Andrew of Bethsaida and the Johannine Circle: The Muratorian Tradition and the Gospel Text (Studies in Biblical Literature) [New ed.] 9781433120251, 9781453909409, 1433120259

Table of contents :
C O V E R
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
P R E F A C E
F O R E W O R D
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
A B B R E V I A T I O N S
C H A P T E R O N E: Presuppositions
C H A P T E R T W O: Irenaeus: Apologetic Ambiguity
C H A P T E R T H R E E: Another Tradition
C H A P T E R F O U R: The Gospel’s Witness to Its Origin
C H A P T E R F I V E: Brothers: The Anonymity of Love
C H A P T E R S I X: What Jesus Did Not Say
C H A P T E R S E V E N: John and His Churches
C H A P T E R E I G H T: The Johannine Corpus after Irenaeus
C H A P T E R N I N E: Coda: Andrew after Constantine
Notes
C H A P T E R O N E
C H A P T E R T W O
C H A P T E R T H R E E
C H A P T E R F O U R
C H A P T E R F I V E
C H A P T E R S I X
C H A P T E R S E V E N
C H A P T E R E I G H T
C H A P T E R N I N E
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Andrew OF Bethsaida AND THE Johannine Circle

Studies in Biblical Literature

Hemchand Gossai General Editor Vol. 153

PETER LANG

New York · Washington, D.C./Baltimore · Bern Frankfurt · Berlin · Brussels · Vienna · Oxford

James Patrick

Andrew OF Bethsaida AND THE Johannine Circle The Muratorian Tradition and the Gospel Text

PETER LANG

New York · Washington, D.C./Baltimore · Bern Frankfurt · Berlin · Brussels · Vienna · Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patrick, James. Andrew of Bethsaida and the Johannine circle: the Muratorian tradition and the Gospel text / James Patrick. pages. cm. — (Studies in biblical literature; vol. 153) 1. Bible. N.T. John—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Andrew, Apostle, Saint. 3. Irenaeus, Saint, Bishop of Lyon. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in biblical literature; v. 153. BS2615.52.P39 226.5009’015—dc23 2012026563 ISBN 978-1-4331-2025-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4539-0940-9 (e-book) ISSN 1089-0645

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2013 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

 To the friends and benefactors of the College whose encouragement and generosity made possible a great adventure in teaching and learning, 1981–2011 Renovellari veritate

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Preface............................................................................................................ ix Foreword ........................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgments........................................................................................ xiii List of Abbreviations..................................................................................... xv 1

Presuppositions......................................................................................... 1

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Irenaeus: Apologetic Ambiguity............................................................. 17

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Another Tradition ................................................................................... 33

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The Gospel’s Witness to Its Origin......................................................... 55

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Brothers: The Anonymity of Love.......................................................... 63

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Chapter 21: What Jesus Did Not Say ..................................................... 73

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John and His Churches ........................................................................... 85

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The Johannine Corpus after Irenaeus ....................................................111

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Coda: Andrew after Constantine .......................................................... 123

Notes ........................................................................................................... 129 Bibliography ............................................................................................... 163 Index ........................................................................................................... 173

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ore than ever the horizons in biblical literature are being expanded beyond that which is immediately imagined; important new methodological, theological, and hermeneutical directions are being explored, often resulting in significant contributions to the world of biblical scholarship. It is an exciting time for the academy as engagement in biblical studies continues to be heightened. This series seeks to make available to scholars and institutions, scholarship of a high order, and which will make a significant contribution to the ongoing biblical discourse. This series includes established and innovative directions, covering general and particular areas in biblical study. For every volume considered for this series, we explore the question as to whether the study will push the horizons of biblical scholarship. The answer must be yes for inclusion. In this volume, James Patrick explores the historical context of the Gospel of John and brings once again in the theological discourse on the Gospel of John, a careful and intentional argument. The author contends that the author of the Gospel is the son of Zebedee and in itself this argument will face challenges from the now well established consensus that the authorship belongs to John the Apostle. Perhaps somewhat counter intuitively then, it is precisely this reality that generates this renewed interest, and I propose to you that this study by Patrick will again renew the scholarly conversation, and regardless of the conclusion that is drawn, the very conversation itself has great merit. Scholars who are engaged in this area of scholarship will find much here to examine, reflect on, challenge and I believe above all allow for a serious expansion of the discourse beyond the consensus convention. The horizon has been expanded. Hemchand Gossai Series Editor

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I always feel there is a riddle in it which some day somebody will solve. Meanwhile it is best to keep clear of John when you are dealing with a person who doesn’t accept Christian revelation as a fact. There are too many loopholes for him. He can always quote learned precedent for questioning its date, its authorship, its accuracy. Ronald Knox, The Hidden Stream

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he following chapters offer not a text-critical analysis but a study of the history of the early Church to which history the Gospel of John bears compelling witness. And one must begin by acknowledging that it is unlikely that after so many years of research into Johannine origins by competent scholars, a hithertofore uncanvassed theory could do more than deserve consideration. Yet contemporary scholarship, by moving ever further from the traditional account which makes the author the son of Zebedee, has seemed to make room for a reconsideration of the evidence. The new search for the historical context reflected in the Johannine text was inaugurated by C. H. Dodd’s Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (1965), a work that challenged the historical skepticism of Bultmann’s Gospel of John and provided context for J. A. T. Robinson’s stillcontroversial Priority of John (1985), which argues the early date and literary independence of the Gospel. James H. Charlesworth’s Beloved Disciple (1995) cataloged exhaustively the attempts to identify the disciple whom Jesus loved. Charles E. Hill’s Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (2004) brought the Gospel into the circle of second-century orthodoxy by challenging the thesis that John was compromised by an association with Gnosticism and reopened discussion of its history by presenting a comprehensive review of the patristic evidence. Birger Gerhardsson’s development of the thesis that the memory of the first-century church lived in discrete, historical communities, represented by his Reliability of Gospel Tradition (2001) as well as his earlier work, has also been an important propaedeutic to this study. My

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dependence on these (among many others) is patent. Of course every theory that questions the traditional authorship challenges piety by suggesting that the figure on the rood beam is not John the Apostle. This should never be done lightly, but there are also gains. The alternative account represented by the Muratorian Canon and its cognates brings out of obscurity the brother of Simon Peter, who emerges from the shadows of his own humility and courtesy to give the Gospel a more believable history. It is nonetheless important to remember that we are dealing here not only with a puzzle that has intrigued scholars over the centuries, but with matters that go to the root of Christianity, a religion in which what actually did or did not happen is of primary importance.

James Patrick The Feast of St. Andrew, 2012

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y first scripture teacher, the Reverend John Howard Winslow Rhys of St. Luke’s Seminary at the University of the South, encouraged me to see study of the Bible as a spiritual work to which criticism was never irrelevant and paid gentle attention to my theories about the Bible in the second century. After many years my affectionate gratitude remains. Frank Beare of Trinity College, Toronto, a great scholar of the New Testament, was a friend and inspiration. And I thank especially the Right Reverend Ann Tottenham, retired Suffragan Bishop of Toronto, who typed the first draft of the article from which this book grew in her student days at Trinity College, Toronto. I also thank Patricia Bowers, the college librarian, and Francis Shivone, without whom the text could not have been prepared for publication. I must also mention with gratitude the encouragement of the Fellows and Tutors of the College of Saint Thomas More, whose participation in a great intellectual adventure was background for my attempt to complete this book. And finally I thank Pringle. Words and ideas are part of the happiness we have shared and nothing has been written that did not bear her stamp.

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B B R E V I AT I O N S

ANF

Ante-Nicene Fathers

AThR

Anglican Theological Review

AH

Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses

BJRL

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

ExpTim

Expository Times

CQR

Church Quarterly Review

HE

Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica

HTR

Harvard Theological Review

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JTS

Journal of Theological Studies

NHL

Nag Hamadi Library in English

NPNF

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers

NTS

New Testament Studies

PG

Patrologia Graeca

PL

Patrologia Latina

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Presuppositions There is no book, either inside the New Testament or outside it, that is really like the Fourth Gospel. C. H. Dodd, “The Background of the Fourth Gospel”

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he following chapters represent an interpretation of the problem of Johannine origins in the light of a family of accounts that share or reflect the influence of certain narrative elements. I have called these the earliest tradition because, neglecting Irenaeus’ claim that John wrote the Gospel at Ephesus and Polycrates’ puzzling description of the author as a priest, teacher, and beloved disciple, these sources offer the earliest narrative account, an account which, although occurring in texts belonging to the second, and third, and fourth centuries, by context must belong to the late first or early second century. The principal witnesses are the Muratorian Canon, a document variously dated from the second to the fourth century, that is embedded in the Muratorian Fragment, a manuscript of the eighth century, which account is seconded by Papias of Hierapolis, by the so-called Anti-Marcionite Prologue to John, and by other authorities, among them Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Jerome, which, taken together argue the existence of a second-century (or earlier), written or unwritten, account of Johannine origins that did not influence Irenaeus. Emil Schürer prophesied a century of scholarly interest when he wrote in 1889, “No other question of NT criticism is of such significance as the origin

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of our Fourth Gospel…. So no other question agitates people as much as the Johannine question.” 1 And agitated the question was. In his book on the Fourth Gospel Ernst Haenchen titled a chapter “The Dismantling of Ancient Johannine Tradition by Modern Scholarship,” documenting there the century-long prescinding from the traditional theory of Johannine origins, its centerpiece the belief that John the son of Zebedee was author and eyewitness.2 Erhardt Friedrich Vogel (1750–1823), armed with the presuppositions of Enlightenment rationalism, anticipated the conclusions of Ferdinand Christian Bauer (1792–1860) and the Tübingen school with doubts that the Gospel had any connection with the apostle John and a complementary certainty that the Fourth Gospel belonged to the second century. 3 Rejection of the traditional theory by nineteenth-century critics presaged a wider abandonment of the conviction that the son of Zebedee was either witness or author. C. H. Dodd observed in 1965 that any such connection was “entirely gratuitous.”4 But despite perennial scholarly interest, represented by an (almost literally) immense bibliography of monographs and commentaries, no alternative to the traditional account has won broad acceptance. The theory, urged episodically, often by critics of authority, that the Gospel takes its title not from the son of Zebedee but from a later Ephesian teacher called John the Presbyter and associated with the First Epistle, has never failed of advocates and remains an important piece in the Johannine puzzle, but neither has it won consensus.5 At this distance in time, given the state of evidence that has been contemplated for at least eighteen-hundred years and reviewed critically for two hundred without producing a common history, it is unlikely that there will soon be a widely accepted account of the origin of what is often considered the most winning, spiritually dense, and theologically important book of the New Testament. Of course every important consideration touching the origin of the Gospel could not be canvassed in even a very long book, certainly not in this study, so I have accepted certain presuppositions, acknowledging that while each could be challenged, these assumptions, lying within the circle of scholarly plausibility, are defensible. The Gospel rests on the witness of a disciple, one of the Twelve who was not John the son of Zebedee, the disciple whom Jesus loved, whose existence the author attests but whom he does not name, and who may be identified with either the John for whom the Gospel is named, a later editor (perhaps John the Presbyter), or an unnamed

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disciple. The common conviction of piety, assumed by scholars following the evidence offered by Irenaeus of Lyons in the 180s, accepted by the church into the twentieth century and represented by the figure on a thousand rood beams, that John the son of Zebedee was the witness who stood by the cross (John 19:35), has not, despite the weight of tradition, proved convincing to great critics, Raymond Brown, C. H. Dodd, and Rudolf Schnackenburg among them, or to contemporary scholarship generally. 6 But while consensus has built around the proposition that the son of Zebedee was not the witness of 19:35, the Beloved Disciple on whose testimony the Gospel’s claim to historicity depends, the ‘eyewitness’ of John 1:14 and 1 John 1:1–3, or the editor who composed the text, criticism has been slow to present a convincing claimant to the title “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” 7 We do, however, have the benefit of a century of scholarly research. In the majority view the Beloved Disciple was not an ideal construct, but the historical witness of 19:35, who in some sense ‘wrote’ the Gospel as 21:24 maintains. 8 As such he was one of the Johannine disciples and therefore probably included in the Twelve, a category to which the five disciples important in the Gospel narrative belong even though “the Twelve” is a category that lies at the edge of Johannine interest (John 6:70, 20:24). Every text has a context, apart from which it will be as enigmatic as Etruscan inscriptions or the intersecting lines of Linear A, evidence of weknow-not-what. The historical context that shaped the testimony of the witness on whom the Gospel relies is the last decades of Second Temple Judaism, the age of the Herodians, the sons and grandsons of Herod the Great, having as its literary and religious heritage not only the Old Testament but the rich tradition of inter-testamental apocalyptic, prophetic movements like John the Baptist’s, and the religious fervor of the Essenes, Qumran, and the Mandeans, all sects seeking purity and redemption from the entangling loyalties of the flesh. It is, however, addressed to, or at least its assumed readership includes, a wider Gentile circle made up of those who must be told that the Passover is a feast of the Jews and for whom such common terms as rabbi must be translated. Complicating an already complicated context is the fact that the Gospel was written in the shadows of the rich world of theosophical speculation attested by Nag Hammadi that over time would become a threat to both Judaism and Christianity, emerging as the Gnosticism of Valentinus and the other ‘spirituals’ and the philosophical mysticism of the Hermetic literature.

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And all this took place against a political background in which the fading light of Maccabean expectations flickered still despite three centuries of Hellenizing rule by the Seleucids and the present fact of Roman authority, at first welcomed by the Jews but gradually resented as the Romans allowed the displacing of the Hasmonaean priesthood, itself reminiscent of the last age of Jewish near-independence, in favor of the Herodians. Finally, official unwisdom in demanding seventeen talents of silver from the sacred temple treasury was answered by Jewish fecklessness in refusing to accept the sacrifices of Gentiles, including the traditional offerings made on behalf of Augustus and the Roman people. 9 This stubbornness, representing the triumph of the Zealots over the Pharisees, was underwritten by expectations that God would intervene to establish his kingdom through his Messiah. 10 God’s perfecting intervention on behalf of his people, universal except among the Sadducees, was anticipated with differing emphases: by Jesus according to the Gospel of Matthew (24) as the coming of the Day and the dividing of the times; by the Johannine Gospel’s author, who remembered Jesus’ promise to return to take his disciples to himself (14:2); by Paul (1 Thess 4:13–18) and Lazarus’s sister (John 11:24), who expected Jesus to return bringing with him those who slept; by the woman at the well, who expected the Messiah to tell her everything (John 4:25); by the witnesses to the ascension of Acts 1:7, who looked forward, like Judas and Simon the Zealot, to the political restoration of Israel; by the author of 1 John (3:2) who anticipated union with Christ; and by the prophet in the cosmic vision of the Apocalypse 21 and 22 (cf. 2 Pet 3:1–12), in which the seer looked forward to the reign of the Lamb of God in a renewed creation. When the author of the Gospel begins his narrative by quoting the words of John the Baptist, “Behold the Lamb of God.... I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God,” he assumed this overarching fact, that the Messiah would appear, that time would turn a corner, that the Day prophesied by Isaiah and Jeremiah was at hand, which would make first-century Palestine the hinge of history. This expectation when ‘spiritualized’ would inspire the Gnostics, when historicized would fuel the Jewish rebellion in 69, and when developed as the once-and-future reign of Christ the King, anticipated at Pentecost, to be fulfilled when Jesus returns in glory, would become the foundation of the religion of Paul, Ignatius, and Irenaeus. This was the crucible of hope in which the intentions of both the Johannine witness and those who wrote in his name were formed, and for which

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intentions the most significant evidence is the text of his Gospel, read of course in the context established by what can be known of the readers and their historical situation. In any event the sum of the sources never ‘explains’ the document exhaustively and undue emphasis upon influences may detract from the meaning of the text. It should be noted en passant that the text of the Gospel is attested early and is stable; theories of displacement remain speculative and no manuscript lacking chapter 21 exists. Robinson quotes Barrett: I take it that if the Gospel makes sense as it stands it can generally be assumed that this was the sense it was intended to make. That it may seem to me to make better sense when rearranged I do not regard as adequate reason for abandoning an order which undoubtedly runs back into the second century—the order, indeed, in which the book was published.11

The Gospel text was not enigmatic to its first readers. When the author of John chose not to attempt a sacred biography along the lines of Matthew and Luke; when, writing from a post-Pentecostal point of view, he designed the narrative of Jesus’ pre-passion ministry as a detailed account of the call of the disciples plus a series of ‘signs’ interspersed and interpreted by discourses, made the Passion Narrative and the accompanying discourses of Jesus roughly half the book; when he told but did not tell the reader the identity of the witness who is the historical anchor of his account, he was doing so selfconsciously and in a way that makes the Gospel a literary whole that its first readers would have found as intelligible as they would have found it spiritually nourishing, however puzzling certain aspects may seem to those who were not present at (or near) creation. That there are aporiai, difficult transitions that sometimes seem superficial and contrived, calculated to keep the story moving, is undeniable.12 Yet the text can be read to show that the Gospel was (arguably) written by one reflective and knowledgeable, who created a work marked by a central intelligence possessed of an overarching purpose and able to incorporate remembered events and words in a more or less self-consistent, if not always seamless, composition.13 Perhaps when the author tells us in the concluding verse (21:25) that writing down everything καθ’ ἕν, one by one, sequentially, would be impossible, he is describing his own method and claiming a limited success in presenting with impressive narrative unity just those events that his evangelical purpose requires. While efforts to name the Beloved Disciple

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have not been notably convincing, scholarly consideration of the place of the Gospel and Epistles in the literature of the first-century Church has made new proposals credible. The conviction of B. W. Bacon and others that the Gospel is late, stamped with Hellenizing, philosophic language and ideas, has largely been abandoned as it has become clear that the literary culture of Palestine itself was Hellenized.14 “Palestinian Judaism (and Christianity) was more Hellenistic and more syncretistic than had earlier been supposed.” 15 And with the weakening of the imaginal link to Asia there has been a notable shift in Johannine geography. Recent archaeology suggests that the author of the Gospel was well acquainted with Jerusalem, which supports a Palestinian milieu and an early rather than a later date. While it is difficult to imagine evidence that would shake decisively the tradition that the Gospel was written in Ephesus, the presence of Aramaisms and certain considerations of influence have made it difficult to dismiss the possibility that at some level John reflects a Syrian background.16 The once near-commonplace that the writer of the Fourth Gospel relied upon one or more of the Synoptics, while still ably defended, is no longer presupposed. The case will never be closed, but the conviction that John is to be seen as a work to be read on its own terms, reflecting a distinctive Johannine tradition, has won a secure place in scholarly consideration. This revisionist opinion was proposed in 1938 by Percival Gardner-Smith, who in his brief study of the Gospel of John and the Synoptics asked, “Is it easier to account for the similarities between John and the Synoptists without a theory of literary dependence, or to explain the discrepancies if such a theory has been accepted?”17 It is not difficult to know what literary dependence among the Gospels looks like, for the so-called Synoptic Problem is fueled by the ever-puzzling but obvious literary interdependence, often verbal, precise, and extensive, among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. For the most part Johannine descriptions of events and recollections of Jesus’ words lack that character, and for a reason Gardner-Smith proposed. 18 In its formation the tradition relied upon memory, variously transcribed; what we have in the Gospels are events common to the story of Jesus remembered and described differently, displaying that similarity-within-differences that would be expected of such a process. “The presumption is surely justified that an underlying event has at some point controlled the reports rather than simply the reports each other.”19 As it happened, the literary independence of John was an idea bred up on the Cam. Gardner-Smith had been dean of Jesus College; C. H. Dodd would

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be professor of divinity in the university after 1935, and J. A. T. Robinson dean of Trinity from 1975 until his death in 1983. Robinson, who considered Dodd his mentor, began his Priority of John with the recollection of the opening sentence of Dodd’s 1957 lecture before the Cambridge Theological Society: “The presumption of literary dependence of John on the Synopists no longer holds.”20 Dodd went on to publish in 1965 his Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, in which he concluded that the Gospel represented a tradition independent of the Synoptics. In 1985 Robinson’s Priority of John, in which Robinson argued the independence, priority, and early date of the Fourth Gospel, was published posthumously. In New Testament studies no majority opinion or apparent consensus enjoys permanent favor, and since 1985, as D. M. Smith points out, the Gardner-Smith consensus has been “significantly eroded.”21 But that ‘consensus’ as proposed by Gardner-Smith and developed by Dodd and Robinson, while it is not essential to the argument of this study, holds an honorable place and gains credibility if, as Dodd and others maintain, the Gospel is rooted in a distinctive, discrete local tradition.22 Advocacy of the independence or priority of John is closely related to the conviction that the Gospel was written early. Barrett wrote, “If the traditional date of the gospel is correct, one wonders where the evangelist can have lived if indeed he knew none of the earlier gospels; and if his book is rightly regarded as a theological variation on a historical theme it is natural rather than difficult to believe that he had read at least Mark, and had pondered— and understood—its meaning.” 23 “Theological variation on a historical theme” is the ghost of the idea that John is a Hellenizing theological interpretation that sits loose to history, so it is not surprising that for Barrett the traditional date was probably early second century, by which time the Johannine author must indeed have been a recluse to have been ignorant of the Synoptics. But if the Gospel is dated as early as sixty or sixty-five, the author’s failure to show awareness of a certain responsibility to Synoptic sources is less puzzling. The present project, the certainties of apostolic authorship and a relatively late date having been challenged, is to craft an account that is explicatory of the text and external evidence, answering to these sources in a way that illuminates and unites them, one which might focus historical research regarding the Johannine books in a new direction. Samuel Butler once wrote that the test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on

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insufficient evidence; for a definitive theory of Johannine origins, evidence, while it may be compelling, will always be insufficient. And while the question of authorship is important—Christianity is rooted in history— Robinson rightly observed that the power and authority of the Gospel do not depend on it; “nor, obviously, shall we ever reach proof or certainty.” 24 In writing this essay I have stood away from what I consider undue reserve toward evidence from the first two centuries, which evidence is often without compelling cause treated with a confident skepticism, a habit of mind evident in the scholarly interpretation of both the Muratorian Canon and the so-called Anti-Marcionite Prologue to the Gospel, both sources that claim to offer knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the writing of John.25 Both were considered by those who brought them forward, Samuel Prideaux Tregelles for the Muratorian Canon in 1867 and Adolf von Harnack and Dom Donatien De Bruyne for the Prologues in the 1920s, important, early, and in part reliable.26 Over the century following, however, both have often been characterized as late and lacking historical significance, perhaps in part because little effort has been made to see how these accounts might be contextualized by the Gospel itself. 27 Similarly, the witness of Papias of Hierapolis, from the time when Eusebius pronounced him small-minded (σμικρὸς ᾤν τὸν νοῦν), perhaps for no greater reason than Papias’ unOrigenistic eschatology, although frequently canvassed, has not been given the weight it deserves, and this despite Papias’ solid reputation and the extensive quotation of his Five Books by orthodox Fathers.28 These three texts, the famous Papias text preserved in the third book of Eusebius’ history, the Anti-Marcionite Prologue to John, and the account of Johannine origins preserved in the Muratorian Canon, with certain echoes of these accounts in third and fourth century literature, taken together, witness an alternative account of Johannine origins which described the Gospel as the composition of a spirit-filled group over whom John presided, their work authenticated by an absent apostle, an account which the Gospel text can be read as supporting. With regard to the argument from style and language, I have accepted— despite the fact that critics are far from unanimous—the view that the Gospel and the Epistles bear the stamp of the same mind, although the authorship exercised in the Epistles and in the Gospel may be of very different kinds and the stamp of authorial style may show significant variations. 29 To the degree that this conclusion can be maintained, it follows that the Epistles and

