Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  Even though Nicodemus is clearly a well-educated man, his apparent incomprehension only deepens when Jesus tells him that only those “born of water and the Spirit” will “enter the kingdom of God” (3:5). As many scholars have noted, Nicodemus is an enigmatic presence throughout the gospel of John, appearing in two later passages as well (7:50–51 and 19:39–40). Is he, or is he not, a follower of Jesus? Did he ever become a disciple of Jesus? The ambiguous relationship between Jesus and Nicodemus has been a perennial puzzle.443 The mystery can be solved, however, by recognizing the “man of the Pharisees” as a surrogate for the once-holy nation of Israel. The existential choice between light and darkness facing Nicodemus captures in essence the climactic moment in the covenantal history of the Jewish people. Nicodemus is present at the dawn of a new creation. Through him, Jesus invites the entire Jewish nation to step into the light.444 In so doing, he transforms the very meaning of what it means to be a Jew.

  Contextual Analysis

  Rudolf Bultmann gives the best-known existentialist interpretation of the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus. He recognizes that Nicodemus was being invited to enter into a miraculous transformation, leaving behind “the this-worldly, human mode of being” to enter “the other-worldly divine mode” known as the kingdom of God. Unfortunately, he conceives the consequent “crisis of the world” in abstract philosophical terms as if it confronted mankind in general rather than just Old Covenant Israel. Bultmann attaches no special significance to the fact that Nicodemus was a high-ranking member of Israel’s ruling council. Nicodemus is a man like any other, compelled to confront “the fact that man is ultimately a stranger to his fate and to his own acts”. Man in the flesh “does not enjoy authentic existence”. Only by invoking the other-worldly realm of spirit can Jesus reveal “the miracle of a mode of being in which man enjoys authentic existence”.445 Other scholars share Bultmann’s resistance to “allegorical representations” of Nicodemus which have him standing “for Pharisaism and the established Judaism of his day”. According to Laurence Cantwell, for example, “We do not have to be members of the Sanhedrin in order to identify with Nicodemus”. The “moments of truth, of judgement, of decision” faced by individuals such as Nicodemus “are of eternal significance, not just for themselves, but for us who come after them”.446

  Such arguments fail to accord due weight to either the historical or the narrative context of the Nicodemus passage. Significantly, the encounter with Nicodemus appears early in John’s gospel, soon after Jesus clears the temple in Jerusalem. When “the Jews” questioned his authority, he challenges them to destroy the temple, declaring that he “will raise it again in three days”. In retrospect, it became clear to his disciples that Jesus was foreshadowing his own resurrection, the moment when his body would become the heavenly temple of a new creation (John 2:18–22). The end of the old creation and the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth also happens to be the subject of the discourse that Jesus delivers to Nicodemus in John 3:5–21. It is not just “the introductory verses of the Johannine Prologue” which “are closely modelled on the first chapter of Genesis”.447 The language of John 3:15–21 also strongly resembles the Prologue and like it draws upon Genesis 1.448

  It should be axiomatic that Genesis 1 is not a scientific paper on astronomy or paleo-geology. Instead, according to John H Walton, the biblical story of creation is an example of ancient cosmology. It “is not an account of material origins but an account of functional origins, specifically focusing on the functioning of the cosmos as God’s temple”. The seven-day sequence of the story describes “the creation of the cosmic temple with all of its functions and with God dwelling in its midst”. In Genesis 1:2 the earth is described as “without form, and void”. This should be taken to mean “unproductive” rather than signifying “something without physical form or shape”. Similarly, when “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” he was not manipulating relationships between the physical properties of matter and energy. In the ancient Near East, “light is never treated as a material object”. Rather, it is “thought of as a condition, just as darkness is”. God saw light as good because it performed an essential function in the cosmic temple. He created periods of light distinguished from periods of darkness, giving form to the cosmos by creating time itself. In other words, his creative act consisted of “creation in a functional sense, not a material one”.449

  It is in this functional context, that the Nicodemus pericope should be read. The cosmic struggle between light and darkness in John 3:15–21 marks the transition between two periods of time. John 2 suggests that the Jerusalem temple, the ritual heart and physical centre of Old Covenant Israel, is no longer the Most Holy Place of the cosmological order. In permitting money-changing along with the sale of cattle, sheep, and doves, the old temple system seems to have lost touch with its essential spiritual functions; in other words, it had become “formless and void”. After clearing the temple, Jesus refused to entrust himself to those who “believed in his name” only because they saw “the miraculous signs he was doing”. Perhaps “he knew what was in a man” just as “darkness was on the face of the deep” in the original creation story (compare Genesis 1:2 with John 2:23–25). The rude and abrupt manner with which Jesus treats Nicodemus was the natural and ordinary consequence of his role as the judge of Israel. The Son of Man had descended from heaven to announce not just the imminent end of the present period of darkness but the advent of a new heaven and new earth.

