. What good ever came out of Nazareth?”

  “Come and see.”

  As sneering Nathaniel ambles along with Philip in Jesus’s direction, Jesus, observing his approach, remarks:

  “Well, well. A true Israelite, a man without guile.”

  “Oh. How did you know me?”

  “I could see you under that fig tree, even before Philip called you.”

  “Why, Rabbi, you’re the Son of God, the King of Israel!”

  “You believe just because I tell you I could see you under the fig tree? You’re going to see a lot more than that.”

  Not long after this encounter, John shows us Jesus sitting alone and exhausted under the noonday sun as it beats down on Jacob’s Well, a source of water in Samaritan country ascribed by tradition to Jacob, also known as Israel, one of the primeval patriarchs of Genesis. A Samaritan woman approaches with a jar for drawing water. No pious Jewish male would acknowledge an unknown or unrelated woman, and no self-respecting Jew would address a Samaritan of either sex. But Jesus breaks through the conventions and shocks the woman by asking her:

  “Would you give me something to drink?”

  “You’re a Jew. How come you ask me, a Samaritana, for a drink?”

  “If you only knew the gift that God holds out to you

  and who it is that asks you for a drink,

  you would have been the one to ask,

  and he would have given you Living Water.”

  Pause.

  “You have no bucket, sir, and the well is deep—so how do you come by this ‘Living Water’? I mean, are you greater than our Father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his sons [the twelve progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel] and his cattle?”

  “Whoever drinks this water

  will thirst again.

  But no one who drinks the Water I give him

  will ever thirst again.

  For the Water I give him

  will become in him a fountain of water,

  leaping up to everlasting life.”

  Pause.

  “Give me that Water, sir, so that I may never thirst or have to come back here again.”

  “Go call your husband and then come back to me.”

  Pause.

  “I don’t have a husband.”

  “True enough. You’ve had five so far—and the man you live with now is not your husband. You spoke the truth there, all right.”

  Pause.

  “Sir, I can see you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain [Mount Gerizim, site of Samaritan worship and rival to the Jerusalem Temple], though you [Jews] claim that Jerusalem is the place of true worship.”

  “Believe me, Woman, the hour is coming

  when you will worship the Father

  neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

  You [Samaritans] worship what you do not understand,

  while we understand what it is we worship—

  for salvation is from the Jews.

  But the hour is coming—indeed it’s already here—

  when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.

  They are the worshipers the Father is looking for.

  God is spirit,

  and his worshipers must worship in spirit and truth.”

  Pause.

  “I know that the Messiah is coming; and when he comes he will explain everything.”

  “I am—the very one speaking to you.”

  At this point, Jesus’s disciples arrive from town with provisions and are unnerved to find Jesus in conversation with such a person, a person who has just been told more about the coming Time, free of conventional restrictions, than they have been able to comprehend. The Samaritan goes off to tell her neighbors about their extraordinary visitor, shouting, “Come and see a man who has just told me everything I’ve ever done! Could he be the Messiah?” John tells us: “Many Samaritans of that town believed in him on the strength of the woman’s words.… So, when [they] approached him, they begged him to stay with them. He stayed for two days, and many more came to believe on the strength of his own words, and then they said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe just because of what you told us. Having heard him ourselves, we know he is truly the savior of the world.’ ”

  Did any of this really happen? There is probably a substrate of oral testimony here, a memory kept in the Johannine community of Jesus’s unusual encounter with a woman at a well in Samaria, a woman who was neither sharp nor sainted but who found Jesus to be completely unusual and who somehow glommed onto things the disciples were still puzzling out. But the discussion about “Living Water” presumes an already elaborated theology of grace that is hard to credit as having emerged full-blown during Jesus’s lifetime—or anytime before the last third of the century. More than this, the dialogue—I have inserted the pauses but believe they reflect the author’s intention in depicting the Samaritan’s confusion—is too polished to have been handed down from memory. So we can identify in this dialogue, as in many passages of John, two or three lightly concealed levels of theological and dramatic development that have gone into the construction of the finished product.

  In this dialogue, as in the one with Nathaniel, Jesus possesses some of the ease and humor of the Synoptic Jesus surely, but he is now all-knowing, which he is never shown to be in Mark and Matthew, and of which there are but occasional flashes in Luke. But in addition to these marks of divinity, interjected no doubt by John the Elder, there runs throughout the narrative continuing evidence of Jesus’s humanity, almost certainly the original contribution of the Beloved Disciple himself; and these details prevent Jesus from ever seeming an unfeeling, otherworldly phantom. Toward the end of his life, for instance, he weeps for the loss of his dead friend Lazarus, brother to Martha and Mary (and whom he eventually raises from the dead), while the bystanders exclaim, “See how much he loved him!”

  After the raising of Lazarus, the brother and sisters hold a dinner of celebration at which Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus. This is a separate incident from the one that only Luke reports of the prostitute who anoints and weeps over Jesus’s feet during the dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. The anointing described by John is also to be found in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, but what is especially intriguing is that John provides convincingly authentic details that are lacking in the work of the “earlier” evangelists. Only John mentions that “the whole house was filled with the fragrance” of the pure nard that Mary broke open for this anointing. And whereas Mark and Matthew mention that “some” of the diners complained about the extravagance of Mary’s gesture, only John puts the objection on the lips of Judas, who says: “Why was this ointment not sold? It was worth three hundred pieces of silver and the money might have been given to the poor”—the predictably pinched complaint of the instinctively ungenerous Puritan who has his own agenda, an agenda that will lead him to sell out Jesus for only thirty pieces of silver. John then comments: “He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief.” These two det
ails—the fragrance that filled the house and the devious response of Judas—point to a perceptive eyewitness as the basis for this most concrete of the three evangelical accounts of this incident.

  At the Last Supper, where the other evangelists place the institution of the Eucharist, John (who makes the institution of the Eucharist part of the multiplication of loaves and fish) sets his own singular ceremony:

  Jesus, knowing that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father, and having loved his own who were in this world, loved them to the last.… And so during supper, fully aware that the Father had handed over all things to him, and that he had come forth from God and was returning to God, Jesus rose from the table, shed his outer clothes, and wrapped a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

  After he has taken his place at table once more, Jesus gives a long Johannine speech, the gist of which is “If I, the Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you must wash one another’s feet.” Even though the inflated rhetoric can only be the work of a later sensibility, the action itself, as well as its essential meaning, may well stem from an authentic memory.

  Only John’s Gospel offers a clear explanation of why the Jewish leaders had to resort to Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judea, to get a judgment on Jesus, for as they retort to Pilate: “We are not permitted to put a man to death.” Only John explains why the reluctant Pilate, knowing Jesus to be innocent, renders the death sentence: “If you set him free,” shout the Jews, “you are no ‘Friend of Caesar.’ Whoever makes himself king is the Emperor’s rival.” Only John mentions that Jesus’s trial before Pilate took place outside Pilate’s praetorium in a courtyard known as Lithostroton, or “Pavement of Stone.” Outside the Antonia Fortress, probable site of Jerusalem’s praetorium, there has been excavated a courtyard of some 2,300 square yards that was paved with massive stones more than a yard square and a foot thick. It is likely that upon this Lithostroton Jesus of Nazareth once stood and faced the Roman official who held life and death in his hands. Did the Beloved Disciple, pictured in John’s Gospel as the only male disciple to follow Jesus all the way to crucifixion, loiter at the edges of the Lithostroton and overhear the frantic dialogue set down in John?