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the Gospel are related in the person of the author of 2 and 3 John, John the Presbyter, in some way, although this does not entail the belief that John wrote the Gospel in the sense in which he was the author of the Epistles. Based also on language and style, John of Patmos, the prophet who recorded his vision in the reign of Domitian, does not come into the argument. Dionysius of Alexandria’s critical judgment that the person who wrote the simple, clear Greek of the Gospel cannot have written the syntactically broken language of the Apocalypse remains a telling critical commonplace.30 Apart from the linguistic evidence, the prophet’s reference in his vision to the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb (Rev 21:14) whose names were written on the foundations of the New Jerusalem makes it unlikely that he counted himself among them. The great event that occurred as Jesus had promised, apart from which the apostolic mission would never have been undertaken and the church never born, was the coming of the Paraclete at Pentecost, empowering the Twelve and turning the timid into bold witnesses who within three of four decades fulfilled their commission, going throughout the Roman world, baptizing and teaching, confident that they would be accompanied by their Risen Lord unto the consummation of God’s promise for the elect and the world. Jesus’ ministry had taken place within the tiny geography of Palestine. He had seen and been seen by many, but at the end, when Jesus hung on the cross, there stood by, as far as we are told, only his mother, the women, and one disciple, and in the aftermath of Jesus’ death the Twelve were full of fear and doubts; “they still disbelieved for joy and wonder” (Luke 24:31). Jesus’ trial, death, and the rumor of his resurrection had created a stir in Jerusalem (Luke 24:18–24), but the resurrection appearances were to the disciples, not to the world (John 14:22). Then at the first Pentecost the Holy Spirit, promised proleptically in John, fell upon the assembled company of “devout men from every nation under heaven” then staying in Jerusalem, and these citizens of the Mediterranean world, Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libyia around Cyrene, visitors from Rome, Jews and Proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, “heard in their own languages of the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:9–11). These witnesses may have been from as far north as Sinope, as far west as Rome, as far south, perhaps, as Petra, and as far east as Edessa, Nisibis, and Haran. The exact nature of the Pentecostal experience may be debated, but its effects

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are evident. The powerful, public, cosmopolitan nature of Pentecost inspired the apostolic mission and with it the necessity for the writing down of the story, first remembered and recited, then written. The fire of Pentecost breathes in the Gospel of John, and the presence of the Paraclete is at the heart of the difference both scholars and ordinary readers have found between John and the Synoptics. Patristic commentators were seeking words to describe this difference when they called John a “spiritual gospel” or commented that the Gospel and Epistles were written on a “spiritual principle.”31 This is not to say that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are less inspired, but while the Synoptics take what might be considered the biographer’s natural point of view, writing objectively, from outside the historical framework of the narrative, chapters 14–17 of the Gospel of John, the account of Jesus’ words and actions at the Last Supper, suggest a distinctive Johannine methodology. Unlike the Synoptics, the authors of which wrote as observers of a certain history, the Johannine author or authors wrote within a milieu established by the immediacy of Pentecost and its gift of the promised Paraclete.32 John is also unique in its concern that the reader know the editorial principles, born of this Spirit-inspired point of view, that influenced its composition. Luke had decided to write an account of events in orderly sequence so that the reader might “realize the certainty of the teaching you have received” (1:1–2). The Johannine author warns his readers that the book gives an incomplete account—“many other signs Jesus truly did in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book” (20:30)—and that the writer (or writers) has exercised the historian’s right to select the evidence that best suits this purpose from a field so dense that if everything Jesus had done were written καθ ἕν, one by one, “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (21:25).33 The principle of selection was the author’s high evangelical purpose, that from “these things” recorded the reader “might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,” and believing “might have life through his name” (20:31).34 The fourfold Gospel canon embodies a tradition that while it is literary— the Synoptic Problem explores the verbal relationships among the Gospels— is more than literary. John (arguably) is the result not of selections from other texts but of memory inspired by Pentecostal light.35 The Johannine author recalled Jesus’ promise: when the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father sends in Jesus’ name comes, “He will teach you all things and bring

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all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you” (14:26). Jesus had left much to future inspiration; “I have many things still to say to you, but you cannot bear them now, but when the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth” (16:13). The same Spirit will vivify memory: “These things I have told you, that when the time shall come, you may remember that I told you of them” (16:4). The Gospel of John is the fruit of that inspired memory; of a writer and a company in whom or among whom the Holy Spirit confirmed a knowledge of who Jesus is in the light of God’s transcendent purpose while the same Spirit joined believers to Jesus in a way that is anticipated in the Synoptics but not, as in John, evidently experienced in the very writing of the Gospel.36 The writer or writers know a witness to the events of Jesus life, (19:35, 20:30, 21:24) and possess memory of the signs done in the presence of his disciples, but these events are recounted selectively as the Spirit directs, so that the reader may believe. Woven into a text that reflects these principles is a subtext that evinces the writer’s concern that the goodness, spiritual perceptiveness, and closeness to the Lord of the Beloved Disciple, upon whose testimony the Gospel depends (19:35, 21:24–25), be recognized. His relation to Peter as portrayed is not one of rivalry, as has sometimes been maintained, 37 but, as Bacon, Bultmann and Dodd have seen, is intended to make a place, a place of honor, for the Beloved Disciple and his tradition, a witness and a tradition the Johannine author considered no less important than the tradition of Peter, which tradition the Gospel of John nonetheless honored. 38 The author demonstrates, persistently and carefully, the Beloved Disciple’s spiritual perceptiveness and closeness to Jesus in several ways. Jesus entrusts his mother to the care of the Beloved Disciple (19:25–27). He runs with Peter to the open tomb and believes (while honoring Peter’s role as the first among the disciples to witness Jesus’ resurrection). He is the eyewitness on whose authority knowledge of Jesus’ death and (implicitly) the assurance of his humanity rest (19:35). Most important of all, within the protocol established by the author the Beloved Disciple provides access for Peter, serving as a kind of mediator upon whom Peter’s relation to the Lord depends. This the Beloved Disciple does at the Last Supper, where Peter’s question must be asked through the Beloved Disciple (15:23–25), and at the Sea of Tiberias, where the Beloved Disciple must point out the Lord for his brother (21:7). This pattern also serves to identify the unnamed “another disciple” of John 18:15–16, who accompanies Jesus to his trial, as the Beloved Disciple,

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described in 20:2; and, more obviously, “the other disciple, whom Jesus loved,” who stood by the cross with Jesus’ mother in 19:26.39 The incident at the high priest’s door as described, while posing challenging historical problems, both reiterates the Beloved Disciple’s closeness to Jesus and emphasizes his role in providing access for Peter. The Beloved Disciple has followed Jesus into the high priest’s court; Peter is without. We do not know whether the disciple who gained admittance for Peter was personally acquainted with Caiaphas or whether he was familiar to the high-priestly household and therefore able to speak to the doorkeeper. What was important to the author was the fact that the Beloved Disciple accompanied Jesus while Peter, for whatever reason—perhaps because his violence in the garden had marked him as a revolutionary—stood outside, to gain admittance only through the intervention of the Beloved Disciple. The writer has carefully crafted a role as ‘mediator’ for an ostensibly anonymous disciple who in the Passion Narrative of 13:1–20:31 stands closer to Jesus than Peter, and it seems unlikely, highly unlikely, that within the carefully developed structure of the Gospel this role would be taken by more than one person.40 Among disciples named in the text, the role given the Beloved Disciple in the Passion Narrative of 13–20 is, in a dramatic way, mirrored in chapters 1‒12 by Peter’s brother Andrew, who is the ‘mediator’ in the Book of Signs, bringing his brother to Jesus; finding the lad with the loaves; with Philip, bringing the Greeks to Jesus, for which reason he is presumptively the Beloved Disciple of chapters 13‒21, the Book of Glory, in which Andrew, the most important disciple in the admittedly sketchy narrative of 1‒12, otherwise would not appear. While the author does not name directly the witness whose authority he claims, he is clearly anxious to assure the reader that his account rests on reliable first-hand authority, and, this being assumed, it follows that the possibility that the Beloved Disciple was a merely ideal figure is untenable. 41 But, granting the existence and activity of this historical witness, the task of understanding the testimony of the Gospel to its origin is nonetheless complicated by the fact that the text comprehends more than one type of witness. The Gospel opens with the claim to knowledge of Christ in glory (1:14) which may or may not make the writer a witness of the events of Jesus’ incarnate life. This claim to immediate knowledge of Jesus is mirrored in 1 John 1:1‒3. These texts have occasioned a rich scholarly literature. What they mean is important because Irenaeus and others assumed that John 1:14

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asserted historical knowledge; and if this is accepted, these texts, taken with John 19:35, represent the single voice of a member of the Twelve; the “we” of John 1:14 and the witness of 19:35 are one. From this assumption the Irenaean theory then unfolds: The Gospel bears John’s name; there is one witness and only one of the Twelve bears that name; the son of Zebedee is the author, witness, and Beloved Disciple. The argument as to whether these ‘eyewitness texts’ (John 1:14, 1 John 1:1‒3) should be taken as ‘historical’ is reviewed below. There are, however, other texts that make an unambiguous claim to historical knowledge, John 19:35 and 21:24‒25. These texts assume the existence of both a historical witness and of those who attest (puzzlingly) to his awareness of his activity and the truth of his witness. The witness of 19:35, that one who witnessed water and blood flowing from Jesus’ side, who presently knows (οἶδεν) he is telling (λέγει) the truth about Jesus’ passion, is the one (οὗτoς) in 21:24 who is testifying. He is the one who wrote these things (γράψας)—although he is obviously not writing in the present. The ἐκεῖνος of 19:35 naturally takes the Beloved Disciple, the only disciple of Jesus who stood by the cross (19:26), as its antecedent, and οὗτός in 21:24 resumes 21:20. The “we” of 19:35 who attest that the Beloved Disciple witnesses truly and who in 21:24 presently attest (οἴδαμεν) as well that the witness is telling the truth give us the voice of the writer of the Gospel. The “I/we” of 21:24–25, who muses that recording everything Jesus had done would be impossible, is the scribe speaking in propria persona, the present, living, attesting voice representing the “we” in whose name he writes. The existence of these two distinct historical voices, the “I/we” of 21:24‒ 25 and the witness of 19:35 to whom the final verse of the Gospel refers, is not generally considered controversial, but the rhetorical construction raises the question, among others, of the meaning of γράψας in 21:24 in relation to the assertion by the writers that the witness presently knows he is telling the truth (19:35). He, the Beloved Disciple, is in some sense the author of “these things,” the Gospel of John; he wrote (taking the ordinary sense of the aorist) in the past, he has testified, and he presently knows he is telling the truth. But he is, clearly, not present, at least not in the body. To anticipate the argument that follows, it can be noted that the implications of the tense structures of 19:35 and 21:24‒25 are reflected explicitly in the Muratorian account, in which the apostle Andrew authenticates and approves the writing of the Gospel of John although the apostle was not

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present. This in turn points to other similar incidents in which knowledge transcended time and place, and this again to the character of the postPentecostal, Spirit-filled Church in which the experience of what would later and formally be called the communion of the saints encouraged not only the conviction that an apostle might be spiritually present although absent in the body but inspired the living to be baptized for the dead (1 Cor 15:29). Christ having ascended might yet appear long afterward (1 Cor 15:5–8). This spiritual milieu, in which the gift of the Paraclete caused renewed life in a way that the Old Covenant, the advice of the philosophers, even the baptism of John, could not, and in which the gift of prophecy signaled the presence of the Holy Spirit, permeated the church in the first two centuries, inspiring the exercise of prophecy inside and outside the catholic communion, in both the magnificent (if syntactically awkward) vision of John of Patmos and the millennial conclusions of the Phrygian heretics. For Justin Martyr and the Apocalypse the very name of the Holy Spirit was the Prophetic Spirit or the Spirit of Prophecy.42 The Didache assumed the existence and importance of prophecy; Irenaeus defended it, and in doing so these defenders were following the admonition of Paul that prophecy, which for Paul meant (at least) being indwelt by the Spirit so as to be able to know and proclaim the truth, was the most desirable gift (1 Cor 14:1). Pentecost was understood as the fulfillment of Jeremiah 31:34: “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh: your sons and daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17–18). It beggars the obvious to point out that the experience of Pentecost and of life in Christ was the reality from which the Church was born. The firstwritten Christian letter claimed that the gospel was not delivered “in word only, but in power also, and in the Holy Spirit” (1 Thess 1:5). The promised Paraclete had done a work that the evident moral truths of Cicero and Aristotle, even of Moses and Old Testament wisdom, had been unable to achieve: the renovation of the human heart by love, a virtue unknown to the De Officiis or the Ethics. The Gospel of John brings to the human condition the renewing power of Pentecostal love. The Johannine prologue of 1:1–18 was understood by the earliest commentators as the fruit of the immediate inspiration of the Paraclete. Jerome, who was following an account mirrored in the Muratorian Canon—ecclesiastica narrat historia—the source of (or a witness to) the earliest account of the inspired origin of the Gospel,43 wrote that after prayer and fasting, when John “had been abundantly filled with revelation (revelatione saturatus), he poured forth that heaven-sent prologue:

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“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the Beginning with God.”44 What followed was inspiration, a book written in the experience of Jesus’ promises that the Paraclete would lead into truth and vivify memory. The story which the Gospel of John tells is the story of the divine mission. God sent his angel to a town of Galilee, to a Virgin whose name was Mary (Luke 1:26). God so loved that he sent his son (John 3:16). “The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you” (John 14:26). He sent them ahead of him, in pairs (Luke 10:1). “Go, make disciples” (Matt 28:29). The Spirit of the Lamb was “sent out into the whole world” (Rev 5:6.) The excitement and newness, the sense of adventure that permeates the entire New Testament as the mission was begun is especially evident in the Gospel of John as the author, revelatione saturatus, tells the story of the coming into his own of the Word who is God, describing in words and events the transposition of the order of this world by love, an order that now lies under the wounds of sin, into the order of glory, union with Jesus, sharing in his very person, the joy of humility, and eternal life with him.45

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Irenaeus: Apologetic Ambiguity The reason for the widespread abandonment of the full apostolic authorship of the Gospel is the clearer recognition that the external evidence is indecisive. It is not until we reach the last quarter of the second century that Irenaeus provides us with our first unambiguous evidence in support of the traditional theory. Wilbert Howard, The Fourth Gospel in Recent Criticism, 1931

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ut was Irenaeus’ evidence unambiguous? In fact his testimony, apparently so self-assured, presents persistent difficulties. About 185 Irenaeus, the Asian-born bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, wrote his book The Detection and Destruction of the Falsely-Named Knowledge, a long theological and historical treatise undertaken to maintain the truth of what he, following Ignatius of Antioch, called the catholic faith, principally against the system of those who interpreted the Gospel in a ‘spiritual’ sense. Along the way, as part of what he considered the received theology, Irenaeus defended prophecy, which he knew as part of the apostolic heritage, against those who, frightened by the outbreak of the ‘new prophecy’ in Phrygia, rejected prophecy entire.1 These proponents of a pneumatically charged millenarianism cited the Johannine doctrine of the Spirit, represented by both the Apocalypse of John, a self-proclaimed book of prophecy (Rev 1:3, 22:19), and by the discourses of John chapters 14–17, which foretold the outpouring of the Comforter, the Paraclete, who would lead believers into all truth and promised that the Paraclete would tell the disciples of things to

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come (John 16:14).2 For modern scholarship the lingering thought that John displays a quasi-philosophic interest suitable to the last-written, most ‘Greek’, of the Gospels has tended to divert attention from the secondcentury interest in its prophetic character, but for Irenaeus, “The fourth was like a flying eagle, pointing out the gift of the Spirit hovering over the Church.”3 Charles Hill’s careful argument that the orthodox never shied away from using John because of its heretical associations leaves unchallenged the fact that wherever one looks in the period 180 to 230, the Johannine books required defense.4 The insistence, asserted and implied, that the author recognized and rejected heresy and the reiterated attempts to justify the differences between John and the synoptic accounts evince an undeniable apologetic anxiety.5 The Apocalypse would be viewed with reserve because it encouraged prophecy and undergirded an eschatology that was sometimes considered unspiritual, in fact the eschatology of glory or δόξα proposed by St. Paul as it was understood and developed by Justin, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus.6 Irenaeus’ task entailed advocacy of the Johannine books for sound apologetic reasons; taken together the Gospel and Apocalypse offered a defense of the incarnation in a context riddled with ‘spiritual’ religion and a defense of prophecy in an age which had become distrustful of prophets. The evidence suggests that as the church of Ignatius and Irenaeus had become ecumenical so had the great heretical movements. It was Victor, bishop of Rome, who about 195 deposed Irenaeus’ fellow-pupil Florinus for his Valentinian allegiance and Victor who attempted to settle the Quartodeciman controversy, provoking Polycrates’ appeal to the presence of ‘great lights” who slept in Asia awaiting the resurrection.7 The Victor-Polycrates controversy was echoed by the correspondence between Gaius of Rome and Proclus, a Montanist defender of the new prophecy, whose claims Gaius refuted with the famous reference to the presence at the Vatican and by the Via Ostiensis of the victory monuments (τρόπαια) of Peter and Paul.8 As far as the evidence goes, the period of most intense argument against the orthodoxy of the Johannine corpus falls between Irenaeus, who wrote about 185 to secure the Gospel and Apocalypse from Valentinian claims and the new prophets, and Hippolytus, who about 215 wrote treatises, now lost, a Defense of the Gospel and Apocalypse of John and Against Gaius. In the pontificates of Zephrinus (198–217) and Callistus (217–22), a constellation of highly controversial, interrelated questions was canvassed: the authenticity

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of the Gospel and Apocalypse, the Logos doctrine in its relation to Sabellianism and Monarchianism, and the question of post-baptismal sin. But this crisis, with its profound import for the future of the church and with the Johannine corpus at its center, belonged to a future hidden from Irenaeus, who died, probably a martyr for the name, about 200, leaving a heritage as the first great theologian and as the defender of the Fourth Gospel and the fourfold canon. In 185, while defending the Gospel from the use made of it by Valentinians and from rejection of both Gospel and Apocalypse by over-zealous antiMontanist enemies of prophecy, Irenaeus was also defending his own place in Asian tradition because he saw himself as part of a succession, emanating from the sainted bishop Polycarp, who had been dramatically martyred in Smyrna just thirty years before Irenaeus wrote, and who as a παῖς, an adolescent, Irenaeus had heard reminisce about John. 9 His was an intensely personal mission, and Irenaeus interprets the (mostly remembered) sources in ways that supported his theory, providing, intentionally or no, a field of evidence from which his readers would be able to construe and defend the implausible but not quite impossible theory of the composition of the fivepiece Johannine corpus by one who had been present at the Last Supper and had lived into the reign of Trajan (98–117) at Ephesus. And all this without once asserting unambiguously in the text of his long book that the Gospel was the work of the apostle John the son of Zebedee.10 Barrett, commenting on Irenaeus’ evidence wrote, “This testimony of Irenaeus is simple and complete: John the son of Zebedee (for no other John can be meant) was the beloved disciple; he lived to great age in Ephesus, and there published the fourth gospel.”11 But, arguably, another was meant, the disciple of the Lord known to Polycarp, John the Presbyter. The question of Johannine origins was of great urgency because Irenaeus’ opponents, Valentinus and Marcion, had produced their own interpretations of the Gospel while the Phrygians complicated the defense of prophecy by making the Apocalypse the proof-text for their chiliastic doctrine. Despite the publication of many thoughtful, extensively researched studies, we still do not know with any certainty how the Gnosticism Irenaeus opposed, an attempt to construe Christianity not as an incarnational religion based on the Hebrew Scriptures and prophecy but as a ‘spiritual’ religion represented on one hand by books like the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Thomas and on the other by the exaggerated Paulinism of Marcion, originat-

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ed. These two strains shared the conviction that evil was somehow located in the very life of God, either in the disturbed pleroma of Valentinian theology or in the character of the harsh, just God of the Old Testament. 12 It followed that these glosses on the religion of Ignatius and Irenaeus shared a profound pessimism about creation and the historical order, and hence about the incarnation and the sacraments, as well as an illuminism that made salvation a kind of superior insight (Valentinus) or an ecstatic apprehension of lawannulling grace (Marcion). Opposition to this ‘spiritual’ religion marks the Johannine literature, as it marks much of Scripture and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. Irenaeus occasionally calls his opponents γνωστικόι, “knowers,” or “intellectuals.” Valentinians described themselves as πνευματκόι, “spirituals, or “spiritual men.” Their system was ‘spiritual,’ or invisible, in contradistinction from the incarnational religion of Irenaeus. Her conclusion may be over-broad, but Elaine Pagel’s thesis that John was written against the religion of the Gospel of Thomas illuminates.13 The great prologue to the Gospel of John can be seen as a reworking of the themes of light and life, Gnostic favorites, in a way that locates them at the center of an Ignatian-Johannine incarnational theology.14 Irenaeus knew that the insistence of John 19:35 that both blood and water poured from Jesus’ wounded side, while arguably a reference to the water and blood of salvation (John 3:5, 6), also, and perhaps most obviously, was introduced in order to deny emphatically that Jesus was an appearance, blood being anathema to the ‘spirituals,’ many of whom celebrated the Eucharist not with the mixed cup, but with what Irenaeus called the “water of this world.”15 Certainly the Johannine prologue was mined by the great Gnostics, and the anti-Gnostic concerns of the author of the Epistles is patent. Indeed 1 John can be read, effortlessly, as a sustained, point by point, argument against a kind of proto-Gnosticism, beginning as it does with the denial that there is darkness in God (1:5), a doctrine intrinsic to many kinds of gnosis, and going on to insist that sin is not rendered moot by illumination but is real, must be confessed, and is only expiated by the blood of Jesus (1:6–10, 2:1–2, 3:4–9); that the anointing given by the Holy Spirit is better than Gnostic ‘knowledge’ (2:20–21); and that the incarnation is real; Jesus came in the flesh (2:22, 4:2–3), the denial of this truth being the mark of antichrist. Why these glosses on the religion of the Gospels, of Ignatius and Irenaeus, sprang up, becoming so troublesome by the last quarter of the second