  Jesus knew this would be a bitter pill to swallow for Nicodemus and other members of the well-entrenched temple oligarchy. In his discourse with Nicodemus, Jesus conveys a warning to all those under his authority that those who refuse to come into the light “because their deeds were evil” will face judgement; indeed, they stand “condemned already” because they have “not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (3:18–20). This harsh, condemnatory tone stands in marked contrast to the much kinder and gentler manner he adopts in the next chapter towards the woman by the well in Samaria. There, too, Jesus announces the imminent advent of a new cosmology. In the course of the dialogue, the woman says, “you Jews claim that the place we must worship is in Jerusalem,” not on Mount Gerizim in Samaria. Jesus assures her that those days are just about over; “a time is coming and is now come” when Jews and Samarians “will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem” (4:20–21).

  In effect, Jesus was foreshadowing the inauguration of a new cosmic temple, not a material structure made with hands such as the temple in Jerusalem, but one in which “true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:21–24). Jesus also promises her that all those who drink of the “living water” he has to offer will enjoy “everlasting life” (John 4: 10, 14). In both the dialogue with Nicodemus and with the Samaritan woman, water and spirit serve essential functions in the creation of a new cosmic temple. One might conclude therefore that the references to water in the text of either John 3:1–21 or 1 John 5:6–8 should be construed in a spiritual rather than a narrowly material or physical sense. In fact, some scholars reject such a presupposition.

  Textual Analysis

  Ben Witherington has posited a shift in New Testament scholarship from a “sacramental” to a “non-sacramental interpretation of various passages” in the gospel of John dealing with “water” and “spirit”.450 In his view, the difference between the two interpretive strategies can best be illustrated by examining John 3:5 and 1 John 5:6–8. In the first passage, Jesus says that a man must be “born of water and the Spirit” to enter the kingdom of God. In 1 John 5:6–8, water, together with Spirit and blood are identified as the earthly witness to God’s truth. Reading such passages in light of Walton’s work on ancient cosmology, Spirit, water, and blood might be said to perform, each in its own distinctive manner, a “sacramental” function in the inauguration and operation of the cosmic temple announced by the Son of Man. Within such a cosmological fra
mework, all three elements would intersect and connect with one another. An earthly person is someone whose blood has no connection with the heavenly things born of water and spirit. In other words, he “is fleshly and knows only fleshly things”; by contrast, “the person born of spirit can see heavenly things and enter there to know spiritual things”. Jerome Neyrey adopts just such a “sacramental” interpretation when he asserts that Nicodemus is “obviously not born of spirit or water”.451 Witherington, on the other hand, takes a “non-sacramental” or materialist view, contending that, like all of us, Nicodemus was indeed “born of water”.

  There is more than enough evidence in ancient Near Eastern literature, Witherington argues, showing “that water could be a synonym for various facets of procreation, child-bearing, and child birth”. Accordingly, when Jesus speaks of those “born of water,” he is not endowing “water” with a sacramental function. On this reading, Jesus refers to “water” and “Spirit” not as “intersecting or connected, realities” but parallel phenomena existing on different planes of experience, the material and the spiritual. Jesus, he suggests, distinguished between “physical birth and spiritual birth” when he says (3:6) “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit”.452 Witherington has garnered some support for his non-sacramental understanding of “water” in John 3 and 1 John 5. According to Sandra Schneiders, for example, the gospel of John reveals that the “Spirit is the one of whom we are born spiritually in the waters of baptism just as we are born physically of our mothers in the waters of natural birth”. A prominent feminist theologian, Schneiders finds in the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus “one of the clearest New Testament images of the femininity of God”. So as to evoke a long-overdue “recognition of the femininity of God,” Schneiders emphasizes the word “born”. But, declaring that there “are two births, one of water and another of spirit,” she, too, draws a bright-line boundary between material realities such as water and the sacramental functions of the Spirit.453

  Both Schneiders and Witherington sever the Nicodemus episode from both its mythic roots in the ancient cosmology of Genesis and its historical context in the last days of Old Covenant Israel. Schneider explicitly refuses to locate the meaning of the text “primarily in the history behind the text, either in the life of the historical Jesus or in the experience of the Johannine community”. Like Bultmann, she presents the passage as an existential quest for meaning in which “the reader experiences both identification with and distance from Nicodemus and comes to recognize in him or herself the split disciple who comes to the light only through an ongoing doing of the truth”.454 Witherington, too, approaches the text with a contemporary theological agenda in mind. In his case, he worries that a sacramental understanding of “born of water” in John 3 and 1 John 5:6–8 will have an adverse impact on the Wesleyan theology of baptism. He contends that “the more soteriology one loads into his or her theology of baptism, the less one sees faith as crucial for salvation”.455 Also like Bultmann, Witherington’s perspective is distorted by an undue emphasis on the subjective spiritual experience of individual believers or readers of John 3 and 1 John 5.

  It is a mistake to separate altogether the earthly from the heavenly things mentioned in either John 3:1–21 or 1 John 5:6–8. Bultmann insists that the reference to “earthly things” in the gospel passage must be understood in universalistic existentialist terms which “indicate the meaningless situation of man” after the flesh. Thus only those can “see the necessity of rebirth” can pass over into the “heavenly things” which are not of this world.456 But, while flesh may give birth to flesh, and spirit to spirit, it is water that connects and intersects with both in the functional order of Christ’s cosmic temple. The three who bear witness in heaven interpenetrate the three who bear witness on earth.

  Jesus tells Nicodemus “we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony” (3:11). The first Johannine letter helps us to understand who Jesus denotes by the word “we” in John 3:11. In 1 John 5:6–8, it is written that “anyone who believes” has the testimony of “the Spirit, the water, and the blood” in his heart. Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3:11 that he and his people had refused to believe the Spirit, the water, and the blood when the Son of Man spoke of “earthly things”. How then could he be believed if he spoke of “heavenly things”? Bultmann never considers the possibility that Nicodemus was among “the Jews” who questioned Jesus’ authority in John 2:18. In any case, as an important temple official, Nicodemus would have known that among the earthly things of which Jesus had spoken were the sheep, the cattle, and the money-changers that he had driven from the heavenly precincts of the temple just before Passover. Heaven and earth can co-exist — harmoniously or disharmoniously — within the same physical space.

  The ancient cosmology within which the Nicodemus passage is set made no sharp distinction between “earthly” and “heavenly” things. Heaven and earth each had its own distinctive function within the cosmic temple. The problem facing Nicodemus and every other Jew following the advent of the Son of Man was that the old temple system, the old heaven and the old earth, was passing away. Under the Old Covenant, every Jew could claim to have been “born of water” in the sacramental sense. After all, the earth itself was “born of water” in Genesis 1:9–10 when the “waters under the heavens” were gathered together to “let the dry land appear”. Like water, light and darkness, the land performed an essential temple function, that of providing food, in ancient cosmologies. Unfortunately for Nicodemus, neither the Sanhedrin nor a teacher of Old Covenant Israel had productive functions to perform in the new creation about to be born not just in Israel but in Samaria and beyond to the ends of the earth.

  Conclusion

  Witherington, however, does perform a useful function in drawing attention to the theological kinship between John 3:1–21 and 1 John 5:6–8. It is a pity, therefore, that neither he nor Schneiders perceive the trinitarian significance of the Spirit, the water, and the blood in the new heaven and new earth. Those three witnesses are not just parallel, disconnected realities; they represent the earthly incarnation of the heavenly kingdom of the triune God. Accordingly, for the past two millennia, Spirit, water, and blood have continued to bear witness not just in the hearts of individual believers but in the corporate lives of Christian families, churches, and nations. As it happens, the inverted parallelism between the Nicodemus episode and the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in the gospel of John also testifies to the mutual interpenetration of Spirit, water, and blood on earth as in heaven.

  Unlike the Pharisee who belongs to the upper crust of Jewish society, the Samaritan woman is not a person of high rank. On the contrary, Jesus reveals that she is more than likely a person of dubious reputation among her own people. We also know that Jews such as Nicodemus despise the impurity of Samaritan bloodlines (John 4:9). But when we last encounter Nicodemus in John 19:39–40 his status among fellow Jews is not at all clear. In sharp contrast, the story of the Samaritan woman ends after she leads her people to the “living water” of the new creation (4:10, 39–42).457 In that retrospective context, Jesus’ cryptic reference to the Spirit in John 3:8 has a prophetic ring to it: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going”. So it was with the providential wind that fused together the Spirit, the water, and the blood in the hearts of the Samaritan villagers who believed that Jesus “really is the Saviour of the world” (4:42).

  In our own time, Spirit, water, and blood have been split apart by a pathological process of theological fission. Even the church downplays or denies the sacramental (a word not to be confused with “immaterial”) functions of water and blood in the spiritual life of Christian communities. Not surprisingly, those who dare to drain the earthly body of Christ of life-giving water and blood let the Spirit depart as well (cf. John 19:30, 34). In the last days of Israel, thos
e who called themselves Jews but were not refused to be reborn in water and the Spirit (Rev 2:9). Accordingly, catastrophe awaited the putative people of God whose proudest boast was that the blood of Abraham ran in their veins. Not even the prince of darkness could save them. In our post-Christian age, the apocalyptic judgement visited upon Nicodemus and his people stills stands as a warning to every nation that turns away from the light.

  9: A House Divided?

  Eschatology in the Johannine Literature

  Introduction

  Church tradition ascribes authorship of five books of the New Testament to “John”: the Gospel of John, the three eponymous epistles, and the Book of Revelation. Modern critical scholarship “challenged this assumption by claiming that the theological differences between Revelation and the Fourth Gospel are so striking the two books “cannot have been written by one and the same author. One and the same person could not have advocated the futuristic eschatology [of Revelation] and the realized eschatology [of the Gospel of John]”. Indeed, as early as the third century, there were those such as Dionysius of Alexandria who attributed the authorship of the Gospel to the apostle John while ascribing Revelation to “another John”. As a consequence, many New Testament scholars “no longer postulate a common authorship of both books but claim that a circle of disciples or a school of the apostle…edited and promoted the Johannine writings”. In her survey of the academic literature on the Johannine community, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza aligns herself with the dominant view that the Revelation and the Gospel of John “represent opposite eschatological options”.458