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century that Irenaeus considered detecting and rooting out this heresy his first duty, remains puzzling. We do know that they were to some degree developed within or at the edges of what would become Ignatius’ catholic church; they were not, as the Johannine Epistles suggest, imported whole. Irenaeus complains bitterly that the spirituals, especially the Valentinians, remain in the church while interpreting its doctrine perversely. Such persons “seem to be like us, from what they say in public, repeating the same words we do; but inwardly they are wolves.”16 1 John is the picture of a community sorting itself out.17 Like the later, better documented, heresies, the unorthodoxies of the firstcentury deniers of a future resurrection and of the misinterpreters of Paul seemed to provide answers to pressing problems. One of these was the tension between law, represented by Pharisaic Judaism (and to a certain degree by Synoptic tradition) and the Christian experience of freedom in the post-pentecostal church. This tension required Paul to defend himself against charges of antinomianism in Romans: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” (6:1–3); and 2 Peter to warn that certain points in Paul’s epistles required very careful interpretation, there being “some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction,” becoming thereby lawless (3:16–17). Paul had preached freedom from the law and like converts after him had seen the Pharisaic legalism he had previously professed as a vicious betrayal of the grace given by Christ. This tension was real and expressed itself in many ways. Most obviously, Jesus said that he had come to perfect the law, and he had given in Matthew 5 a series of strictures that redefined obedience to the law as something much deeper than adherence to its letter. The background was Jeremiah 31:27–34, the prophetic promise that the law would be put in believers’ hearts, but in a pre-Pentecostal world a careless reading of Matthew might leave one with what could be considered a higher legalism tempered by forgiveness and generosity. Paul, in the light of his experience of the risen Christ, sketched the resolution of this tension. God had given us his Spirit to renew us and join us to Christ, our righteousness being a righteousness of the heart that was a gift from God the Holy Spirit and our lives being lived “in Christ,” to whom Christians are joined by love. The First Epistle would be the summary presentation of this idea, an idea with a great future, becoming when formulated the heart of the traditional moral theology of the patristic, medieval,

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and renaissance church, but in the fifties or sixties it was still possible for single-minded Paulinists to see a church that insisted that love engendered obedience (as well as a joy-inspiring confidence in God’s mercy) as a betrayal of the gracious freedom of the Gospel. This tension was one root of the anti-incarnational theme common to the Gnostic heresies. Marcion would conclude that the God of the law, of justice, and of necessity, was evil, no god at all in comparison with the God of grace and the world he created a prison. In another, very different way, what became Gnosticism, or at least what prompted openness to the adopting of themes borrowed from the underworld of vernacular theosophy, looks like a home-grown attempt to make sense of the Gospel by side-stepping the thorny problem of the delay of the second advent in the light of pentecostal experience. In his letter to the Ephesians Ignatius admonished Christians that whether they feared the wrath that is to come or loved the present grace they should be found in Jesus Christ. This disjunction marks in nuce the tension that would lead some to undervalue the starkly historical claims of future resurrection and Jesus’ return, which as time passed seemed unrealistic and in the light of the compelling power of life in Christ even unnecessary.18 One could argue, based on the Pauline doctrine that we already taste the fruits of the age to come (Rom 8:23); that the present grace, the transforming experience of Christ, is the resurrection. That the spiritualizers had early developed such a ‘realized’ eschatology is evident in the denunciation of a cadre that included Hymenaeus, Alexander, and probably Philetus, who had “made shipwreck of the faith,” having “erred, saying the resurrection is past already,” overthrowing the faith of some (1 Tim 1:19; 2 Tim 2:17–18). These opponents of the faith would have agreed with the author of the Gospel of Thomas. When Jesus is asked when the resurrection and new cosmos will come, he replies: “The thing which you expect has come, but you do not recognize it.”19 The same argument may have been presented by those, presumably members in good standing of the Corinthian church, confident in the name of Christian, who to the chagrin of Paul denied the resurrection (1 Cor 15:12– 30), a conclusion which the apostle denounced as blatant abandonment of the faith since it entailed the belief that Christ did not rise. Perhaps his opponents would have argued that Christ’s ‘spiritual’ resurrection and ascension had indeed occurred, a claim Ignatius knew half a century later and against which orthodoxy carried on a running argument into the third century. 20 Paul brings

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a battery of arguments against his mistaken Corinthian disciples. The denial of the resurrection implies the denial that Jesus rose from the dead, destroying the very foundation of the faith. If our only hope is what we enjoy now, in this present life, we are of all men most miserable. The fullness of our salvation, predicted by Christ’s resurrection, lies in the future when death is destroyed and the kingdom is delivered up to God the Father. And for good measure: if there is no resurrection, why be baptized for the dead? If there is no future accounting for our desires and actions, why suffer in Christ’s name; why not eat, drink, and be merry? We do not have the arguments given by St. Paul’s Corinthian opponents, but it is predictable that a gospel severed from historical claims would be a breeding ground for a rich variety of antiincarnational illuminisms, grotesquely ascetical on one hand, antinomian and libertine on the other.21 Polycarp, quoting the stricture of 1 John that “one who shall not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is antichrist,” links this opinion directly with those who say “there is neither resurrection nor judgment.” 22 That this anti-historical, spiritual religion, appropriating along the way something of the anti-nomianism against which Paul was required to defend his doctrine and accepting the cultural commonplace that the body is the tomb of the soul, an illusion or a prison, might be developed into Marcionism in one way and into Valentinian gnosis in another is understandable.23 Marcionism, sometimes considered (perhaps on insufficient grounds) the project of a bishop’s son, was inspired at least in part by the founder’s experience of release from the power of the just and vengeful God into the precincts of grace. Marcion’s Antitheses was prefaced with the ecstatic “O wonder upon wonder, rapture, power, amazement!” 24 About 140 Valentinus wrote “The gospel of truth is a joy for those who have received from the Father of Truth the grace of knowing him. For he discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves.…”25 To categorize precisely the Gnosticisms engaged by the fathers of the second century has proved challenging; the various systems might be dualistic or monistic, might discover God within or without, might be related closely or remotely to orthodox sources, and might incorporate alien mythologies to a greater or lesser degree, but they have in common an appeal based on insight or knowledge that yields fulfilling experience. 26 This in itself is hardly disqualifying; the religion of Paul and Peter claimed, in contradistinction from Hellenistic moral systems like Stoicism, which offered advice and

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insight, to offer through faith and baptism a regenerate life based upon the gift of a new heart. But this incarnational Christianity was rooted in a profound conviction that creation was good and history purposeful, the theology of Paul, Ignatius, and Irenaeus. To create the elaborate systems of great Gnostics like Heracleon and Valentinus would have required an infusion of mythology borrowed from sources outside the church, but they, like Marcion, would have found among those who thought the present grace was the resurrection a matrix that could have been appropriated to their theological purposes more or less effortlessly in the decades marked by anxious expectation that the Lord would soon return. Paul is dealing with this anxiety in one way in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:11 and 2 Peter 3:1–13 with the same difficulty in another way. Whatever the discrete origins of the spiritual heresy may have been, by mid-second century the authorities among the spiritualizers, Heracleon, Basilides, Cerinthus, and Valentinus, had marked the Gospel of John as their own, Heracleon and Valentinus by writing commentaries intended to establish their ‘Gnostic’ interpretation of the text. 27 As late as Hippolytus in the early third century the Gospel and Apocalypse required defense, the Gospel from those who, like Gaius of Rome, considered John a Gnostic work and the Apocalypse from Origenizing Greeks like Eusebius and Dionysius of Alexandria who thought the book unspiritual.28 So for Ireaneus, writing in 185, standing chronologically between the mid-century assertion of the Gnostic interest in the Gospel by men like Heracleon and Valentinus and the fin-de-siècle emergence of orthodox skepticism by critics such as Gaius regarding the origin of John’s Gospel and the Apocalypse, the defense of these two works, linked as they were by assumed common authorship, was a pressing project. Understanding Irenaeus’ evidence has not proved to be an easy task, so that his references in Adversus haereses have been taken to support and to disqualify the claim that John the son of Zebedee wrote the Gospel, and to make John of Ephesus the author. A recent exhaustive study concludes that from Irenaeus’ evidence it is impossible to draw any conclusion.29 But the Asian-born bishop of Lugdunum clearly believed he was giving his readers reliable information. What Irenaeus wrote is evident; what he and his sources meant, and what Irenaeus understood by such terms as ‘apostle’ and ‘eyewitness;’ such questions are complicated by a historical context in which the story of the Gospels is still in the making. To cite only the most obvious confusion, by the end of the

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century, as Culpepper notes, after the Gospel and Apocalypse were accepted as the work of an apostle, “references to the elder and the seer were mingled indiscriminately with references to the Apostle.” 30 Irenaeus’ evidence on behalf of John’s Gospel, what he knew, included at least those recollections from his adolescence of Polycarp’s reminiscences about John, recollections Irenaeus recorded “not on paper but in my heart.” Smyrna had been Irenaeus’ boyhood home and Polycarp was its distinguished bishop, martyred just thirty years before Irenaeus wrote his book in the 180s. Regarding the accuracy of these recollections Irenaeus is insistent, perhaps over-insistent, arguing that “what boys learn, growing with their minds, becomes joined with it.” 31 Irenaeus also had the text of four Johannine books, the Gospel, Apocalypse, and two Epistles—he may not cite 3 John—assumed to be the work of one author, as well as a tradition that associated John with Ephesus in the reign of Trajan, this last reinforced by the Apocalypse, which placed John on Patmos, off the coast of Ephesus. 32 Given that the tradition of John in Ephesus was by the 150s well established, by apocryphal acts among other sources, Irenaeus was able to bring to the text of the Gospel, with its enigmatic references to the author, what he had learned from Polycarp about John. Polycarp had known John, a “disciple of the Lord,” an “apostolic presbyter” who had “seen the Lord.” Polycarp “gave accounts of his intercourse with John and with others who had seen the Lord;” he was “acquainted with many that had seen Christ,” who were, with obvious reference to 1 John 1:1–3 “eyewitnesses of the Word of Life.” Polycarp himself had been appointed by “apostles in Asia.” 33 Polycarp remembered the words of these witnesses, “what he heard from them concerning the Lord, and concerning his miracles and his teaching, having received them from eyewitnesses of the ‘Word of Life.’” This is language that invites the reader to believe that Polycarp had known apostles, among whom was John. On the other hand Irenaeus is reserved about calling John an apostle, preferring the title “disciple of the Lord” and (once) a witness to the tradition of the apostles, while at the same time Irenaeus is bold in claiming that John was an “eyewitness to the Word of Life,” and twice identifies John as the Beloved Disciple. 34 Granting that Ireaneus had heard Polycarp describe himself as an associate of apostles, among whom Polycarp (explicitly or inferentially) numbered John, who was John, what did Polycarp mean, and what did Irenaeus understand? The honored and essential nature of the apostolic ministry was

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confirmed by synoptic emphasis (Matt 10:2, Luke 6:14–16) and by Revelation 21:14, where the twelve apostles of the Lamb are the very foundation of the New Jerusalem. But there were, as Irenaeus once acknowledges, apostles other than the Twelve. Paul, listing those to whom Jesus appeared, considered apostles, “all the apostles” as he puts it, a category outside, and presumably more extensive, than the Twelve (1 Cor 15:6). Paul, Barnabas (Acts 14:14), Andronicus and Junia (Rom 16:7) were not necessarily eyewitnesses of Gospel events, but were among those who had been sent, a category that would include the Twelve, as well as others whom the Twelve would have commissioned or whom, as in the case of Paul, Jesus would have called immediately through a post-resurrection appearance, their status being subsequently confirmed by the church. There is no reason to think that all of those who saw the risen Christ undertook the apostolic mission or that everyone who took the title apostle had seen the Lord. The title apostle was, however, clearly a patent of authority; the apostolic ministry was not elected in Christian congregations but called and sent with the authority of God and the Church: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). So desirable was the title apostle that it would be falsely appropriated at Ephesus by “evil men” who “call themselves apostles but are not” (Rev 2:2) and by “false apostles, deceitful workers” at Corinth (2 Cor 11:13). Inevitably there would be controversy. Paul, in the text cited above, refers to those who did not consider him an apostle. Whether belonging to the Twelve or to the larger apostolic group, being an apostle was a high calling, exemplified by Peter, who was of the Twelve, and Paul, who was not, an office which Ignatius, as he wrote the Romans shortly after the turn of the century, did not presume to share. 35 Surrounding the Twelve in the thirty or forty years after Pentecost was a generation of “apostles and prophets, and teachers” (Eph 4:11).36 For Polycarp, born about 69, the “many apostles” and the “others who had seen the Lord” could not have included many of the Twelve or many eyewitnesses to the events in Jerusalem in the twenties or thirties, but it did include an important witness named John who had “seen the Lord,” an association that need not imply that Polycarp himself located that John among the Twelve or even the seventy called and commissioned by Christ, who were surely also (as Irenaeus recognized) apostles.37 But by the time Irenaeus wrote, about 185, the generation of Barnabas and Junias, of “apostles, prophets, and teachers,” had passed from the scene, the larger meaning of the term apostles had passed

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out of use, and “the apostles” meant, increasingly, “the Twelve.” Seventy years earlier this had not been the case, and Polycarp, writing in the age of Ignatius of Antioch, despite his reluctance to call John an apostle, may well have considered John an apostle in the wider sense, an apostle being for Polycarp one who had been sent by Christ or perhaps later by the Church. Irenaeus’ use of the term “apostolic presbyter,” like the allusion to John 1:14 and 1 John 1:1–3, suggests that the subject of Polycarp’s recollections was John the Presbyter, who had seen the risen Lord. Those other apostles, men of the late first century, when Irenaeus wrote in the 180s, had left no lasting impression, at least none that Irenaeus reported. Striving about 190 to claim the presence of members of the Twelve for Asia, Polycrates of Ephesus could offer only Philip, “one of the Twelve who rests at Hierapolis.” 38 Just as the term apostle may have had different meanings for Polycarp and for Irenaeus, so that what Irenaeus remembered may not have been what Polycarp meant, the claim to ‘eyewitness’ knowledge made in John 1:14 and 1 John 1:1–3 may have had a different meaning for the writer of the Gospel and Epistles, and indeed for Polycarp, than it had for Irenaeus. Anxious as he was to clarify the status of John by providing for the Gospel an unclouded provenance, Irenaeus unhesitatingly interpreted John 1:14 (“we beheld his glory”) as a claim by the writer (or writers) to historical knowledge, thus identifying this witness as the Beloved Disciple of 19:35 in the Passion Narrative. Yet references to the Johannine ‘eyewitness’ texts need only mean that Polycarp claimed knowledge of many who had seen the Lord, and seeing the Lord did not always, or even typically, imply historical knowledge. 39 Irenaeus’ assertion that Polycarp was “instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ,” need not imply that Polycarp’s knowledge of Jesus’ teaching and deeds was gained from one who had companied among the Twelve “all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us beginning from the Baptism of John unto the same day that he was taken up from us” (Acts 1:21–22). Many had seen the Lord who were not eyewitnesses in that historical sense, for Jesus appeared to many after his resurrection and indeed after his ascension. We do not know comprehensively to whom, or when these appearances ceased, but Paul gives a catalog of these postresurrection appearances, many of which were to those who had indeed “companied” with Jesus, some of which were to those like Paul, who had not: Cephas, always the first witness among Jesus’ disciples, then to the rest of the Twelve, then to more than five hundred, most of whom were still alive

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when 1 Corinthians was written, perhaps in the fifties, then to James, then to all the apostles, then last of all to Paul as one born out of time (1 Cor 15:6). And presumably Jesus’ appearance to Paul took place long after the forty days during which he “presented himself alive to them by many proofs” (Acts 1:3), for Paul’s conversion is usually dated to 35 or 36. And again, surely the author of the Apocalypse was an eyewitness within Paul’s meaning, for he had seen Jesus (Rev 2:16–19). Christian tradition is replete with appearances of Jesus that lie outside the historical narrative, from his appearance to Peter on the Via Ostiensis in 65 to revelations given mystics like Julian of Norwich. If Irenaeus’ interpretation of Polycarp’s reminiscences was mistaken, what the Johannine “eyewitness” texts must nevertheless claim is knowledge of Jesus that would justify the dramatic rhetorical character of John 1:14 and 1 John 1:1–3 without asserting the participation of the “we” of these texts in Jesus’ ministry. The claim inferred by these texts is very different from the claim made for the Beloved Disciple in 19:35, which asserts specific knowledge of the fact of Jesus’ death on the cross, with the accompanying assertion that he was truly human evidenced by the flow of blood and water from his side. While John 1:14 might be understood as historical, Jesus was among us, the structure of 1 John 1:1–4 is especially challenging because its meaning falls between the straightforward claim to historical witness and a ‘spiritual’ experience. The text seems to run shy of making a specific claim similar to that of 19:35, while at the same time, especially with the use of the aorist of the verb handled (ἐψηλάφησαν), which bears the meaning “to reach out and touch,” it obviates the interpretation that what John and others had seen was phenomenal or ‘spiritual’ in the Gnostic sense. Furthermore, there is something formulaic about the sequence “we have heard,…. we have seen with our eyes,… we have looked upon,… and our hands have handled,…” which echoes Jesus’ invitation to Thomas, “Behold my hands, reach out your hand and thrust it into my side” (John 20:27) as well as Luke 24:39: “Behold my hands and feet.… Handle me and see.” The introductory verses of 1 John express the author’s purpose (“that you also may have fellowship;… that your joy may be full”) in verse 3 before returning to the first member in the opening verse “which we have heard” with the assertion “This is the message we have heard of him (Jesus, the Word of Life) and declare unto you: that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”

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The dramatic introductory sentences of the First Epistle are directed toward the denial of the novel proposition that was in various ways at the heart of the Gnostic systems: against Valentinus’ conviction that there was evil within the pleroma, against the belief of Marcion and Cerinthus that the creator was evil. The reference to knowledge of what was in the beginning (1 John 1:1, 2:6, 14), whatever other intentions may be expressed, are claims to fidelity to what was already Christian tradition. The anomalous quality of 1 John 1:1–3, which John 1:14 shares, derives from the tension caused by the contrast between the author’s claim to a dramatic authenticating experience and the suspiciously non-historical, profoundly existential, nature of the message that this experience authenticates. It has been suggested by Barrett that the “we” of 1:14, cannot be taken to mean “we men” or “we apostles” (unless the author was an apostle), but was intended by the author’s use of the first person plural to include the reader, asserting broadly the claim to that knowledge of Jesus that existed in the heart of the Church; the “we” means ‘we, the Church,’ ‘we Christians.’40 Barrett may be right, but what seems to do more justice to the intensity of the implicit claim of the “eyewitness” texts is the suggestion of de Ausejo and others that John 1:14 refers to the author’s experience of the risen Christ, or that the Johannine author had experienced the presence of Jesus in the Spirit in a way that would justify the language of the Johannine preface as well as 1 John 1:1–3. Should this be the case, the claim that one or more of the witnesses represented by the “we” had seen the risen Jesus would not weaken the force of Barrett’s suggestion.41 Brooke in his classic study of the Johannine Epistles argues that the only natural interpretation requires the writer to have known the historical Jesus. But the encounter assumed in 1 John 1:1–3 was surely supernatural, a revelation of Christ in δόξα, hence of “eternal life.”42 Misunderstanding the ahistorical quality of the claim made by the “we” of 1:14 to eyewitness knowledge led Irenaeus to an impossible conclusion. The assumption made by A. E. Brooke and others who have shared his interpretation of the eyewitness texts leads to conundrums such as that provoked when Schillebeeckx writes, “Certainly no one who had known the historical Jesus was still alive in the Johannine community [when the Gospel was written],” against which Robinson, charging Schillebeeckx with ignoring the “implication of the present tense,” offered in evidence 21:24, in which the Beloved Disciple “attests,” and against which Robinson might also have cited 19:35, in which the witness “knows” that he is telling the truth, if,

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that is, these texts, unlike John 1:14 and I John 1:1–3, make straightforward, historical claims.43 Irenaeus, evidently believing that the John known to Polycarp was an eyewitness in the sense of Acts 1:21, one who had companied with Jesus during his ministry, and reading John 1:14 as a claim to historical knowledge, made plausible in Adversus haereses the theory that the author of the Gospel of John who spoke in 1:14 was the historical witness of 19:34–35, therefore that John was the disciple who had lain on Jesus’ breast, implying the conclusion that Polycarp’s John was the son of Zebedee, the only John named among the Twelve.44 Eighteen centuries later J. A. T. Robinson followed Irenaeus’ lead, identifying the Johannine author as the son of Zebedee because Irenaeus had included John among the apostles, which, taken with Polycarp’s evidence that John had “seen the Lord,” seemed conclusive or nearly so.45 But the note of ambiguity that would haunt Irenaeus’ evidence was struck within a decade of the Adversus haereses. Polycrates of Ephesus, writing about 190, unhesitatingly makes John the disciple who lay on the Lord’s breast, but in a context that, like the Adversus haereses itself, casts doubt on what it seems to assert. Polycrates by listing John after Philip, “one of the Twelve,” and Philip’s prophetic daughters, missed a golden opportunity to say that John, like Philip, was among the Twelve, adding the qualifying phrase that John was “a priest wearing the breastplate,” a witness, and a teacher, teaching being the characteristic function of presbyters. 46 Other notable second century sources who also missed the opportunity to make the author either an apostle or a son of Zebedee were Ignatius at the turn of the century and Theophilus of Antioch and Ptolemaeus fifty years later.47 But by the end of the century Irenaeus (and perhaps other sources lost to us) had established the tradition that John the son of Zebedee was the Johannine author and the witness of 19:34–35.48 When Irenaeus wrote in the 180s he was the greatest theologian the church had produced. His thought anticipated faithfully the technically more developed theology of the fifth century, from his doctrine of the Eucharist to his insight that Mary recapitulates and redeems in her obedience the failure of Eve just as Jesus recapitulates the experience of the whole human race. In his long book may be found the skeleton of the creeds and a defense of the fourfold canon, as well as the doctrine that it is to the sees founded by the apostles (in which they still speak) that the faithful must refer. His eschatology was that of St. Paul, the

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Apocalypse, and 2 Peter 3:13. That this great saint and martyr, so manifestly competent in things of the faith, could have been mistaken, or could have misunderstood evidence from the recent past, seemed, and still seems to many, incredible. Irenaeus did not settle the question; doubts about the authorship of the Gospel, often taking the form of concern that John seemed disturbingly unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, persisted into the fifth century and surfaced when critical scholarship renewed them in the early nineteenth.49 There are still defenders of the identification of the son of Zebedee as the Beloved Disciple, and indeed if one approaches the text with the conviction that the son of Zebedee was the author, the ‘eyewitness’ texts make what became the traditional theory plausible. 50 But if the claim of apostolic authorship is not discredited, it at least can no longer be assumed. 51 The Gospel was composed, or put down, and the Epistles written, by John, routinely “the disciple of the Lord,” Polycarp’s John, the presbyter whose name the Epistles bear and whose language and ideas invest the roughly contemporary epistles of Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp. 52 Irenaeus knew the tradition of John the prophet in Ephesus, which had been proposed by about 150 in the Acts of John and to which the Apocalypse itself attested.53 He accepted uncritically the common authorship of the Gospel and the Epistles, a position later scholarship would second. He had recollections from Polycarp about the John whom Polycarp had known, but Irenaeus knew little or nothing of John the son of Zebedee, who, if Papias’ sources may be believed, had been martyred, probably before 70.

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H AP T E R

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HR E E

Another Tradition The same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that with the acknowledgment of all John should write down everything in his own name. Canon Muratorianus, ca. 190

T

ry as we will, it does not seem possible to go behind Irenaeus.” 1 But it is worth a try; even Dodd believed that a distinctive Johannine tradition existed: “Behind the Fourth Gospel lies an ancient tradition independent of the other Gospels, and meriting serious consideration as a contribution to our knowledge of the historical facts concerning Jesus.” 2 Raymond Brown, although tending to the traditional view that the Beloved Disciple was John the son of Zebedee, wrote: If these are his memories, they survived even though they were quite often unlike the memories that went into the Petrine kerygma that underlies Mark, and through Mark influenced Matthew and Luke. In other words, John’s historical tradition is something of a challenge to the general tradition shared by the Synoptics. Does it not seem likely that the man behind it would have been a man of real authority in 3 the Church, a man of status not unlike Peter’s?

There are indeed glimpses in the literature of another tradition that relies on a witness of status not unlike Peter’s. Traces of this tradition are found most clearly in three documents the authority and provenance of which are widely contested: the Muratorian Canon; the early gospel prologues conventionally called the Anti-Marcionite Prologues; and Eusebius’ much-

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canvassed quotation from Papias of Hierapolis’s Five Books of Interpretations of the Lord’s Sayings, in which Papias includes among his sources knowledge of the words and deeds of seven of the Twelve as these were recounted by itinerants who visited his city, notably Aristion and John the Presbyter. In this alternative account the Gospel of John, like Mark and Luke, takes its name not from the apostolic witness upon whose testimony it relies, but from the authorial editor, a sub-apostolic John called John ex discipulis (in contrast to ex apostolis in the Muratorian Canon), John the Younger (perhaps in contrast to the prophet of Patmos in the Mingana Colophon),4 and John the Presbyter (as contrasted with members of the Twelve in Papias). Papias makes this John the Presbyter the author of 1 John, and his Interpretations is referenced by later writers, among them the author of the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, as the source of an account of the writing of the Gospel. 5 Although the reading of the Papias text, the dates of the Anti-Marcionite Prologue and the Muratorian Canon and the significance of each are controversial, these three documents, taken together, point to a common Johannine milieu, imply a common source, and sketch a distinctive history.6 Understood in the context of the grammatical anomalies of certain Johannine texts (1:14, 19:35, 21:24–25), these sources can be related to one another and to the text of John in a way that suggests the existence of an account containing five narrative elements: 1) the Gospel was written down, or perhaps dictated, by John the Presbyter (a disciple of the Lord, not an apostle); 2) John was urged to write; 3) John acted for and with a community of disciples and bishops; 4) the work was composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and in that sense was revealed; 5) the apostolic authority upon whom John and his fellows relied was the apostle Andrew; and 6) Andrew was not present at the time of writing but knew and approved what John and his fellow disciples were doing, thereby lending his authority to their enterprise. The account of Johannine origins outlined in these sources differs markedly from the account supported by Irenaeus, but it is, as Robinson observed, “merely uncritical, to dismiss ancient tradition without a cause.” 7 Elements of the Papias-Muratorian-Prologue tradition outlined above, allusive but unmistakable, invest references to the writing of the Gospel of John not only in the sources cited above but in Jerome, Origen, Eusebius, and Victorinus of Pettau, offering indications that beneath, and probably before, the Irenaean apology there was another stable tradition of Johannine origins.8

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First Papias, who at the end of the first century was bishop of Hierapolis, a city of some 100,000, famous as a center of healing because of the warm springs that flowed from the limestone plateau on which the city was built. Located perhaps one hundred miles east of Ephesus on the north side of the Lycos a few miles above its confluence with the Maeander, with Colossae and Laodicea, which lay just south of the river, Hierapolis, the “city of temples,” formed a triangle of towns to which St. Paul wrote in the fifties or sixties. Epaphras, whom Paul addresses as head of the church in Colossae (Col 4:12–13), had exercised care over Laodicea and Hierapolis as well. Papias was his successor in Hierapolis as was Claudius Apollinarius, 9 who presented an apology to Marcus Aurelius in the 140s and wrote treatises on the date of Easter and against the Montanists. 10 When Papias wrote his Five Books, Hierapolis had recovered from a devastating earthquake of 60 A. D. and was on a path to the regional importance it would attain under Septimus Severus (193–211), becoming finally the capital of Phrygia under Constantine. Hierapolis claimed an important place in the second-century Christian world because its church was ancient, established or taught by Paul, because its bishops, at least Papias and Apollinarius, had been literary and hence well known, and because, as Polycrates of Ephesus recalled about 190, the town possessed the only site of relics of one of the Twelve in Asia, making the city a center of pilgrimage.11 While there is an apparent, never-easily-explained confusion between the apostle and the evangelist of Acts (6:5, 8:5–13, 21:8), Polycrates confidently called Philip one of the Twelve at about the same time that the Montanist Proclus, in his controversy with Gaius of Rome, claimed that the tombs of Philip and his four prophetic daughters were at Hierapolis. 11 In the fifth century a proper martyrium of impressive proportions was built at the site of Philip’s burial.12 Hierapolis lay near the southwest border of Phrygia, the province that would give its name to the Montanist heresy, perhaps fifty miles from Pepuza and Thymion, the cities identified by Montanus as the Jerusalem of his millenarian expectations. The exact character of this heresy is not easy to discover, nor is the line between Montanism and the Asian defense of prophecy on one hand and the Irenaean-Pauline eschatology on the other easy to draw. Certainly Montanist doctrine can be seen as a historicizing eschatology and a stern rigorism in an age of delayed expectations and increasingly conventional Christian profession, but the afflatus that gave it credibility also marked it as a kind of illuminism, ecstatic more than insight-

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ful, different in tenor and tone but not in kind from Marcionite gnosis. That Papias’ successor Claudius Apollinarius wrote against the new prophecy located Hierapolis among the catholic churches, but Papias’ intense eschatological interests, for which he was remembered and quoted by Irenaeus in the late second century, Andrew of Caesarea in the sixth century and Maximus the Confessor and Anastasius of Sinai in the seventh, illustrate the confusionprovoking overlap that existed between heresy and orthodoxy, especially with regard to prophecy (but also eschatology), in second-century Asia Minor.13 Papias’ text now survives only in quotations, but it was in the catalogs of medieval libraries, and he was considered an authority as late as Photius in the ninth century, although Eusebius thought him small-minded, perhaps because Papias advocated the intensely incarnational Pauline eschatology of glory, the advocacy of which raised Eusebius’ suspicions.14 That Papias of Hierapolis knew 1 John is attested by Eusebius; that he knew the Apocalypse is evident from the citation of his interpretations by Andrew of Caesarea; that he knew the Gospel is claimed by the ancient Prologue (discussed below) and other sources that attribute to him an account of the writing of John. 15 The Johannine corpus, interpreted or misinterpreted, was formative for the Asian church in the first quarter of the second century. Eusebius’ quotation from the preface to Papias Five Books provides a picture of an urban church, known to and counseled by St Paul or his delegate, on the border of Phrygia, perhaps at the turn of the century, perhaps earlier. Along with the interpretations, I will not hesitate to add all that I ever learned and carefully remembered from the presbyters, for I am sure of its truth. Unlike most, I did not delight in those who say much but in those who teach the truth, nor in those who recite the commandments of others, but in those who reported the commandments given by the Lord. And again, on any occasion when a person came (in my way) who had been a follower of the presbyters, I would enquire about the discourses of the presbyters—what was said by Andrew, or by Peter, or by Philip, or by Thomas or James, or by John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, which things Aristion and John the Presbyter, the disciples of the Lord, recount. For I did not suppose that information from books would help me as much as things [learned] from the living and surviving voice.16

Eusebius goes on to quote Papias’ accounts of miracles, one of which had been recounted by the daughters of Philip who lived in Hierapolis, as well as “strange parables and teachings of the Savior, and some other more

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mythical accounts” gained from unwritten tradition. Among these was Papias’ defense of the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, a notion Papias got, Eusebius believed, from “a perverse reading of the apostolic accounts, not realizing that they spoke mystically and symbolically.” This deficiency evoked the judgment that Papias was “a man of very little intelligence, as is clear from his books.” Papias, Eusebius writes, was “responsible for the fact that so many of the Christian writers after him held the same opinion, relying on his antiquity, for instance Irenaeus….” In fact Papias was in the mainstream of Asian eschatology, while Eusebius was a semi-Arian and an allegorizer along the lines of Dionysius of Alexandria, whose reserve about the Apocalypse Eusebius would cite with approval in his history (7.25.6–7). Papias quoted “other interpretations of the words of the Lord” given by Aristion and “the traditions of John the Presbyter,” and “used quotations from the first Epistle of John, and likewise also from that of Peter” as well as reciting “another story about a woman who was accused before the Lord of many sins, which the Gospel according to the Hebrews contains.” 17 Critical as he was of Papias’ eschatology, Eusebius cited with confidence Papias’ accounts of the writing of Matthew and Mark in HE 3. 39. 15. From Papias one would have learned that Mark was the interpreter of Peter, whose teaching he had written down without attempting to make a complete and ordered narrative, and that Matthew “collected the oracles in the Hebrew language and each interpreted them as best he could.” That Papias also gave an account of the origin of the Fourth Gospel is claimed by the AntiMarcionite Prologue; Charles Hill has argued that it is to this account that Eusebius refers in HE 3.24.5–13.18 With Papias, who may have flourished as early as the 90s—Eusebius makes him the contemporary of Polycarp, born in 69―we are still in the age when written witness is not universally preferred to memory. 19 “I did not think,” Pa̛ pias concluded, “.things from books would help me as much as things [learned] from the surviving, living voice.” Like his near contemporary Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote that the charters or records (ἀρχεῖα) were not books but the cross of Christ,20 Papias knew that the memories and memoirs that formed the church’s Gospels existed among a vast library of Gnostic gospels, epistles, and apocalypses; abstract, paradoxical, enigmatic, in comparison with which the tradition “given to the faith by the Lord and derived from the truth itself ” rang with the voice of dominical authority.

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Beneath Eusebius’ general interest in citing authorities from the Christian past and mentioning their works, lay his particular interest in showing that Papias mentions two men named John, one an apostle, the other “outside the apostles” as he says, which afforded an opportunity to assign the Gospel to one and the Apocalypse to the other—Eusebius had no opinion which—so that the much-valued Gospel of John is not associated with the eschatology of the Apocalypse which Eusebius, following Dionysius of Alexandria, disapproved. The phrase in which Eusebius finds two Johns is: τί Ἀνδρέαζ ἤ τί Πέτρος εἶπιν ἤ τί Φίλιππος ἤ τί Θωμᾶς ἤ ͗Ιάκωβυς ἤ τί Ιωάννης ἤ Ματθαῖος ἤ τις ἓτερος τῶν τοῦ κυρίου μαθητῶν ἅ τε Αριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί, λέγουσιν. Dom John Chapman represented early the opinion that John the Presbyter is really John the Apostle and that there is in fact only one John mentioned by Papias.21 At the beginning of what would be a long argument, Lightfoot, in a reading that recurs so often that Annand called it “the accepted English translation,” read λέγουσιν as a historical present that links synchronically what seven members of the Twelve said with what John and Aristion say.22 If this were correct, if the present referred to the past, the living voices whose testimony Papias values would be unidentified living voices, anonymous visitors who can tell not only of members of the Twelve but of sub-apostolic figures such as Aristion and John the presbyter, none of whom were ‘speaking’ when Papias wrote. But grammar and context are against this; John the apostle, who spoke in the past, is not John the presbyter who was speaking in the present.23 But this text is nothing if not controversial. C. F. Burney wrote, “Why Dr. Lightfoot should accept Eusebius’ opinion [that Papias mentions two Johns] on this point against the plain sense of this passage is incomprehensible.”24 Dr. Lightfoot’s confidence that λέγουσιν is a historical present is also puzzling. Papias’ two lists are distinguished by office—seven are obviously apostles, two others are of the post-apostolic generation—, by the tenses of the verbs used—the apostles spoke (aorist) while Aristion and John are speaking (present)—, and (inferentially) by generation. The two lists are linked not by another και but by the neuter plural relative ἅ which refers to the preceding string of neuter plural relatives (τί). John and Aristion were living voices recounting what seven of the Twelve had said in the past. Papias’ use of the title πρεσβύτερος does nothing to clarify, for all are “disciples of the Lord.”25 Robinson may or may not be right in thinking that

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the Papias text does not distinguish generations, but he observes, “All we can be sure of is that Papias distinguished between those elders/apostles who are dead (what they said) and those who are still alive (what they say). And in the second, much smaller class he places John, which bears out rather than impugns Irenaeus’ statement that Papias like Polycarp, was ‘a hearer of John.’ Indeed for Papias this John is almost certainly the one he describes as, ‘the Elder,’ without needing further designation, as in the addresses of 2 and 3 John.”26 The Papias text (3.39.12) makes reference to a constellation of millenarian ideas and circumstances current in late first or early second-century Phrygia, which suggests some relation to the Gospel of John. When Papias thought of the apostles, here intending the Twelve, he did not think of Peter, James and John, but recalled members of the Twelve in a distinctive order reflected elsewhere only in the inferred Johannine order in which Andrew, Peter, and Philip, the three from Bethsaida in Galilee, occupy such sketchy narrative ground as may be found in the Johannine narrative, often called the Book of Signs (1:19–12:50). Papias names seven apostolic witnesses: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John, and Matthew. The Johannine list would include eight: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Nathanael, Judas not Iscariot, Thomas, and the sons of Zebedee. In both Andrew, Peter, and Philip stand first, an order very different from the Synoptic Peter, James, and John, the two lists differing only in the inclusion in the Gospel of Nathanael and Judas not Iscariot and its neglect of Matthew. The Fourth Gospel and Papias share a common belief that Andrew, always the first-called in eastern tradition and the most important disciple in the narrative portion of John (1:19–12:50), should stand first; and consider James and John relatively unimportant. 27 For Papias they are the last named and for the Gospel they are merely “the [sons] of Zebedee,” οἱ τοῦ ζεβιδαίου, in the single reference of 21:2. The Gospel of John omits Matthew, whose testimony was central to Synoptic tradition, and with that omission Matthean material (the Sermon on the Mount, the temptation of Jesus and the transformation of the law in Matthew 5:17 following), of which the Johannine author apparently knows little or nothing. Apart from Papias’ list and the list implicit in the Gospel there is no apostolic list in the New Testament in which the name of Peter does not stand first. Placing Andrew first as Papias does and portraying him as the most important disciple as John 1–12 does, reflect an order of apostolic authority unknown to Synoptic tradition, unattested certainly in first-century Rome.

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This order suggests that Papias shared the tradition of apostolic witness that formed the Gospel while at the same time the Papias text posits a relation between apostolic eye-witnesses such as Andrew and a sub-apostolic generation represented by John the Presbyter (and Aristion) that the Gospel and the Muratorian Canon mirror. Dodd commented, “It certainly looks as if we were in touch with a tradition proper to Ephesus, in which the view taken of relations among the Twelve was not exactly that which became dominant elsewhere.”28 Most importantly the Papias quotation posits a relation between John the Presbyter and the Johannine disciples, among whom Andrew stands first. Papias’ familiarity with 1 John, the Apocalypse and (if Hill is right) the Gospel, as well as his friendship with Polycarp, who certainly knew Ignatius and probably 1 John, locates him within the circle at whose center was John the Presbyter. At the turn of the century, perhaps a decade or two before, he, and the otherwise unidentified Aristion, were sources in Phrygia, the only sources of which we have knowledge, of what the Johannine apostles had said. The collateral witness to the Andrew-John tradition implied by Papias is a few lines from the canon contained in the Muratorian Fragment, a manuscript discovered in the 1740s by Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), librarian to the Duke of Modena. Of interest because it included a list of books received in and rejected by the church at the time of writing, the Muratorian Canon was not much canvassed in English-language scholarship until Samuel Tregelles published his edition and translation in 1867. It has been variously dated, by Tregelles and Robert M. Grant as early as the second century, by others as late as the fourth.29 The document encapsulates more than one level of textual witness, the brief four-line account of Johannine origins, the apologetic commentary attached, and the document as we have it being representative of different historical contexts. The manuscript was certainly copied and perhaps edited at Bobbio, the Benedictine foundation planted in 612 in the Apennines northeast of Genoa by St Columbanus, probably in the eighth century. But the content and argument offered is intended to bolster what would become the catholic view of the canon by transmitting a list of accepted books, a concern native to the second century but largely irrelevant by the fourth. The warning against accepting The Shepherd of Hermas on the grounds that the book was written nuperrime, recently, when Pius was bishop of Rome, that is, about 150, and the author’s mediating position, that the Shepherd could be

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read, but not in church, as well as the vehemence with which the author forbids its liturgical use “to the end of time,” all suggest the late second century, a time when authority was hardening against a book which was still widely valued and defended.30 The concern that the Gospels offered disparate accounts had probably surfaced when Irenaeus wrote; they were certainly familiar to Tertullian and were part of the anti-Johannine arsenal of Gaius and the Logos opposers about 200.31 The emphatic assertion of the second advent, Christ’s return in majesty, finds its most appropriate context in the second century or earlier, when the idea that resurrection was a psychological event already past was floating about in proto-Gnostic circles, and the heresies mentioned (Marcion, ‘Arsenoeite’, Valentinus, Miltiades, Basilides, Cataphrygians) all belong to the second century and by 400 would have been for the most part unthreatening historical curiosities. 32 Furthermore, Charles Hill’s observation that if the reference to nostris temporibus, calculated to link the Shepherd to the author’s biography and to the pontificate of Pius I (140–56), was written in the fourth century, it would be difficult to avoid the implication that the document in toto is a self-conscious hoax, a possible position, but one that has played little or no part in the debate.33 The document as it stands is uncritical to the extent that its author incorporated a traditional account of the writing of the Gospel which cannot be assimilated to the theory posed by Irenaeus. For present purposes the importance of the Muratorian Canon is its brief defense of the authority of the Gospel of John on the grounds that its author John, Spirit-filled, enabled by the memories of many, wrote with the authenticating knowledge of the apostle Andrew, thus (arguably) mirroring the Andrew-John relationship found in Papias. Quartu euangeliorum johannis ex discipulis cohortanibus condiscipulis et eps suis dixit conieiunate mihi odie triduo et quid cuique fuerit reualatum alterutrum nobis ennareumus eadem nocte reuelatum Andrae ex apostolis ut recogniscentibus cunctis Johannis suo nomine cuncta discriberet.34 The Fourth Gospel is of John, one of the disciples. With the encouragement of his fellow-disciples and bishops, he said “Fast with me for three days and whatever will be revealed to us, let us tell to one another.” The same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that with the acknowledgment of all John should write everything down in his name.

The text continues with an apology:

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ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA Therefore, while various elements may be taught in the several books of the Gospels, it makes no difference to the faith of believers, for by one chief Spirit all things have been declared in all: concerning his the nativity, the passion, the resurrection, the life with his disciples, and his double advent, first in lowliness and contempt (which has taken place), second in glorious royal power (which is to be). Why then is it remarkable that John so constantly brings forth specific points even in his epistles, saying of himself, “What we have seen with our eyes, and heard with our ears, and our hands have handled, these we write to you?” Thus he professes himself not only a witness and hearer but also a writer of all the miracles of the Lord in order.

The Muratorian account makes the Gospel the work of John ex discipulis, who assembles his fellow disciples, proclaims a three-day fast, and presides over its collegial composition.35 The verb revelare occurs twice.36 After prayer and fasting the content of the Gospel is revealed through the inspired memory of the assembled company in a way reflecting Jesus’ promise, perhaps much in the writer’s mind, that in the future the disciples would be led into all truth because the Lord would bring to memory his words and teaching (John 16:4, 12, 13). The disciples and bishops thus assembled, some or all, may have depended in part on written accounts or aides-mémoire. Certainly something, many things, remembered and written, perhaps fragmentary, lay behind the finished text not only of John but of the other gospels. To say that a ‘signs’ source and a Passion Narrative, remembered, written, or both certainly existed in the churches of John’s assembled fellow-disciples and bishops seems to recite the obvious.37 These, where they existed, were to be incorporated in a way that made them auxiliary to the project of publishing a unified work in John’s name. Written or remembered, the sources from which the Gospel was to be made were recounted or related (ennareumus), the fruit of inspired memory, the testimony of the “living voice” that Ignatius and Papias preferred to written records.38 The inclusion of each discourse or event would have been qualified by the Spirit-inspired dialectic of the assembly, and in that sense would have been ‘revealed.’ The work that resulted was a gospel, a narrative form, imposed by the supervening authority and editorial ability of John, the form of the proceedings making it difficult to say whether the book was ‘written’ by the apostolic guarantor Andrew, the assembled disciples, or John, the disciple who wrote everything down in his own name, because it was the work of each and all. Although only one Gospel, Matthew, was written by an apostle, gospels required apostolic authority, with ‘apostle’ in the narrow sense prevalent after

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about 100 meaning one of the Twelve or Paul. Thus the reiterated claim that Mark was based on Peter’s preaching and possessed his authority. A revelation of a kind different from the inspiration involved in the process of collating remembered traditions is made to or by Andrew that John, with the acknowledgment of all, should write down everything in his own name. The writer’s authority for doing so is the revelation of their activity to Andrew ex apostolis and Andrew’s assumed permission that John should issue the Gospel in his name. The scene is one to which the “I/we” of John 24-25 answers, because while everything was to be written by John and to bear his name, there were many authors, fellow-disciples and bishops who had consented to this way of making their Gospel. Two constituencies took part in the process of remembering and writing, disciples of the Lord and bishops, John belonging to the former. Chronologically, the brief text envisions a time when there are still teaching presbyters (like John) who possess broad authority as well as ministers settled in specific communities, the bishops described in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and exemplified by Ignatius, bishop of Antioch.39 The author or editor who incorporated this brief, earlier history of John into his longer narrative immediately entered the apologetic field that surrounded the question of Johannine origins and authenticity, arguing, first, that the narrative differences between John and the other three did not disqualify the Fourth Gospel, since all are the work of one and the same Spirit;40 second, that Christ will return, a teaching central to the Asian tradition represented by Irenaeus and Melito of Sardis but rendered doubtful by those, proto-Gnostics, who say there is no future resurrection.41 In raising the question of the differences among the Gospels immediately following the description of the inspired composition of John, the Muratorian editor is echoing Eusebius in an account Charles Hill sees as derived from Papias. Eusebius wrote that John, urged (παρακληθέντα) to hand down the Gospel, “fittingly passed over the genealogy of our Savior according to the flesh and began with the description of his divinity since this had been reserved for him by the Divine Spirit.”42 That the Gospel was a collegial effort directly inspired by the Paraclete and the claim that John was exhorted to write suggest that Eusebius was following an account known to Clement of Alexandria, to Victorinus of Pettau, and to Jerome which is also reflected in the Anti-Marcionite Prologue discussed below.43 What each remembered was revealed, related, verified,

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and presented in narrative form to fulfill an evangelical purpose. J. A. T. Robinson noted that J. B. Lightfoot had commented on “the conversational character of the Gospel,” shared as it was with “an immediate circle of hearers.”44 Alfred Diessmann suggested that “St. Luke’s is written in Greek, but St. John’s is spoken Greek.”45 The Gospel is a recension from remembered material on hand, and there are suggestions that the editor or author occasionally presupposes words and deeds that are not recorded. John the Baptist’s twice-repeated words, “This is the man I spoke of when I said,” implies knowledge on the writer’s part of things said previously and left unrecorded, and the assertion of 20:30 that the disciples had witnessed many signs that were not included, like the plea of 21:25 that to attempt to include everything was impossible—“The world itself could not contain the books that should be written”—echoes the (somewhat apologetic) sentiments of an editor responsible for shaping the work by omitting material offered in good faith. The refusal of the author/editor to effect seamless transitions suggests a certain respect on his part for the integrity of his sources. Fortna commented, “The aporias are just those points at which a more thorough recasting of the source(s) would have produced a smoother text without aporias.”46 Nothing in the text of the Gospel would challenge the implication of the Muratorian account that John’s narrative, the Book of Signs, is a catena of episodes, characteristic of teaching more than preaching, strung together with the connectives οὖν, “so then,” and μετὰ ταῦτα, “after these things.” And, it should be added, episodes welded into a literary unity by the vocabulary and overmastering style of the writer of what Jerome called the “heaven-sent” prologue. The Muratorian account that the composition of the Gospel was the work of a Spirit-inspired group who shared their memories, which John then made into the Gospel, comports well with the critical assessment that the Gospel is a series of incidents and discourses held together by the effective hand of the editor; “The major literary problem of John is its combination of remarkable stylistic unity with glaringly bad transitions between episodes at many points.”47 In his commentary on Matthew, Jerome gives an account of the origin of John that echoes the Muratorian Canon, the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, and (presumably) Papias: At that time John was compelled by nearly all the bishops of Asia and delegations from many churches to write more deeply concerning the divinity of the Savior, and to break through, so to speak, into the very Word of God, through a boldness that

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was not so much audacious as blessed. This is the source of the Church’s historical tradition that when he was compelled by the brothers to write, he answered that he would do so if a universal fast were proclaimed and everyone would pray to the Lord. When this had been carried out and he had been abundantly filled with revelation (revelatione saturatus) he poured forth that heaven-sent prologue.” 48

Victorinus of Pettau, writing perhaps about 290, recites the tradition of the composition of the Gospel in the face of heresy at the urging of others: “The Gospel [of John] he wrote afterward. When Valentinus and Cerinthus and Ebion and others of the school of Satan were spread throughout the world, all came together to him from the furthest provinces, and they required that he write down his witness.”49 By the time the Muratorian Fragment was given its form, the tradition that John was an eyewitness and thus of the Twelve was broadly accepted despite the evidence of an alternative account such as the four-line history of the Gospel which the Muratorian editor included. There the editor, in the face of the chronology implied by the ex apostolis-ex discipulis distinction, citing 1 John 1:1–3, argues that the writer John was an eyewitness, meaning a historical eyewitness.50 When the Muratorian Canon was written, the understanding that John was an eyewitness to Gospel events was already standard, and the writer did not hesitate to locate the account he had inherited, albeit inconsistently, in the context of what had become the common understanding that the author of 1 John claimed eyewitness authority. The account of Johannine origins that the Muratorian Canon preserves, with its teacher-disciple, absent witness-present writer relation between Andrew ex apostolis and John ex discipulis, mirrors the relation between Andrew and John, the absent apostle and the presiding editor, that Papias (as quoted in HE 3.39) assumed, as well as the tradition that undergirds the earliest Prologue to the Gospel, the claim that the Gospel was the work of a Spirit-inspired group. One or more of these so called Anti-Marcionite Prologues is to be found in forty manuscripts of the Vulgate, ten of which contain the Prologue to John. They were dated to the late second century by Harnack and De Bruyne when in the 1920s they became an object of popular scholarly interest. Now usually considered translations of Greek originals, they are dated variously from 160 to the early fourth century. The qualifying “Anti-Marcionite” was attached by modern commentators because the preface to John mentions Marcion, only to show that the author of the Gospel would not receive or acknowledge the heretic from Pontus.

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ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA Evangelium Johannis manifestatum et datum est ecclesiis ab Iohanne aduc in corpore constituto, sicut Papias nomine Hierapolitanus, discipulis Johanis carus, in exotericis, id est in extremis quinque libris retullit. Descripsit vero evangelium, dictante Iohanne recte. Verum Marcion hereticus, cum ab eo fuisset improbatus eo quod contraria sentebat, abjectus est ab Ioanne. Is vero scripta vel epistulas ad eum per51 tulerat a fratribus qui in Ponto ferunt. The Gospel of John was revealed and given to the churches by John while he was still in the body, as Papias, called of Hierapolis, a dear disciple of John, related publicly, that is at the end of the Five Books. He wrote down the Gospel while John dictated accurately. But the heretic Marcion, since he had been condemned by him because he was opposed to his views, was expelled by John. In fact he had brought writings or letters to him from the brothers who were in Pontus .

The writer of the Prologue does not make John an apostle. He cites Papias of Hierapolis’ Five Books as an authority for the fact that the Gospel was not a posthumous work, indicating at the same time that the Five Books preserved an account of the writing of John. The Gospel was revealed, not simply written as in the surviving companion prefaces to Matthew, Mark, and Luke.52. The phrase “in exotericis, id est in extremis quinque libris,” refers the reader to Papias’ book, but whether in exotericis means something like “publicly,” and whether in extremis means “in the last of the five books,” or “at the end of the five books,” the text claims that Papias recorded an account of Johannine origins. Notoriously, the second sentence may be read in more than one way; “He [Papias] recounted the [writing of the] Gospel accurately as having been dictated by John,” or “He wrote down the Gospel, John dictating accurately.” Either Papias was the scribe to whom the Gospel was dictated or Papias recorded accurately the circumstances in which John was written.53 Both readings preserve the claim that Papias was the Johannine author’s contemporary, which is no more than Papias himself claimed if the author was that John the Presbyter, surely the author of the Epistles, also, according to the Prologue, as John ex discipulis, the editor of the Gospel, the “living voice” who visited Hierapolis. The Prologue finally records John’s rejection of Marcion, who had brought writings and letters from the brothers in Pontus, thus locating John in the context of the anti-Gnostic controversy to which the Epistles refer. The account as written is intended to counter the charge that John or his writings displayed a sympathy for the teaching of Marcion and to assuage the concern that the Gospel was published after John’s death.

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Making sense of the assertion that John was still alive would require an environment in which the thought was abroad that the Johannine author, presumably the apostle, was dead, a concern that might have been fed either by a reading of John 21:23—24 or by the tradition that John the son of Zebedee had been martyred in the fifties or sixties. Whatever account Papias gave, he cannot have been thinking of the son of Zebedee if his Five Books also (according to George the Sinner and Philip of Side) reported that the apostles James and John were killed “by the Jews,” presumably before 70. 54 The claim that the Gospel was revealed points back to the Muratorian account, which detail later preface writers would embroider, depicting John as reciting the words of John 1:1.55 The assertion that John may have had an encounter with Marcion between 100 and 120 is not impossible if John the Presbyter was born in the thirties or forties and Marcion in the eighties. The detail that Marcion had brought writings or letters from the “brothers” in Pontus lends a verisimilitude that makes it difficult to reject the Prologue’s account out of hand. Polycrates was convinced that John the teacher, the Beloved Disciple, was buried in his own city Ephesus, but this claim engages another confusion, for Eusebius knew two tombs of John in Ephesus, and the author of the Gospel may have awaited the resurrection in either or neither.56 In any event, we know John was something of an itinerant; he might visit Hierapolis at any time. The geography of the unique Syriac preface and colophon to the Gospel found in the Peshitta New Testament, which says that the book was “the preaching of John the Younger…who spoke Greek in Bithynia,” would locate John in a place where we know (from Pliny) that Christianity was well established by 100 and bring the author of the Gospel close to Marcion’s native Pontus.57 The letters and writings Marcion brought were from “brothers.” Perhaps the most startling detail in any of the three accounts cited is the implication that an absent apostle might lend authority to the writing of a Gospel, but this was not considered remarkable in the pneumatologically thick atmosphere of the first century, when it was sometimes assumed that “in the Spirit” relations among Christians could transcend time and place. In Acts God communicated with Cornelius by a vision of an angel (10:3), Peter was given the liberating vision of the animals in a trance (10:11), and the evangelist Philip disappeared from the sight of the Ethiopian Eunuch only to be found at Azotus (8:39). Living Christians might effect incorporation into

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Christ by having themselves baptized “on behalf of the dead” (1 Cor 15:29). Paul made his journey to Jerusalem by revelation (κατὰ ἀποκάλυψιν, Gal 2:2) and once ordered the convening of an assembly at Corinth to deliver his predetermined condemnation of a fallen brother: I truly, although absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already as though I were present, concerning him that has done this deed. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such a one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. (1 Cor 5:3–5).

Whatever problems this text and others that seemingly violate typical geographical and temporal relations raises, it, like the Muratorian account, clearly represents an absent apostle as exercising authenticating authority in a Spirit-filled assembly. Nor was the idea that an absent apostle might lend his authority to his disciples’ gospel-writing considered incredible in the fourth century. Eusebius, citing Papias of Hierapolis and Clement of Alexandria as his authorities, explained the origin of Mark thus: And they say that Peter the apostle, when he had learned through a revelation of the Spirit what had been done [the writing down of Peter’s preaching by Mark], was pleased with the zeal of the men, and that he approved the work for use in the churches. Clement in the sixth book of his Hypotyposes gives this account and with him agrees the bishop of Hierapolis named Papias.58

The context indicates that Peter knew of Mark’s work in an extraordinary way, through a revelation of the Spirit, perhaps necessarily so because Peter’s martyrdom lay in the past. Papias’ account of the origin of Mark, offered on the authority of the Presbyter—and the Presbyter must be John— is quoted elsewhere by Eusebius without mention of the revelation to Peter: This also the Presbyter said: Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not indeed in order, whatsoever of the things he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he heard, and not to state any of them falsely. These things are related by Papias concerning Mark.”59

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And in the context of an apology for Mark’s variance from some accepted (Johannine?) order, Eusebius again cites Clement’s lost Hypotyposes directly: As Peter had preached the word publicly at Rome, and declared the Gospel by the Spirit, many who were present requested that Mark, who had followed him a long time and remembered his sayings, should write them out. And having composed the Gospel he gave it to those who requested it. When Peter heard of this he neither directly forbade nor encouraged it. 60

Granting that the assertion of Peter’s indifference seems odd, very odd, in the face of the witness of 2.15 that Peter approved, and noting as well that in this text Peter is represented unambiguously as being alive, it is nevertheless the case that somewhere in Eusebius’ sources there was an account of Markan origins that asserted Peter’s approval of Mark’s gospel-writing by ‘spiritual’ means. Eusebius, for motives that are far from clear, wanted to deny the authority of Clement to the account of the revelation to an absent apostle, but if it was not Clement who included the account of the revelation to an absent apostle, if such an account featuring the authenticating witness of an absent apostle through knowledge “in the Spirit” was to be found anywhere among the sources quoted by Eusebius in HE 2.15, it was somewhere in Papias’ Five Books, which Eusebius certainly had at hand. HE 2.15 refers explicitly to the composition of Mark, but it is not impossible that the absent apostle-present gospel writer account was to be found in a history of John that stood in the text of Papias’ Interpretations.61 At least Eusebius shows that in the 340s a history such as that proposed by the Muratorian Canon, recounting the approval of gospel-writing by an absent apostle, was unremarkable, certainly not disqualifying, providing as it did a specific guarantee of apostolic authenticity in an age in which many books were being written. It is important to Johannine chronology to note that the Anti-Marcionite Prologue to John, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria in HE 2.15 assume that Mark wrote his Gospel after Peter’s death.62 The Gospel itself does not tell us directly whether the apostolic witness was alive or departed when 19:35 was written, although the grammar favors the conclusion that the witness is “absent in the body but present in spirit” (to use Paul’s phrase in 1 Corinthians 5:3); what he saw in the past he is presently authenticating by his witness and knows, presumably by a revelation of the Spirit, that he is doing so. All that can be said is that it seems certain that the Beloved had departed

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this life when 19:35 and 21:24 were written. Certainly the death of the Johannine witness had occasioned the consternation which chapter 21 presupposes, a disappointment that cannot have posed pressing apologetic difficulties for a very long time. The interval between the writing of chapters 1–20 and chapter 21 cannot have been long. The detail that the revelation of Andrew’s approval was given at night, perhaps in a dream or vision, for which there are New Testament precedents. 63 If Andrew died or was martyred in the sixties or seventies, when John was in his thirties or forties, John would have lived into decades bracketing the turn of the first Christian century, when Polycarp might have known him and when Ignatius might have considered him a valued contemporary (whose ideas Ignatius certainly shared) but not yet an authority whose writings were included in the emerging canon. One may wonder why Andrew is not mentioned by catholic sources during the century that separates Papias and Origen. Why is Papias the only witness to infer (against what was by then the emerging common tradition of Peter’s primacy) Andrew’s preeminence, and why was the tradition that is represented in the Muratorian Canon and the Prologue so little noticed in the second century? Of course this is in context not unusual, for after Papias very little is said by any second century writer about the origins of the canonical books.64 The argument that the orthodox were not put off by the Valentinian use of John or Marcionite use of Paul did not quite resolve the question: whose books, whose authority? Papias, who had Mark and Matthew and John at hand, was still seeking knowledge that would be extra-canonical and Ignatius was leery of books in general. When Ignatius wrote his epistles, what he called the catholic church, with its specifically incarnational theology of Christ, the Eucharist, and the resurrection, was distinguishing itself from gnosis-based heresy.65 We know that the Johannine communities cast off a shadow church that denied the incarnation: “They went out from us because they were not of us” (1 John 2:19). The Gospel and the Epistles, as they were incorporated into the life of the Church, became themselves pillars of the incarnational faith that was to be, but the ‘spiritual’ dissenters, represented by the party of Diotrephes, would have taken the name and tradition known in the Johannine community, preeminently the tradition of Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, into the precincts of heresy.66 Granting Hill’s well-defended thesis that the orthodox never shied away from using the Gospel and Epistles, these

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texts were nevertheless born in the context of the struggle with those holding radically different convictions about the meaning of Jesus and of life in the post-Pentecostal church. The advocates of the idea that the experience of either Pentecostal grace or Gnostic illumination was the fulfillment of Christian hope, so that the resurrection had been accomplished, may not yet have developed, in the fifties or sixties, into a full-blown antiincarnationalism, but when 1 and 2 John were written, perhaps later in the century, some had drawn the logical conclusion—Jesus had come, but not in the flesh—, and when Ignatius wrote shortly after the turn of the century, he found in Asia a developed proto-Gnosticism, which, whatever its origin, Paul and John the Presbyter had discovered earlier, Paul perhaps as early as the fifties, John a bit later, not outside the Church but among those who counted themselves believers.67 The chronological uncertainties of the early second century notwithstanding, if John the Presbyter had lived into the first decade of the new century—and the survival of the Johannine author into the reign of Trajan (98–115) is reiterated by Irenaeus and others—,68 it would not have been unreasonable for the Prologue to insist that before Rome had rejected Marcion, traditionally about 144, the Johannine author had done so. If John the Presbyter had known many apostles (not members of the Twelve but apostles still) he might have been born in the thirties or forties and if he visited Papias in Hierapolis in the 100s, we are within striking distance of a time when a young Marcion might have sought John’s approval—in vain. Papias is concerned that Marcan order differs from the received order of the Gospels, thinking perhaps of John,69 but none of the Synoptics required defending from charges of heretical associations. The Anti-Marcionite Prologue, Irenaeus, and the Muratorian Canon, though in different ways, are all on apologetic offensive regarding John, anxious to show that neither the Gospel nor its author had anything to do with what would be counted heresy, that it was of apostolic origin or had apostolic authority, that its differences from the Synoptics were not disqualifying, and that it was not a posthumous production, interests which are missing from such second-century references to early accounts of the other three Gospels as survive. If the Muratorian/Anti-Marcionite account is given credence, albeit qualified by reservations that must surround documents with uncertain histories, there are gains as well as losses. The tradition Dodd and others assumed must exist, a tradition represented by the author of the Gospel and based

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upon the witness of Andrew and other Johannine members of the Twelve, is brought into somewhat clearer focus. If Irenaeus’ identification of John as the Beloved Disciple, based upon his mistaken beliefs that Polycarp had known the John who was one of the Twelve and that the eyewitness passages clamed historical knowledge, which made it reasonable to argue that John was the witness or 19:35, and therefore the Beloved Disciple, is dropped, the heroic efforts to make sense of Irenaeus’ testimony to the existence of one person, present in the upper room, alive in the reign of Trajan, who wrote all five books that make up the Johannine corpus as it stands, can be abandoned. Then a place can be made for John the Presbyter, a great missionary teacher of the period 70–110, who could recount, either from personal knowledge or received tradition, what had been said by Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James or John or Matthew; for the prophet of Patmos, and for the son of Zebedee, martyred in the sixties. If seeing and knowing the Lord may have occurred after Jesus’ ascension, perhaps years after, and if apostles were not only the Twelve but a larger and somewhat later group of those sent, Irenaeus’ recollection that Polycarp had known many eyewitness and many apostles becomes intelligible. The difficulties implicit in the assumption that the Gospel and the Epistles were the work of one author also resolve themselves, for while there has been broad agreement that these are the work of one mind, there has also been well-founded criticism suggesting that there are significant differences which require explanation.70 The similarities of vocabulary and style might then be explained on the thesis that the Canon and the Prologue reflect the Spirit-filled ethos in which the Gospel was composed and its single evangelical purpose, while at the same time the Epistles, reflecting the same ethos, are the letters of a church leader under pressure, fearful of the destruction of his work at the hands of the ‘spiritual’ party, writing tersely to make matters clear and to strengthen what can be saved. In that case, the fact that the Gospel displays a certain splendor, a depth and an expressiveness absent from the Epistles is perhaps not unintelligible. The Muratorian-Anti-Marcionite account also offers a hermeneutic clue to the paradoxical inferences the Gospel text offers regarding its origin and intended readership. If the Gospel rests upon the witness of an apostle or apostles to events of Jesus’ life, memories belonging to the period before Jesus’ ascension, as those events were retold and remembered by that apostle’s disciples, then recounted as the Muratorian Canon described and

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brought together by John in his name, we would expect the text to betray countervailing contextual clues. It would not be surprising that the Gospel narrative seems at some level to move within the discrete world of Jerusalem and Second Temple Judaism, and to be marked by the recollection of fraternal bitterness between “the Jews,” those who denied Jesus’ messiahship, and the Jews who were his followers. This features of Jerusalem remembered by the Beloved Disciple might justify the conclusion that the mission of the Johannine circle, Andrew and his disciples, was to “members of the Jewish leadership,”71 But this reading is challenged by evidence from another hermeneutic level. The text suggests that at the time of writing, in Asia or Syria, the Gospel would have been directed by John the Presbyter and his fellow disciples to the wider Gentile world. That Robinson could be convinced that the Gospel is addressed to Hellenized Jews in Jerusalem, that it shows no concern for any conflict between Jews and Gentiles, its mise en scene being Jerusalem with Galilee of secondary concern, while Martin Hengel was convinced that John was addressed to those Greeks whose knowledge of things Jewish was such that they must be told that Passover was a feast of the Jews,72 information even the most Hellenized Jews of Palestine would not require, is evidence of the tension between the situation of the apostolic witness to events of the thirties and the situation of the Church after Jesus’ death on one hand and the evangelical purposes of John as he composed the Gospel perhaps two or three decades later on the other. 73 Whatever traditions the Beloved Disciple may have represented as he told the story of events taking place before Jesus’ ascension to the Father, these memories were set in order and made into a book later, perhaps twenty or thirty years later, by another mind with an evangelical interest in the Greekspeaking world.

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he Gospels, although written by authors who may (or may not) have known of other written traditions, were composed through the lens of particular interests and based inevitably upon traditions that were circumscribed by the author’s sources. An attentive first-century reader, native to the milieu in which the Gospel of John was composed, would have noticed that, neglecting Jesus’ reference to Judas Iscariot in 6:71, the narrative portion of the Gospel (1–12) employs the witness of five disciples, four (Andrew, Peter, Philip, and Nathanael) linked by kinship, friendship, and geography plus Thomas, to which the Passion Narrative adds the single question of Judas not Iscariot (14:22) and the single mention of “the [ones] of Zebedee” (21:2), the omission of whom would, like the omission of Peter’s profession, court the suspicion of Christians to whom the natural order of apostles was the Synoptic order, beginning with Peter, James, and John. Structurally, after the famous prologue of 1:1–18, the Gospel of John falls into two very different parts, the Book of Signs so-called, an account of Jesus’ ministry in 1:19–12:36, and the Passion Narrative, or the Book of Glory. Our reader might have noticed a startling anomaly in the text, that

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while Andrew is the most important apostle in the (admittedly sketchy) narrative of 1–12 he is never named in the Passion Narrative of 13–21.1 Yet it is Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, who first follows Jesus (1:41), who brings his brother Peter to the Lord (1:42), brings the Greeks to Jesus (6:8), and finds the lad with the loaves and fishes (6:8). Bethsaida is the city of Andrew and Peter, not, as we would expect, the city of Peter and Andrew, and Philip is Andrew’s townsman (1:44, 12:21).2 The contrast between these two major sections of the Gospel of John is indicated by but does not depend upon the presence and absence of Andrew, for the division is deeper. Bultmann notes “the radical division of the Gospel into two,” and most critics treat 13–20 as having a purpose different from the narrative of 1:19–12.3 The Gospel through chapter 12 is set in the framework of Jesus’ public ministry. Subsequent chapters “deal with the relation of Jesus to his disciples,” with his love for his own, and with the promise of his ministry, which will be realized in his resurrection and the coming of the Paraclete.4 The Gospel is “a reworking, a redaction of older material: principally a Signs Source...and, whether still separate or joined to it, a Passion Source as well.”5 The text 1:19–2:11 with which the Gospel story begins is a narrative unity, linked by references to the events of three days, that roots the Gospel account in the preparatory witness of “the man sent from God called John” and ends at Cana when Jesus has “manifested his glory,” at which sign his disciples believe.6 The text presupposes a milieu of intense messianic expectation, centered upon John the Baptist, whose prophecy that Jesus is the Messiah has drawn the attention of the temple authorities, priests, Levites, and Pharisees, members of what might be considered the ‘progressive’ party among the observant (1:19, 24). Religion was at the center of the city, and those who studied and served it felt an interest in John and his message of repentance, as well as, understandably, an obligation to investigate, perhaps to lend or withhold their authority. Andrew is brought into the center of the narrative with the emphatic assertion that he was one of two of John’s disciples who heard John’s dramatic announcement: “Behold the Lamb of God.” Much interest has been shown in the unnamed disciple who stood with John the Baptist and Andrew, but his presence may be conventional; the disciples of a teacher or prophet always traveled two by two.7 The text claims only that with Andrew this disciple of John followed Jesus to the place he was staying; it tells the reader nothing of

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the other disciple’s fate, perhaps because that disciple holds no interest for the writer, his presence serving here as one of those discrete recollections, frequent in John, that seemingly add nothing to the meaning of the text while assuring the reader of the historicity of the narrative. 8 It is Andrew who in his person links the ministry of John with the ministry of Jesus, who sought out his own brother Simon Peter and identified Jesus as the Messiah for him. Jesus then finds Philip, also from Bethsaida, who in turn finds Nathanael (1:45), these four being, as far as we are told, the disciples who were present at the marriage feast in Cana, Nathanael’s native place (21:2). Our reader, having noticed that Andrew, the disciple who dominates the narrative of 1:15–12:50 insofar as there is a narrative, is unaccountably missing from the Passion Narrative of chapters 13 following, might have observed that in a complementary way the narrative portion of the Gospel (1:19–12) shows almost no interest in Peter after the account of his call in 1:41, mentioning him subsequently in the Book of Signs only by including in 6:68–69 an abbreviated account of Peter’s identification of Jesus as the Messiah, itself a doublet on Nathanael’s more dramatic profession: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God” (1:49). John omits in 6:68–71 both the identification of Peter as the rock and the ‘keys’ references of Matthew 16:17–19, the latter, at least its intent, being transferred in John to a post-resurrection commission to all the disciples to forgive sins (21:21–23). But in the Passion Narrative Peter is everywhere, although always shadowed there by the Beloved Disciple, with whose faithfulness, nearness to the Lord, and spiritual perceptiveness Peter’s weakness and spiritual insensitivity is consistently contrasted.9 Andrew is the faithful disciple of 1–12 while the Beloved Disciple assumes that role in the Passion Narrative, from which text Andrew is ostensibly absent, and this alone is enough to suggest that the Beloved Disciple of 13–21 is Andrew, the faithful disciple of the Book of Signs. Furthermore, the Beloved Disciple cannot be one who appears with the Beloved Disciple, so that of the eight named Johannine apostles the last supper setting would exclude Peter (13:36), Thomas (14:5), Philip (14:8), and Judas not Iscariot (14:22); and assuming that the Beloved Disciple is one of the two others of the list of 21:2—he was surely present—would exclude as well Nathanael, and the [sons] of Zebedee. The only one of the Johannine eight never named in the presence of the Beloved Disciple is Andrew. To any reader not reading the Gospel through the lens of the Irenaean theory, free, perhaps merely

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unaware, of Synoptic tradition, these usages would suggest that Andrew is the Disciple whom Jesus loved, the Lord’s first disciple, and, as the narrative would have it, the first-called and the most faithful. For the Beloved Disciple is an example of fidelity, beloved of Jesus and loving him, while Peter, despite a certain preeminence which the Johannine writer carefully recognizes, is weak and uncertain, one whose love for Jesus can, at least rhetorically, be questioned. The Beloved Disciple is closest to Jesus at the supper, and Peter must ask the name of the betrayer through the Beloved Disciple (13:23–24). While the Beloved Disciple, here “another disciple” known to the high priest (18:15), 10 follows Jesus to his trial, Peter, who must be admitted through the influence of this disciple, stands at the door to betray Christ to the doorkeeper (18:17), to an unidentified bystander (18:25) and to a servant of the high priest (18:27). The Beloved Disciple follows Jesus to his crucifixion, where he is told to care for the Lord’s mother, whose son he is to be (19:26–27). Peter is absent. Peter and the Beloved Disciple run together to the tomb (20:4). The Beloved Disciple reaches the tomb first but stands back to allow Peter to be the first witness to the resurrection (20:5). We are not told that Peter, given the evidence of the linen clothes lying, believed, while the Gospel is careful to tell the reader that the Beloved Disciple both saw and believed (20:8). At the Sea of Tiberias it is the Beloved Disciple who recognizes the Lord before and for Peter (21:7– 8). It is always the role of the Beloved Disciple/Andrew to bring events to successful fruition, and especially to provide access for his brother. Without the actions of Andrew/the Beloved Disciple, Peter would not have been brought to Jesus (1:40–41), the five barley loaves and two fish would not have been found (6:8), the inquiring Greeks would not have been taken to Jesus (12:22), at the supper Simon Peter’s question would have gone unasked (13:24–25), Peter would have had no access to the trial (18:16), nor would he have recognized the Lord at the Sea of Tiberias (21:7). It is not jejune to observe that the only alternative to identifying the Beloved Disciple of 13–21 as the apostle Andrew of 1–12 would be the conclusion that the disciple most important in 1–12, the disciple who dominates such narrative as the Gospel offers, simply disappears from the Gospel account at the point at which his presence would be most obviously presumed and his witness most obviously required. This aspect of the Johannine ‘problem’ can never move outside the circle of probabilities, but when the Gospel text is analyzed apart from the context

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of Synoptic influence and Irenaean apology, the Beloved Disciple of the Johannine circle is, on the evidence of the text alone, Andrew, Peter’s brother, an identification perhaps too obvious to have merited much attention, but a fact members of the Johannine circle would have assumed. 11 The Gospel of John is of all the Gospels most intent upon telling the reader something of its origin. In 19:35, the effusion of blood and water from the Lord’s side, a cardinal point in any anti-Gnostic argument, having been recounted, the writers assure us: “The one who has seen [ὁ ἑωρακὼς, perfect] has testified [μεμαρτύρηκεν, perfect] and his testimony is true [ἀληθινὴ αὐτοῦ ἐστιν ἡ μαρτυρία, present], and that one [ἐκεῖνος] knows [oίδεν, perfect with a present sense] that he is telling [λέγει, present] the truth, or perhaps “recounting true things” or even “witnessing to what really happened.” The neuter plural ἀληθῆ suggests that the witness is testifying to events not ideas or principles. The witness did not in any simple sense write these things, for the “we” of 21:24, the “I” of 21:25, and the voice behind 19:35 (“we know his testimony is true”) is presently doing the writing. And why if the witness were present must the writer or writers insist (on his behalf) that he presently knows that he is bearing witness? And again in 21:24: “This one [οὗτος, the Beloved Disciple of 21:20] is the disciple who is presently testifying [ὁ μαρτυρῶν] to these things and who wrote [γράψας, aorist] these things,12 and we know [οἵδαμεν, present] that his witness is true.” The use of the first person plural relates 21:24 to the same use in 1:14 and 1 John 1:1–3. In 19:35 it is the Beloved Disciple himself who knows he is telling the truth whereas in 21:24–25 it is the writer, the “I/we” who knows that the Beloved Disciple is telling the truth. The appendix, chapter 21, although it uses the convention that the Beloved Disciple (although he ‘wrote’ in the past) is presently bearing witness, does not claim, as in 19:35, that the Beloved Disciple knows he is telling the truth. On any showing the witness is not the same person or persons as those who attest the witness’s knowledge of his own activity and (in 21:24–25) the truth of his testimony. The grammar of the witness texts defines the two levels that the Gospel comprehends, one being the testimony of the Beloved Disciple that reaches back to the ministry of Jesus in Galilee and Judea, with its vivid memories of the Passion Narrative and the hostility of official Judaism once Jesus’ claims had been rejected, and the other the representation of that testimony through the inspired memory of the Johannine community at the time when the Gospel was written. “If the Johannine

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community which produced the Gospel saw itself in traditional continuity with Jesus, we are in a position to perceive in the ‘we’ of the prologues of both Gospel and Epistles, not the apostolic eye-witness per se, but a community which nevertheless understood itself as heir of a tradition based upon some historical witness to Jesus.”13 But the editorial “we” is also an “I,” as in 21:25, for writing a work like John, in which stubbornly episodic pericopes are brought together, not without a certain awkwardness, and forged into a unity dominated by insights and discourses of great profundity, cannot have been, in its final formulation, the work of a committee. The first person texts (19:35, 21:24–25) present grammatical and narrative anomalies. Some resolution of this puzzle of tenses can be discovered if these texts are read in the context of the Muratorian account and its echoes, which tell of the revelation of the Gospel to a group guided by John ex discipulis, whose name the Gospel bears, who wrote the Gospel under the influence of the Holy Spirit, remembering Jesus’ promise to bring to mind things needful, aware that the Spirit whom Jesus had promised would lead into all truth, and writing with the spiritual approval of the absent Andrew, the Beloved Disciple of their tradition, whose memories or preaching form the historical core of the writers’ knowledge, and who in that sense ‘wrote’ the Gospel. The Beloved Disciple would have borne witness in the past, being present in the Spirit, and would know that he was presently telling the truth, that is, serving as the authenticating apostolic authority on whose witness the Gospel’s claim to historicity rests. If the setting in which the Gospel was composed and the method described are as these are lightly sketched in the Muratorian Canon and the Prologue, the literary qualities of the text thus created are what a reader of those documents familiar with the Gospel text might have expected. There is throughout an intense awareness of the presence of the Paraclete, not only through memory of the promises made by Jesus that are recounted in the narrative but as evinced in the very character of the text, evident especially in the Johannine prologue and in the implicit apology for the writer’s method— Jesus predicts the time when the Paraclete will bring his word to memory and lead his disciples into all truth, which promise is fulfilled in the composition of the Gospel and exemplified in the heaven-sent preface. Nor is it difficult to see the text as composed of many discrete memories, assimilated into a common narrative by a masterful editor. Commentators like Victorinus of Pettau and Jerome believed that the great preface was written under the

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immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The superficially inconsistent use of “I” and “we” may be seen as reflecting the fact that the Gospel had several authors but one editor. Finally, it is noteworthy that the double colophon, John 20:30–31 and 21:24–25, seems to assume that the author knows no other written gospel or tradition, at least none suitable to his purposes, so that he is supplying an otherwise unmet evangelical need. Given that in Papias the Presbyter is almost certainly John the Presbyter, when in the nineties he visited Hierpolis John recounted a tradition explaining the origin of Mark. Twenty or thirty years earlier, when the Gospel of John was written, Mark’s Gospel may not have existed. The things not written in his book, while they lived in memory (as the addition of chapter 21 shows), are written nowhere. The attempt to write down all that Jesus did is impossible and therefore unassayed; this selection of remembered events and discourses must suffice for the evangelical purpose of the Gospel of John. In the conventional course of generations a mature disciple of Jesus might have lived into the seventh decade. Because of the implicit chronological relation of chapter 21, which assumes the death of the Beloved Disciple, to the preceding twenty chapters, the Gospel cannot have been written much later than the date of that disciple’s departure. Granting that this is an inexact guide, yet having some weight, at least in the sense that if the basic Beloved Disciple-sub-apostolic writer/editor structure is sketched correctly, the date of the composition of the Gospel cannot easily be pushed back too dramatically, into the fifties or forties (which would strained the claim that the subapostolic disciple who published the Gospel lived into the principate of Trajan, or moved forward beyond a date at which the specific eschatological expectation of 21:22–25 had probably passed into irrelevance in the eighties and nineties.

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Brothers: The Anonymity of Love I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. John 3:15

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ohn’s Gospel tells an intensely personal story, beginning with one family and one town, kinship and geography being the ties that bind four Galileans. The narrative draws upon the witness of the disciples it names, among whom Andrew was chief, the disciple first called by Jesus: “He first found his brother Simon, and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’” (John 1:42). Andrew found Peter; and Philip, who was from Bethsaida, “the town of Andrew and Peter,” found Nathanael, who was from Cana, a town perhaps twenty miles southwest of Bethsaida (John 1:29–51). With Thomas, these are the disciples to whom the Gospel attributes significant actions and words, who would have witnessed the events the Gospel records and (the reader is told) many more that were not recorded (20:30, 21:25). 1 Jesus of Nazareth, whom these four called Messiah as well as teacher, was the fifth Galilean, born in Bethlehem but reared in Nazareth, a town perhaps ten miles southwest of Cana. The temple familiares would perhaps have been faintly condescending to these Galileans, possessed as they were of politically dangerous, unrealistic messianic expectations, whose very speech attested their residence in the half-Greek borderland of upper Galilee and Gaulanitis (Matt 26:73). That “no great good was to be expected from Nazareth” (John 1:46) expressed not

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so much the disdain of the city dweller for the countryman as the xenophobia bred of Nathanael’s intensely local loyalty. If there is a Hellenistic tone in the Gospel, it is perhaps to be found not only in turn-of-the-century Ephesus but also in the Hellenized Semitic culture of Galilee. “Anyone brought up in Bethsaida would not only have understood Greek, but would have been polished by intercourse with foreigners and have had some Greek culture.” 2 Andrew and Philip were Greek names. The expostulation of John 7:35, “Surely he is not going to the dispersion among the Greeks to teach the Greeks,” is answered antiphonally by the request some Greeks who wished to see Jesus made to Philip, who then brought them to Andrew, who, with Philip, brought them to Jesus (12:20–23). Philip we are told once more, too carefully for the information to lack significance, “was from Bethsaida in Galilee” (1:44, 12:21).3 In the Gospel we meet Andrew as a disciple of John the Baptist in Bethany beyond Jordan, where the Gospel locates John, Jesus, Andrew, an unnamed companion of Andrew, who was also John’s disciple, and Andrew’s brother Simon Peter. If we ask why these Galileans were at Bethany, the answer must be that they were there because John the Baptist was there baptizing and proclaiming Jesus God’s anointed one. John’s work was baptizing as a sign of repentance, and the reason for his mission was so that the Messiah might be made known to Israel (1:31). John has become convinced, before the moment of Jesus’ baptism, that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, for before the Johannine story opens John had seen the Spirit “come down and remain” with Jesus (1:24). John was then ready to proclaim Jesus “the Lamb of God,” a phrase that summed up the history of salvation for the Jews. On the authority of John’s witness, two of his disciples followed Jesus to the place where he was staying, spent the day, and one of the two, Andrew, believed Jesus’ words and began the great adventure of the Gospel by finding and convincing his brother Simon Peter. In this circle of friendship Andrew is always closest to the Lord. Peter knows Jesus through Andrew, the firstcalled. The events the Book of Signs describes are events in which Andrew took part. He was at the wedding feast at Cana. At the feeding of the multitude, in keeping with the implicit hierarchy of the Book of Signs, Philip must bring the hunger of the crowd to Jesus’ attention so that Andrew can discover the loaves and fishes (6:6–9), just as Philip brings the Greeks who would know Jesus first to Andrew (12:20–22).

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The Gospel According to John is a story like no other, told, or at least authenticated, by the disciple who reclined next to Jesus at the supper, followed him through his trial and stood by the cross, the disciple whom Jesus from the cross made his own mother’s son and who took the Lord’s mother into his home. Whether the writers knew Matthew and Mark, they at least were party to a tradition that told the same story and remembered many of the same events. The divergences of John from Synoptic tradition may not be, indeed probably are not, the result of selection from some pre-existing literary whole; we are, as Dodd wrote, in the presence of another tradition. Events remembered were refracted in a diffuse oral tradition; unsurprisingly, references to that tradition by different authors will present differences within similarities. At the same time the Johannine point of view is unique in several ways. It is tied to the witness of a single apostle, himself representative of a discrete group of Galileans within the Twelve, who in some sense ‘wrote’ the Gospel (21:24), and one may assume that the range of the narrative is the range of events to which Andrew and the Johannine disciples had testified. 4 The infancy narratives are absent from John because the story told by the Beloved Disciple began where his discipleship began, with the prophetic mission of John the Baptist in Bethany. 5 Set within the prologue of John 1:1– 14 is the message that John was the God-sent messenger who came to bear witness to the light that all men might believe. What is important to the writer or writers of the Gospel is not the message of Gabriel, the prophecies of Simeon and Anna, the visits of the shepherds and magi who proclaim Jesus’ messiahship—perhaps they do not know of these events—but the testimony of John the Baptist that Jesus is the Lamb of God, the Son of God upon whom John saw the Spirit descend and remain (John 1:29–34). The dramatic sixth chapter (for example) is unique to the Fourth Gospel because it was Andrew who, prompted by Philip, enabled the two-days’ events by finding the lad with the loaves and the fishes. Just as Mark is Peter’s gospel, with Peter seconded by the sons of Zebedee, John is framed around the story Andrew had told as it was remembered by his own disciples. Oscar Cullmann wrote in his Johannine Circle (1976), in a text quoted by Robinson and Brown: [The Beloved Disciple] began to follow Jesus in Judea when Jesus himself was in close proximity to the Baptist. He shared the life of the Master during Jesus’ last stay

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Robinson, noting that the Beloved Disciple must have been one who shared Peter’s geography (“Galilee, Samaria, and above all Jerusalem”), remarked that “apart from Peter, with whom in each case the Beloved Disciple is connected, there is no other New Testament character known to us who has such associations except John.” 7 But surely, given this criterion, Peter’s brother Andrew had such associations. We know little of Andrew from the Gospel text, but we know something. We know the esteem in which he was held by his own disciples, a love that prompted the author of the Gospel to depict him as always closest to the Lord, always a paradigm of faithfulness, loved by Jesus so much, so it was believed, that he had been given the extraordinary promise that he would live to see the Parousia (21:21–23). The Beloved Disciple was a Jew, a somewhat Hellenized citizen of Bethsaida.8 Whether the Aramaisms that most scholars find reflect the idiom in which the Beloved Disciple told his story or the linguistic habitus of the editor or both is unknowable. He was familiar with Jerusalem, where he probably had a house,9 and the topographical precision that (typically) characterizes the Gospel was his. 10 He was known to the high priest, although the meaning of both γνωστὸς τῳ ἀρχιερεῖ (18:15) and the variant γνωστὸς τοῦ ἀρχιερεῖ (18:16) is hard to pin down. On one hand the hopes Jesus confirmed and the miraculous signs he performed inspired a very public movement. His teaching was carried out daily in the temple or in synagogues (John 18:20), so the would-be Messiah and his disciples would have been anxiously monitored by the Pharisees and chief priests from the beginning. The raising of Lazarus prompted a crisis in official circles that caused a special meeting of the Sanhedrin (11:47–50) devoted to the question, soon a commonplace consideration, whether benign neglect or official suppression would be most effective. In this environment it would have been culpable negligence on the part of the Sanhedrin had they not cultivated contacts with the leaders among Jesus’ disciples. Judas, apparently obsessed with the Zealot-like expectation that Jesus would bring a political solution, was obviously an object of official interest, but Simon Peter’s brother would surely have been numbered among those with whom the authorities were engaged in semi-official conversation. The Beloved Disciple knew that Malchus was the name of the servant of the high priest, a household slave not a temple guard, whose ear Peter had cut off

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in the garden. He knew the girl on the door, and he knew that the slave who, warming himself at the fire with Peter, called attention to the fact that Peter had been “in the garden with him” was a relative of Malchus, predictably unfriendly (at least) to Jesus’ claims. Only one familiar with the high priest’s household could have told this story. The situation had been complicated from the beginning, when John had proclaimed Jesus the Messiah, for Jesus’ popularity had spurred a debate one of whose consequences was sympathy in official circles for his claim and his teaching. He had, after all, taught not in secret but in synagogues and in the temple, where Jews meet (18:21). The Pharisees had sensed the danger; “You see, you can do nothing, look, the whole world has gone after him” (12:19). At some point, perhaps during Jesus’ ministry or certainly after his death, resurrection, and ascension, the authorities made it known that adherents of the Jesus-is-Messiah movement were not welcomed in the synagogues, inaugurating the hostility that marks the Gospel of John. Its bitterness as represented in the Gospel is best explained by its character as a controversy en famille.11 “Many, even among the authorities (ἐκ τῶν ἀρχόντων), believed in him, but because of the Pharisees they did not acknowledge him openly in order not to be expelled from the synagogue” (12:42). Whether or not the Beloved Disciple’s being “known to the high priest” meant more than official notice, he was nonetheless part of the conversation that raged involving high and low, and which included those who lived in the cultural ambience of the temple, its priesthood, scholars, and Levites, touching men like Joseph of Arimathea, a man of means (Matt 27:57), a respected member of the council who was eagerly awaiting the Kingdom of God (Luke 23:50–51, John 19:38), and Nicodemus, whose sympathies for Jesus allowed the Pharisees to call him a Galilean, from a place in which no prophet could arise (John 7:51– 52). Even the temple guards took pause: “Never before has anyone spoken like this one” (John 7:45–46), and the high priest Caiaphas testified that Jesus’ death would be the salvation of his people (John 11:49–52, 18:14). Johannine Christians were not persecuted by the Romans but by the Jews (οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι), which in the Gospel refers “preeminently to the Jews of Judea,” and within that circle to the keepers of the official faith. “There is no hint of state persecution, which hit the Church with Nero in 65, only a bitter Jewish harassment.” This bitterness displays the particular vehemence of a struggle for the possession of an inheritance. The question is “Who is a true Jew?’ (Rom 2:28). The Johannine answer is the one who believes Jesus is the

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Messiah, “who believes in him as the crown of all that Judaism stands for: the shekinah (John 1:14), the temple (2:21), the manna (6:32–35), the water (7:38), the light (8:12), the shepherd (10:14), the king (12:15), the vine (15:1).”12 The list is Robinson’s, and to it should be added “the Lamb of God” (1:29), whose sacrifice takes away the sins of the world. But while Jesus’ message, and the Gospel of John, was rooted in the religion of the Jews, Jesus’ teaching implied an attack on the extrinsicism and legalism of the Pharisees, the secular millenarianism of the Zealots, and the accommodating spirit of the Sadducees, while the central claim of the Gospel constituted an unforgiveable outrage. The public charge may have been stated in political terms that both Pilate and Herod were bound to understand (19:12, 19), but the bitterness of the chief priests and Pharisees was rooted in the charge that Jesus made himself the Son of God (19:7), a revolutionary claim intimated by the prophets but alien to the fundamental belief of Israel that its God was holy, pure, acting providentially, but always beyond history. At some point the Beloved Disciple ‘wrote’ the Gospel of John; this is the claim of 21:25. Obviously he did not take pen in hand to create the text we have. Paul ‘wrote’ Romans, but it was Tertius who put pen to paper (Rom 16:22). The Beloved Disciple told the story, or at least provided the essential evidence (19:35) that lay at the heart of things remembered when the Gospel was written down, when within the context of Jewish tradition disciples not only remembered but memorized the words of their teacher, always aware that the disciple is not greater than his master (13:16). The Gospel’s text is insistent that its source was memory (2:17, 22; 12:16; 16:4, 13). Precisely what this meant is probably now lost to us, for the art of reliably transmitting oral tradition faded in the church with the coming of written gospels and the collecting of apostolic letters. The literary surface was the work of the author, John the Presbyter, but at some level the words must have been those remembered words the Beloved Disciple, and others of the Johannine five, had taught. The memories and the point of view are distinctively his, as was the range of his recollections. The Gospel knows that Peter’s place must be acknowledged and respected, just as it knows of James and John, although it is perhaps not unjust to see a faint dismissiveness in the Gospel’s single mention of “the ones of Zebedee” (John 21:2), whom some readers will know are the disciples closest to Jesus in Synoptic tradition but who play no part in the Johannine narrative. In the Synoptics the sons of Zebedee are Peter’s auxiliaries, his

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partners in the fishing enterprise (Luke 5:10), who accompany Peter into the synagogue official’s house when his daughter was healed (Mark 5:36), who witness the transfiguration (Mark 9:2, Mt 17:1), who believed they had a claim to sit at Jesus’ right hand and his left (Mark 10:35–41), who ask the question that leads to Jesus’ prophecy of the end (Mark 13:3), 13 and who accompanied Jesus to Gethsemane (Mark 14:33). John remembered the story from a different viewpoint. But if the apostle Andrew was the Beloved Disciple of the Johannine community, why was the title Beloved Disciple substituted for Andrew’s name in the Passion Narrative, that is, whenever, apart from his call in 1:40– 42, he appears with his brother Peter? Bultmann’s conviction that if the Beloved Disciple was assumed to be a particular historical figure “there would be no accounting for the fact that the Evangelist does not speak of him by name” misses the writer’s motive, which is graciously to preclude offense and to gain a hearing for his Gospel and the witness on which it rests in a climate in which the importance of Peter and his tradition was, increasingly, considered normative, while simultaneously claiming for the community’s Beloved Disciple the place of honor the writers understand him to deserve. 15 There is the implication, a certain anxiety, that as Petrine Christianity, Peter’s story and his witness, centered in the imperial capital and seconded by Paul’s presence, was increasingly recognized as central to the apostolic mission, the tradition of the Beloved Disciple would be forgotten, which is, of course, what in a certain sense happened. Within the Johannine community the title Beloved Disciple would not have secured, or even have been intended to secure, anonymity but rather was used to soften the lines of what might have been seen within the larger church as a controversial claim while exemplifying the pattern of love and humility Jesus had given his disciples when he knelt before them to wash their feet. Seventy years ago B. W. Bacon, musing on the import of the anonymous title, saw that it was somehow located in the context of a certain difference or even tension among traditions, suggesting that John 21:15–25 was written “for the purpose of making a place alongside the accepted commission of Peter (cf. 20:21–23) for another commission equally important if different in scope.”15 Bultmann noted that in 19:35 and 21:24 “the term Beloved Disciple stands for a particular historical figure, clearly an authoritative one for the circle which edits the Gospel, and one whose authority is placed alongside that of Peter.”16

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The title Beloved Disciple is used because it simultaneously honors Andrew, allowing the writers to claim that he was remembered as enjoying a particularly close relation to Jesus and as being possessed of a distinctive spiritual excellence, while courteously, indeed lovingly, avoiding the overt claim that Andrew is a superior witness and a superior character, and, more particularly, avoiding the claim that Andrew pretended to the place Peter held as first witness to Jesus’ resurrection and as recipient of the grace that allowed the profession of 6:69–70, both claims the neglect of which would have rendered the Gospel suspect to any adherent of the broader Petrine tradition or indeed any reader of Matthew, Luke, and Mark. The Synoptic Gospels either omit any mention of Andrew apart from the apostolic list or name him so infrequently as to render plausible Peter M. Peterson’s conclusion that Andrew was “historically a person of no importance whatever.”17 In assessing the self-effacing nature of the Beloved Disciple’s witness as the Johannine community understood it, their willingness that he should go unnamed before the world, it is important to remember that the primary considerations were not political. The Gospel was set down by one, or by those, who understood the tradition they had received to hold at its center Jesus’ teaching at the Passover supper, when Jesus’ breaking and blessing of bread and wine at the Last Supper was displaced by Jesus’ actions: “I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, you also should do” (13:15). Given the deeply held conviction that love shown through humility is the sign of true discipleship, the writer faced a dilemma which the anonymous title solved brilliantly. The writer and his community obviously believed that at every turn Peter’s apostleship had been made possible and effective by the actions of his brother, but brashly to put one’s self first, which would have been the effect of using Andrew’s name, was not something the Johannine author and community were willing to do. Substitute any name for “Beloved Disciple” in 12–21 and the Gospel becomes a different, distractingly controversial, book. While the author of John was intent that the place and spiritual perceptiveness of the community’s preeminent witness be acknowledged, the spiritual authority of the Gospel of John could not have been sustained had the writers’ use of the anonymous title been rooted in settled rivalry. It was in fact rooted in love, love tempered of course, as it often is, by the common desire that one’s good work be acknowledged, that is, not only in the charity

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taught by Jesus’ example on Passover night, but by that complicated love that exists between sons of the same household. The motive of chapter 21 is not enmity or emulation, but that the place of Andrew be honored and remembered. In this respect the Gospel was unsuccessful, and the anonymous title and the Irenaean apology too effective. Save for Papias’ notice and the reference in the Muratorian Canon, Andrew would disappear from catholic sources until in the age of Constantine, when there was a necessity for a great apostle whose presence would lend to the East and its glittering new capital an authority analogous to the authority Peter had brought to old Rome. And by the 330s, with manifest irony, the Beloved Disciple of the Gospel had become John the son of Zebedee.

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What Jesus Did Not Say Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple would not die: yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, “If I will that he remains until I come, what is that to you?” John 21:23

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ith the concluding verses of chapter 20 the Book of Glory is complete; the story has been told. Jesus has appeared to Mary Magdalene and to the seven, among whom, unnamed, is the Beloved Disciple. The great commission to forgive sins has been given to the disciples, showing that it was Jesus’ intention that the ministry of forgiveness should continue. Thomas the skeptic, otherwise represented only in 11:16 where he voices a faithless loyalty—“Let us also go die with him”–– has at last come to believe because he has touched, or has been invited to touch, the Lord’s wounded hands and side. Making the account of Thomas’s conversion from skepticism to belief the ultimate event in the Johannine narrative as it was originally composed supplies three purposes. In an environment in which a vibrant tradition about Thomas would be developed within the precincts of Gnosticism, verses 24– 29 serve to co-opt the faithful Thomas for Johannine orthodoxy. 1 At the same time these verses effectively reject the doctrine of ‘spiritual’ resurrection, against which the great church fought stubbornly, while simultaneously foreseeing, with the line “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed,” the existence of a growing church whose members could not have

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enjoyed Thomas’s privilege and for whom the Gospel was written. 2 The author then reiterates his purpose: “That you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you might have life in his name” (20:31). Words conceived as an elegant and forceful ending to a masterfully written book. For such an evangelical purpose the story of Thomas, who was not with the other disciples when Jesus appeared to set them on their way, giving them power to forgive sins, is a perfect ending for a gospel addressed to those who have not seen. But events made this first ending penultimate; as it happened more would have to be said. The text following, chapter 21, consists of material drawn from the many things that could have been included but which the author had not had at hand or not believed essential to his evangelical purpose when he penned 20:30–31. Like the rest of the Gospel of John, chapter 21 rests on memory, words recollected but rooted in real events. At the Sea of Tiberias seven disciples are present, two are unnamed. We know that Andrew the Beloved Disciple is one of the two unnamed for, conforming to the role he has taken throughout the book, he identifies the Lord for his less perceptive brother (21:7). It is important within the pattern the author has established that in 21:2 there be two unidentified disciples, for if there is only one, the identity of the Beloved Disciple shouts from the text. The other unnamed disciple is certainly Philip, whom the action of chapters 1–12 gives the greatest claim after Andrew to a place of importance in the narrative, whose absence from Jesus’ appearance at the Sea of Tiberias would be anomalous, and who, were he named, would define a single absent place that only Andrew could fill, making obvious what has been deliberately and carefully muted. 3 It is perhaps not difficult to see why the editor would have omitted the material in 21 when the Gospel was composed, locating it among the “many things” the disciples had witnessed which remained unrecorded, for its contents (21:1–19) insofar as these were rooted in the witness of the Beloved Disciple were intensely personal and potentially controversial, bringing into sharper focus the tension between two brothers and two traditions, while its content added little that would further the evangelical mission. The exact nature of Chapter 21 will never lie beyond controversy. Although 21:21–22, with its acerbic question “What is that to you?” sharpens the point, chapter 21 adds nothing to the community’s or the reader’s understanding of the relationship between Peter and the Beloved Disciple; the writer knows and the reader has been told throughout the narrative that an unperceptive and

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sometimes faithless Peter was dependent upon his spiritually perceptive and faithful brother for access to the Lord. Agourides is right when he points out that the third resurrection appearance “is simply background for the favorite subject of the author of the Fourth Gospel, namely the comparison of Peter with…the Beloved Disciple”4 But it must be noted that the relation of Peter to the Beloved Disciple is itself in turn the “scenery,” to use Agourides’ word, for the point toward which the chapter 21 is driving: the correcting of the community’s understanding of Jesus’ words to Peter about his brother. The death of the Beloved Disciple before the Lord’s return, in contravention of the perceived promise that he would live until the Parousia, had unsettled the Johannine community, and with that death the connected narrative that began with events at the Sea of Tiberias and ended with Jesus’ words to Peter, “You follow me,” had become essential background against which the author would clear up a misunderstanding.5 The subtly constructed account that begins with Peter’s words, “I am going fishing” (21:3), is a narrative unity held together by the image of Peter the fisherman as well as the image of Peter the shepherd. None of the seven catch anything until one later recognized as the Lord tells them to cast their net on the right side of the boat. Then they are successful; the catch so large that they are not able to haul it in. At this point the Beloved Disciple, within the protocol established, identifies the Lord, not for all the seven but for Peter, upon which Peter jumps into the sea, making for the shore where Jesus stands at a charcoal fire with fish and bread. Jesus says, “Bring some of the fish you have just caught,” and it is then Peter who brings to shore the net full of large fish that the other disciples had not been able to land. The net is not torn despite the large catch, consisting, the reader is told, of 153 fish. The number is not another Johannine detail but is a reference either to the ancient taxonomy that counted 153 kinds of fish or to a numerical triangle constructed on a base of seventeen that includes every whole number from one to seventeen, perhaps to both.6 The great catch, representing ultimately the Lord’s elect, is complete and perfect for the net is not torn. This perfect catch is landed by Peter alone, establishing him as the great fisher of men (Matthew 4:19, Luke 5:10). This success, perhaps more than his three-fold declaration of his love for Jesus, reaffirms Peter’s universal mission. Some of the disciples’ fish is added to those already prepared. Jesus then feeds the seven disciples fish and bread, the allusion to the Eucharist being unmistakable. When they had finished breakfast, still seated round the fire,

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the fire perhaps reminiscent of that other fire in the courtyard of the high priest, Jesus begins to question Simon Peter, the one who is able to bring to shore the fish-laden net that the other disciples could not land, asking “Do you love me more than these?” The question is unanswerable, and Peter refuses to answer it in its first iteration. He cannot say that he loves Jesus more than the others, for he cannot know that this is the case, and to make such an assertion, or even such a speculation, would violate the humility that Jesus had taught. So, chagrinned at Jesus’ persistence, Peter replies, “Lord you know I love you.” Within the question there is also the implication that Peter claims a greater authority based upon a love greater than the others, a claim Jesus tests with the ironic thrice-asked question, its reiteration indicating that dramatic reaffirmation is required in the face of the three-fold denial. Then Jesus, with obvious reference to his teaching that love requires obedience, says to Peter simply, “Feed my sheep.” The passage then moves to a consideration of the future that awaits Peter and his brother. Peter is to feed Christ’s sheep. The Beloved Disciple is to pursue his own mission. Since chapters 1–20 were written the Beloved Disciple has departed this life. Jesus’ description of the manner of Peter’s death in old age, arms outstretched, is often taken to reflect knowledge of an event that when it was recorded belonged to the past, Peter’s crucifixion in the Circus of Nero. But there is no sufficient reason to doubt that Jesus’ words are prophetic. The death of the Beloved Disciple cannot be long past, for it has caused disappointment and consternation. At the conclusion of the scene by the sea, as the disciples walked away with Jesus, the Beloved Disciple heard Peter ask his brother’s fate: “What about this one?” and had also heard Jesus’ terse reply, “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me.” This exchange is part of the story that begins with Peter’s decision to go fishing and which builds to the resolution of the quandary caused by the widespread misunderstanding that Jesus had promised that the Beloved Disciple would live until his return.7 Whether the death of the Beloved Disciple occurred days or years after chapter 20 was written, the author considered that, given this fact, it was essential that a false interpretation of Jesus’ words which had spread among the brothers be corrected. It was this necessity that inspired the writing of chapter 21, a text which is not a miscellany of remembered events tacked on to what was considered at 20:30–31 a completed work but the purposeful addition of matter not

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previously considered essential to the writer’s evangelical purpose but now, in the light of the death of the community’s Beloved Disciple, of heightened importance. The Johannine circle, at least many of the brothers, had understood Jesus’ words: “If I will him to remain until I come, what is that to you?” as a promise that the Beloved Disciple would live until Jesus’ return. But Jesus had not promised that the Beloved Disciple would live until the Parousia; his words reminded Peter that the mission of the Beloved Disciple was none of his concern. But in the context of this widespread misunderstanding the death of the Beloved Disciple deprived the Johannine circle of what had been taken as dominical approval of that disciple’s favored place, and if the misunderstood promise was not the only reason Peter’s brother was considered especially beloved, it was nonetheless an essential testimony to the popular perception of the Beloved Disciple’s closeness to Jesus, which the Gospel asserts throughout the narrative. The Lord’s words (as misunderstood) were not an interesting detail but were a popular pillar of the Johannine community’s claim that Jesus loved the Beloved Disciple so much that he had promised that disciple (and his community) that the beloved witness would live until the Parousia. Jesus’ words had been taken to specify to one apostle the broader promise of Matthew: “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (16:28). Paul in 1 Corinthians expected some to whom he wrote to be alive to greet the Lord: “We shall not all sleep; we shall all be changed” (1 Cor 15:51), and offered assurance that the living would not have an advantage; they would not go before those who slept (1 Thess 4:15).8 The expectation of the Johannine disciples was fed by Jesus’ promise that although he would not be with them for a little while, he would return: “I will come again and will take you to myself” (16:16–19). The length of Jesus’ absence was to be μικρός, small or brief. That members of the Johannine churches, like their brothers and sisters in Thessalonica and Corinth, should have expected to see the return of Jesus was unremarkable until that hope was moderated by the passage of time. The death of the Beloved Disciple before the Parousia would not only disappoint what was understood to be a specific promise but would at the same time render Jesus’ return an event of the indefinite future. The author of the Gospel, writing at a time when it was assumed that most or many Christians would be alive, “to meet the Lord in the air” when he returned (1

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Thess 4:13–18), explains that Jesus’ words were not a promise or prediction that the Beloved Disciple would live until the return of the Messiah, an explanation that presupposes Andrew’s death (21:23).9 Jesus’ words did not mean that this disciple was not to die, but that the destiny of the Beloved Disciple, his vocation and his place in the community, was in the Lord’s hands and was no concern of Peter: “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” This misunderstanding was of course only one of several admitted by the text, but this was no ordinary misunderstanding, involving as it did the relinquishing of the belief that Jesus had granted Andrew a special place. There is no easy alternative to the conclusion that the “I/we” of verses 24–25, the community of the presbyter John, believed that Jesus had said these words, that their meaning had been understood as a promise, and that this promise was held so broadly that Andrew’s death required the Gospel writer’s explanation. The urgent tone of chapter 21, especially 20–24, assumes a clear relation to the death of the Beloved Disciple, suggesting, within certain limits, the date of the Gospel’s composition. The verses explaining what Jesus had not said would have been most intensely relevant to disappointed disciples in the months following that death, a disappointment that would have faded with passing years into an abstract objection and perhaps something of an embarrassment. By the time the explanatory verses (22–23) were written the ‘misunderstanding’ had at least a brief history, but the difficulty chapter 21 addresses was not historical in the conventional sense; it was “spread abroad among the brethren” and immediate. The text assumes that the troublesome saying of the Lord had been in common circulation, but only the fact of the death of the Beloved Disciple could have brought it to the fore as a cause for dismay. As a member, roughly, of the generation of his brother Peter, perhaps somewhat younger but old enough to take the leading role given him by the Gospel of John, Andrew might have been born before the end of the first decade and might have lived to be seventy, or to about eighty. The question of his martyrdom is not addressed by Chapter 21, but the apocryphal tradition on which it relies gives Andrew an extensive career in Thrace and Achaia, ending with martyrdom at Patras in Achaia. However and whenever the Beloved Disciple died, his death was the cause of an immediate crisis, apart from which chapter 21 might never have been written. It is at least possible that for the “we” of chapter 21, at the time of writing, the manner of

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Andrew’s death paled into insignificance in the light of the near scandal that his death caused, which was the point the author so urgently addressed. One effect of John 21 was to convert a widespread misunderstanding, the correcting of which deprived the community of a claim to exceptional status, into an explicit assertion of the independent authority of the Beloved Disciple. As clarified, the remembered words had not constituted a personal promise conveying a special place or status but a warrant for the independent authority of the Beloved Disciple in the church. Jesus’ admonition to Peter, “What is that to you; you follow me,” was rooted in the memory of the Asian church in a way that over time, reinforced by other beliefs and circumstances exotic to Roman experience, would make its bishops such as those mentioned in the Muratorian Canon conscious of an authority given not by Peter but by the Lord himself. Chapter 21 made an awkward ending, raising to the level of controversy the Peter-Beloved Disciple relation that had been presented with such delicate charity in chapters 1–20. In Chapter 21:15–23 the tone necessarily shifts. In both the Book of Signs and the Book of Glory, the author has made an honorable place for Andrew, depicting him as the enabler, Peter’s means of access. There is no rivalry, no criticism. But it is difficult to read Jesus’ threefold questioning of Peter, often believed to echo his threefold denial, without hearing in the text a faint tone of irony. The background was one in which the belief that Peter, the holder of the keys in Matthean tradition, was increasingly perceived as a witness to the truth of the Gospel having special weight and authority. Chronologically, if Chapter 21 was written in the late sixties, but after Peter’s death in the Circus of Nero, we are not far from the time when Greeks in Corinth think it evident that an appeal to Clement of Rome, in whose church the voice of Peter spoke, will correct what is amiss, and when, perhaps twenty years later, Ignatius will imply the desirability, if not the necessity, of association with the church that is “beloved and enlightened, that holds the presidency in the country of the region of the Romans,” representing as it does the witness of Peter and Paul.10 Jesus’ reiterated question to Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” is a gently ironic gloss on the implicit claim that Peter loves the Lord more than the other disciples, while at the same time the text, the mere asking of the question, can be taken to imply that Peter claims, or that unfolding tradition claims for him, a great love that undergirds a universal mission.11 This enthymeme, that authority is rooted in love, is the heart of John’s Gospel.

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Clearly the question of the recognition of Andrew’s place is a more than personal issue, involving as it does the authenticity and authority of Johannine tradition. Paul’s admonition that Christians should claim to be only of Christ, not of Paul or Cephas (1 Cor 1:12, 3:22), would not be strictly followed in a Christian world in which authority was bound up with the historical witness of the great apostles. By the time Ireaneus wrote, claims and counterclaims regarding the relative importance of Rome and the East (Gaius, Polycrates, Proclus) were flying. Irenaeus, himself an easterner and very much aware of the importance of the Johannine presence in Asia, was the great advocate of the necessity of the witness of Peter and Paul in Rome.12 By the time of 1 Clement, certainly by the time of Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses, a certain recognition of Roman primacy was customary, seconded by the undoubted possession of the relics of Peter and Paul, to which the proud boast of Gaius is sufficient witness: “If you will go to the Vatican, or to the Ostian Way, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church;” Peter buried by what was then, about 190, the wall of the cemetery on the Vatican hill, Paul by the Via Ostiensis. Roman primacy was based broadly on the commonly acknowledged importance of its two apostles, more narrowly on the ministry of Peter, always named first in Rome’s episcopal list. The context of Gaius’ representation of the importance of the τρόπαία where the revered relics of Peter and Paul rested, was a counterargument addressed to the East, represented by Proclus the Montanist and by Polycrates bishop of Ephesus, who claimed that great lights had also fallen asleep in Asia. The East always had its authorities and its differences, claiming a different date, the Johannine date, for Easter, and welcoming the prophetic tradition which so alarmed Pope Victor that he proposed to excommunicate Asia. Among the great lights who had fallen asleep in Asia was John the martyr, teacher, and priest who slept at Ephesus.13 What one witnesses in the Fourth Gospel’s manifest interest in defending the authenticity of its own tradition is the playing out of the burden of history that an incarnational religion must bear. For John’s Gnostic opponents, tradition was congruent with insight; Johannine Christianity told a historical story. Tradition is almost always grounded in something. In the age of Papias, Asian tradition, for at least one important community of churches, was grounded in the witness of a succession in which the apostle Andrew naturally stands before Peter, his name followed by Philip and Thomas.

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Three of the Johannine disciples were associated with the East, Andrew first with Scythia, with Epirus, and in the Acts of Andrew with Ephesus, Byzantium, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Nicea (in Bithynia). His relics rested in the Achaean city Patras, just across the Gulf of Corinth from Epirus. 14 Philip, according to Polycrates of Ephesus, was buried in Papias’ own city of Hierapolis. It was the fate of Andrew and Philip to rest in provincial towns, not in a great capital to which pilgrims would flock, and Andrew could never qualify as a “great light’ in Asia, thus deserving Polycrates’ mention, because he slept in far away Achaia. Thomas preached and died in India, his relics returned to Edessa in the fourth century. In Papias we see the early, local tradition of the importance of Andrew, Philip, and Thomas brought down to the end of the first century by John the Presbyter, who had been born in good time to know apostles, members of the Twelve, certainly their traditions, who may have been born in the thirties and may have lived beyond the turn of the century, serving as inspired editor of the Gospel in the sixties or seventies and bringing his authority to bear against the ‘spirituals’ in the eighties or nineties. In the nineties, perhaps somewhat later, Papias welcomed to Hierapolis John the Presbyter, who by whatever means had seen the glory of the resurrected Jesus and who knew what had been from the beginning. In the interplay between the roles of Peter and Andrew, in its interest in the authority of the two brothers, the Gospel of John, especially its last chapter, can be read as an essay on ecclesiology. Thus the Petrine profession, the only mention of Peter in the Fourth Gospel between the call of the two brothers and the events of the Passion Narrative, is included in cursory form in 6:68–70 because Peter’s profession already belonged to the universal tradition. By standing aside, Andrew allows Peter to enter before him, becoming the first witness to the Lord’s resurrection.15 Thus this text is a kind of doublet on the call of the brothers in 1:40–42. Andrew, who had reached the empty tomb first, is allowed by the writers of the Gospel of John a certain leadership. The thrice-given command to feed my sheep can be seen as testimony to the importance of Peter and his office, a claim recognized but asserted in a milieu in which other apostolic traditions claim their own authority as the Petrine witness begins to assume ever greater importance. Birger Gerhardsson saw that, “In the Gospel of John we easily see which disciple is the ideal one in the Johannine church: the Beloved Disciple. But Peter and the Twelve are not rejected. We may suspect criticism against

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them, but their authority is respected.”16 It is the function of the concluding verses not to derogate the place Peter already held in the church but, as B. W. Bacon pointed out long ago, to establish the fact that Andrew has a place of his own, given by Christ, not simply mediated through Peter. Importing evidence from the first century more or less directly into the twenty-first, without careful consideration of the kaleidoscope of hermeneutic contexts through which it will have passed, is always problematic. This said, the ecclesiology implied by the Fourth Gospel can be seen as a kind of anticipation of the clarifying judgment of the Second Vatican Council, which emphasized the authority of every bishop, each of whom justly teaches and governs in his local church as long as he maintains unity with that essential witness, Peter and his successors. There was clearly tension between the traditions established by the two brothers; a tension that still exists between brother churches. The sub-text of 21 is the assumption that Peter is accorded a certain preeminence, that Peter loves Jesus more than the other Johannine disciples, but the text does not support the claim that all authority derives through Peter and his office.17 Determining the exact meaning of John 21: 15–24, its implications for the history and present life of the church is, after nineteen centuries, still a work in progress. One thing the Gospel of John makes clear: great authority is rooted in great love. In an era (such as the present) in which the temptation to see political implications is everywhere, it is not surprising that the contrast in the text between Peter and his brother has provided opportunity for speculation that the two represented political or ecclesiastical communities in conflict. But at the time of writing there were no political considerations as such. There is a desire for what the Gospel writers consider just recognition of the place of their own tradition. Such rivalry as existed is subtle and complex, touched perhaps (especially in chapter 21) ever so lightly, with a note of irony, in its determination that the community’s witness be honored while never moving outside the circle of charity. The Johannine author carefully recognized the two notes of Petrine leadership: that it was Peter who, when others were turning away because of Jesus’ hard teaching about the Bread of Life, recognized that Jesus was “the Holy One of God” (6:69–70), the Johannine parallel to Peter’s confession in Matthew 16:17; and Peter who was the first witness to the resurrection of the Lord, a place secured for him in Johannine tradition by the humility of the

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Beloved Disciple (20:1–9), and a fact that implied leadership in the Church (1 Cor 15:5). There is no denying that there is a distinctive, indeed personal, point of view in the telling. Peter is martyred, his arms stretched on the cross in Rome. Andrew has gone to be with the Lord—the writer must explain his death against the background of a misunderstood promise that he would live until Jesus’ return. The desire that one’s own history, one’s own tradition, be acknowledged is honorable. The title “Beloved Disciple,” or “the disciple whom Jesus loved” was given Andrew by the Johannine community, but it was based upon the story Andrew told. Because tradition is most often rooted in something, even if that something is not well understood or perfectly remembered, it is not unreasonable to think that the fraternal tension between West and East, Rome and Constantinople, reflects remotely the tension between the two traditions which the Fourth Gospel knows. If that tension was later to assume political implications, these were not foreseen at the time of the Beloved Disciple’s death. Yet that tension, muted by courtesy in the Johannine text, as well as the charitable, fraternal ideal it presupposes, still incompletely resolved, lives on in the imaginations of East and West in the twenty-first century. In January 1964, at their meeting in Jerusalem, Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople presented to Paul VI an icon showing Peter and Andrew, “the brother apostles” embracing.18

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onsiderations of style, syntax¸ and vocabulary, as well as weighty tradition, argue that the author of this text was the author of 2 and 3 John, that his name was John, and that he was, as the two shorter Epistles attest, a presbyter. His authority was great, for heeding his teaching meant communion with God while ignoring it meant “not belonging to God.” We know John the Presbyter through his writings, and a majority of scholars ancient and modern have found the similarities of content and language among the Epistles and the Gospel so compelling that unity of authorship has been widely, if not universally, accepted. About 260 Dionysius of Alexandria, thinking of 1 John only, noted, “It is plainly to be seen that one and the same character marks the Gospel and the Epistle throughout…. Similar phrases occur everywhere,” and both were written “without error as regards the Greek language, with elegance in their expression, in their reasonings and in their entire structure.”1 That John the Presbyter was the teacher who wrote the Epistles and brought together the memories of the community to make the Gospel is an identification given weight by the considered support of B. H. Streeter and Von Hügel, an opinion advanced more recently by Martin Hengel among others.2 But the relation between Gospel and Epistles is more complex than

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Dionysius might have allowed, vocabulary and syntax differing just enough to render plausible the conclusion that the author of the Epistles had no part in the writing of the Gospel. In recent scholarship this question has been treated with reserve, with few scholars willing to deny the probability that there is some literary relation between Gospel and Epistles and many unwilling to assert that relation without qualification. Robinson, having noted that “the trend at the moment is toward diversity of authorship,” wrote: “I am not personally convinced that discrepancies of style and vocabulary are not again better explained by one man responding to a new situation after the lapse of perhaps a decade.”3 Martin Hengel seconded Robinson: “We cannot always expect exclusively the same language in such extremely different writings. The manifold and in some respects close links between the two short letters and the Gospel, and even more the first letter, are astonishing.”4 But Raymond Brown differed: “I think it very likely but not certain that 1 John was written by one other than the evangelist, and this position has won support.”5 In the face of these disparate opinions, it can only be said that criticism has produced nothing that would tell decisively against the tradition of the Muratorian Canon: the Gospel was composed from many discrete memories, the content of which will have influenced vocabulary and style; so that disquieting dissimilarities between Gospel and Epistles are the result of this process, while texts such as John 1:1–18 and 1 John 1:1–7, to cite only the most obvious, testify to unity of authorship between Gospel and Epistles. 6 And the remarkably similar thematic content of the Gospel and 1 John, noted by Dionysius, must count for something. The use of darkness as a substantive describing the order of this world and contrasted with the light of God occurs in Gospel and Epistles (John 1:5, 3:19, 12:35; 1 John 1:6, 2:9, 2:11[2]) with a frequency sufficient to encourage Bultmann’s theory of Mandean influence.7 Some form of the verb ἀγαπάω or the related substantive is found thirty-one times in John, twenty-one times in 1 John, seven times in Matthew, and five times in Mark, while ἀλῄθεια occurs twenty-one times in John, nineteen times in the three epistles, once in Matthew, twice in Luke and three times in Mark. Certainly nothing in the evidence would obviate the claim that one author wrote the Epistles, the Gospel being the result of the same writer’s editorial and authorial skill, the collated memories of many brought together under his name and hand; making the Muratorian account, at least in outline, an illuminating witness.

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Polycrates of Ephesus, seven of whose relatives had been bishops before him, who knew the episcopal list of the Roman Church from Anicetus to his own day, who was steeped in the tradition he defended, included John in his letter to Victor of Rome setting forward the Asian claims, calling John a witness, a teacher, and a priest who wore the breastplate or distinctive crown—the Greek πέταλον can mean either—and identifying him as the disciple who reclined on the bosom of the Lord. Because Polycrates and Victor shared the belief that the authority of churches was rooted in their fidelity to the witness of a great founder or founders, the authenticity of the claim established by possession of the burial place and hence the body of that apostolic witness, Polycrates was careful to cite the city in which each of the “foundations” or “great lights” of the Asian church had fallen asleep. Given the importance of the question and Polycrates’ place as metropolitan, positioned to know not only the history of his church but the information brought by a stream of Christian visitors, the claim Polycrates made for the apostolic foundation of the Ephesian church is remarkably weak. 8 Most of Polycrates’ great lights, “stars” as Hengel translates, were saints and martyrs whose memoriae were scattered across Caria and Lydia and who belonged to the third, fourth or fifth Christian generations: Polycarp and Thraseus of Eumenia in Smyrna; Sagaris in Laodicea; Papirius and Melito (in Sardis), whose burial places were perhaps too well known to require mention, but Asia could claim the witness of only one of the Twelve, Philip of Bethsaida. Philip’s presence, and the presence of his prophetic daughters, in Hierapolis was attested at the turn of the century by Papias, who had known Philip’s daughters, and when Polycrates wrote perhaps ninety years later Philip’s burial place was remembered and venerated. 9 After Christianity became a public profession, an impressive octagonal martyrium was built in Hierapolis, outside the city walls, at the place of Philip’s burial.10 Had Polycrates been confident that the John familiar to Ephesian tradition was the son of Zebedee, he would have named him one of the Twelve; that he did not is decisive against Irenaeus’ account claiming (or implying) the residence of John the son of Zebedee in Ephesus. By the 190s Polycrates’ identification of the John whose memory persisted at Ephesus as the Beloved Disciple of the Gospel belonged to the conventional apologetic confusion that Irenaeus represented and enabled in his work against heresies.11 Polycrates’ information that John was not only a witness and teacher, but a priest wearing the breastplate or crown belonging to the high priest’s office,

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occurring as it does in a letter from the Bishop of Ephesus to the Bishop of Rome, a letter representing the voice of the assembly Polycrates had convened at Victor’s request,12 reiterating already-traditional claims and destined to become a matter of public record, puzzling as it at first glance seems, cannot be dismissed. The picture of the Johannine author as a priest (ἱερύς), a member of the priestly caste, a claim recited matter of factly by Polycrates, jars imaginations more at home with the (anachronistic) picture of John as a familiar of the elegantly classic Library of Celsus at Ephesus. But there are no ‘origins’ of Christianity that lie outside Palestinian Judaism. We know that both the witness (the Beloved Disciple) and his own disciple who wrote down the Gospel in his own name were familiar with Jerusalem. The Beloved Disciple Andrew walked the city streets and the Galilean countryside with Jesus and was a familiar of the high-priestly household. John, the hand that composed the Gospel, was always ready and able to clear up the meaning of Hebrew place names for the Greek readers. That a high priest in Jerusalem in the fifties or sixties—between 37 and 70 there were at least twenty-eight—should become an important Christian teacher near the end of the century is no more surprising than the transformation of an intellectual Pharisee named Paul into an inspired preacher of Jesus Christ, willing to die for the name, between 35 and 60. Acts (6:7) tells us that in Jerusalem a crowd (πολύς τε ὄχλος) of priests became obedient to the faith, and that “John and Alexander and as many as were related to the high priest” sat with Caiaphas to judge the apostles Peter and John (4:6). Polycrates, in claiming that John had been a priest (as well as the witness who was nearest Jesus at the supper), was writing not to provoke puzzles but to assert a conviction current in the Ephesian church which he found unsurprising and believed important to his case, an attitude he expected his readers to share. The reference to the πέταλον, the crown-like headpiece encircled with golden leaves and bearing the sacred name, defined the bearer as high priest in succession to Aaron, not merely a member of a priestly caste mentioned in Acts and elsewhere. With the extinction of the Hasmonean priesthood at the accession of Herod the Great, the high priestly office fell under the influence of the king, and the office changed hands frequently. Robert Eisler’s confidence that Acts 4:6 identifies John the priest of Jerusalem as the presbyter of Ephesus, at best suggestive, seems too serendipitous, although it is not impossible that John may have sat with a court determined to defeat or destroy the followers of Jesus and later been converted to

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discipleship; Paul had looked on as Stephen was stoned. It is clear that the Johannine author was a man of Jerusalem whose association with priestly circles would not be unexpected. The claim that a person of priestly caste, whose work as a teacher began in the inner circles of the Palestinian Judaism of the fifties or sixties, who had served as high priest for years or months, might become, through contact with Jesus’ followers, probably in Jerusalem but perhaps elsewhere, a ‘disciple of the Lord” and an “apostolic presbyter,” dying in Ephesus after Trajan’s accession, is not self-evidently unlikely. That such was the case was proposed by Hugo Delff in 1890, in a theory that was recited favorably by F. C. Burney in 1922, accepted by Martin Hengel in his Johannine Question in 1989, and considered favorably by Bauckham in a 1993 essay.13 In 1968 Rudolf Schnackenburg abandoned his belief that John the son of Zebedee was the author in favor of a figure such as Delft had described.14 But the Delft-Robinson-Hengel account has this weakness; it overlooks the textual and grammatical evidence that the Gospel both rests upon the apostolic witness of the Beloved Disciple and presents at the same time a literary surface that displays the hermeneutic and the apologetic interests of the sub-apostolic author/editor, so that any account of Johannine origins must take cognizance of both the situation of the apostolic witness and the situation of the sub-apostolic author, of the cultural/historical milieu of both the Beloved disciple and John the Presbyter. The tradition that the composition of the Gospel depended upon both an apostolic witness and a sub-apostolic editor runs back in the preConstantinian church to the Muratorian Canon. In modern scholarship it was proposed by Adolf von Harnack, who wrote in 1890 that the Gospel might properly be called the Gospel of John (the son of Zebedee) according to John (the Presbyter).15 Although Harnack did not live to encounter the pervasive skepticism that the witness could be John the son of Zebedee, on the point that the Gospel involved both a witness and an editor/author Harnack’s insight was perceptive, recognizing the two-level character of the Gospel’s text. In John 20:30–31 and 21:25, as well as 19:35, the reader hears the voice of the author/editor, the “I/we”, John the Presbyter, who taught in Asia and Phrygia (at least) and died in Ephesus. His audience may well have included, as Robinson suggests, Hellenized Jews of the priestly class, but his book was launched into a world in which Greek was the common language and knowledge of things Jewish tenuated. F. C. Burney’s question, “What Jew, or indeed what Gentile inhabitant of Palestine, would need to be told

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that Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans or that Tabernacles was a feast of the Jews, or that the Feast of the Dedication took place in winter?” is hardly consistent with Burney’s belief that intended readership was Palestinian Jews of priestly class.16 And surely, had the Gospel as published been intended chiefly for them, members of such a caste would have been puzzled by the careful translation of Hebrew terms and names for a Greek-speaking reader. But these explanations of customs and language represent the voice of John the Presbyter and his school, who, writing perhaps thirty years after the events the Gospel describes, expected the Gospel to find a Hellenized, probably Gentile, readership.17 This fact, however, that the Gospel rests upon two levels of memory and witness, the memories of the Beloved Disciple who had stood by the cross as a witness to Jesus’ death, and the memories of John the Presbyter and his school as to what Andrew (and others of the Twelve) had said, memories garnered during the sixties, does not render moot the evidence Robinson and others find that makes the Beloved Disciple, the witness, a Palestinian Jew, as any member of the Twelve must have been, nor does it explain the palimpsest of knowledge that must belong not to the Gospel writer, the “I/we” of 21:24–25, but to the eyewitness cited in 19:35 and must belong to the years of Jesus’ ministry. The disciple of John the Baptist, who was an eyewitness to the events recorded, who heard John call Jesus the Lamb of God, who followed Jesus to his trial and took Jesus’ mother into his care was Andrew of Bethsaida, a Galilean but familiar with Jerusalem during the two or three decades that preceded its destruction. Of the priestly class, John would have shared with the apostle Andrew the geography of the city and, as John came of age in the fifties, the local religious milieu of those historically obscure years between Pentecost and the first Jewish war, when the Beloved Disciple’s witness was given to his hearer John, the disciple of the Lord, the priest become presbyter. It is remarkable, and has often been noticed, that Gentiles appear in neither the Gospel nor Epistles while the Greeks, Hellenized Jews or perhaps just ‘Greeks,’ are assisted in their desire to see Jesus. The historical context evident in the Gospel is Jewish, but in John the tension, indeed bitterness, is not between Jew and Gentile; the questions of circumcision and dietary rules do not come up; the tension is between Jews who believe that Jesus is the Messiah and those who deny. These are questions that lost much of their significance with the fall of Jerusalem in 70, questions that had little or no

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relevance for a Gentile audience. The bitterness expressed repeatedly against “the Jews” may not have been quite so implacable in the days of Jesus’ ministry, when there was still doubt and inquiry, when Jesus still taught in synagogues and in the temple area (John 18:20), a time before the believers in Jesus’ messiahship were formally expelled from the synagogue by the rabbinical Benediction Against Heretics, which, as Martyn points out, echoes in John 19:22, 12:42, and 16:2.18 The establishment-threatening conversions of the great crowd of priests occurred after Pentecost. Martin Hengel wrote, “The controversy with the Jews and their leaders takes place with a glance back to the situation of Jesus in Jerusalem two generations earlier.” 19 Perhaps not two generations, if the Gospel reflects the situation as Andrew and his disciple John found it in the sixties. Nevertheless, while it is clear that the story John tells is a Jewish story, set in Jerusalem, based upon the witness of the Beloved Disciple, it is also evident that the story told was directed by John the Presbyter to a Gentile audience, uninvolved existentially in the conflicts with “the Jews” that the Gospel describes as having been an essential part of the Jerusalem story.20 Even the most Hellenized of Jews would not have required a reminder that the Passover was “the Passover of the Jews.” This, Hengel, following Burney, wrote, “is clear evidence that the Gospel was written for a mainly Gentile-Christian audience.”21 The voices one hears in the text are the voices of the Johannine disciples speaking through the inspired memory of their followers like John the Presbyter. Occasionally one hears the voice of the author/editor, speaking in propria persona as the Gospel was written (1:14, 19:35, 21:24–25). At many, most, points in the text it difficult to know whose voice one hears because the witness of the Beloved disciple is presented through the language, experiences, and memories of the author/editors. Furthermore, what the Gospel is about, the content of the story, the witness of the Beloved Disciple and perhaps others (Philip and Thomas), is marked by memories of Jerusalem, by engagement in the struggle between the followers of Jesus as Messiah and the temple establishment “the Jews,” and by Semiticisms or Aramaisms as remembered by the Johannine community, who would have shared these political views and lived within, or at least have been familiar with, the cultural/linguistic milieu of the Beloved Disciple and his generation. The authenticity of the Gospel does depend on the fact that the Beloved Disciple and the author/editor shared a core of experiences rooted in teach-

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ing, geography, and cultural inheritance, if not in a common experience of Jesus’ ministry. That the Gospel rests upon apostolic witness as interpreted by a subapostolic author can be read to suggest two disparate dates for the writing of the Gospel, one based on the text itself and established by the relation of the writing of chapter 21 to the death of the Beloved Disciple as the apostolic generation drew to a close; the other encouraged by the testimony of Jerome, Victorinus, and Eusebius, that John was written to put down ‘spiritual’ heresies, suggesting that the Gospel was a work of the late first century. The Beloved Disciple Andrew, being of the generation of his brother Peter, if he was not, as apocryphal tradition maintains, martyred (which might have taken place earlier), would probably have died in the sixties or seventies, that in any event is the only, admittedly imprecise, assumption available. John the Presbyter’s letters opposing the incarnation-deniers would have come later, perhaps about 90 or 100. The Muratorian Canon, with its account of the collegial composition of the Gospel under the presidency of John, proposes no chronological link between the writing of the Gospel and turn-of-thecentury heresy. It is certain, however, on the grounds of external as well as internal evidence, that John the Presbyter did oppose heresy. Polycarp remembered John’s flight from an Ephesian bath house because Cerinthus the enemy of truth was within, but that text does not propose opposition to heresy as the motive for the writing of the Gospel.22 The chief interest of the Anti-Marcionite Prologue was (apparently) to answer the charge that the Gospel was posthumous, perhaps because the Irenaean claim that the son of Zebedee lived into the reign of Trajan strained belief in the second or third centuries as much as in the twenty-first. The Anti-Marcionite Prologue, after insisting, on the authority of Papias that the Gospel was written while John was still alive, added the reference that gave the Anti-Marcionite Prologues their conventional title, the claim that Marcion had visited John, bringing writings and letters, scripta vel epistulas, from the brothers in Pontus, a detail that made Irenaeus’ implied chronology even more improbable. Even in the Prologue John’s encounter with Marcion is not proposed as a motive for writing the Gospel. John’s opposition to Marcion was considered a fact by the Prologue’s author, and his rejection of Marcion and his writings was considered an important apologetic point at a time when Marcion was using the Fourth Gospel to spread his doctrine.23 It is not difficult to see that the conviction that John was the last-written, ‘spiritual’ gospel,24 combined with

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the evidence of Polycrates and Irenaeus that John opposed heretics, might evanesce into a broader claim that the Gospel was written to oppose heresy. Victorinus of Pettau, writing toward the end of the third century, made the dramatic, and ill-grounded, claim that John was urged to write when the opinions of Valentinus, Cerinthus, Ebion, and other schools of Satan (scholae Sathanae) had been spread throughout the world, a reference which, like the mention of Marcion in the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, makes the first quarter of the second century more likely than a pre-100 date.25 The implications that the Gospel, while it certainly displays a broad antiheretical purpose, was occasioned by the desire to put down heresy are for the most part easy to dismiss as the far-from-obvious deductions of zealous apologists, especially in the light of the Gospel’s twice-stated evangelical purpose. The exception is the assertion of the Anti-Marcionite Prologue that John met and rejected Marcion, the specificity of which—Marcion had brought writings or letters from the brothers in Pontus—argues its authenticity. Yet it should be noted that the chronology of Marcion’s career, dependent as it is, at least in part, on the evidence of Justin Martyr, is imprecise. Justin’s First Apology, in which he twice says that Marcion is still teaching, and that his heresy has spread “among the whole human race,” is usually dated about 150, but there is as good a case for a date prior to 138. Aurelian, who assumed imperial authority in 138, is addressed as verissimus instead of with his imperial titles, which would date the First Apology before 138.26 It is difficult to reconcile Justin’s reiterated testimony that Marcionism had spread “among many in every race of man” with the traditional claim, based on Marcionite chronology, that his doctrine was not rejected decisively at Rome until 144, but then again the relation of Marcion’s thought in its various stages to the various shades of Paulinism current at the turn of the century is unclear.27 Were the Christians whom 2 Peter cites as having misunderstood difficult Pauline texts ineffective exegetes, Marcionites, or Marcionite sympathizers? While redating Justin’s First Apology to the 130s would not relieve definitively the tension implicit in the claim that John knew Marcion, it would render more plausible the assertion of the Anti-Marcionite Prologue that a young Marcion, representing brothers in Pontus, had at some point indeed expected to be received by John, anticipating John’s approval. Harnack thought Marcion might have been born as early as 85; there is nothing inherently improbable about a precocious religious genius having visited the old man about 110.28

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Writers of the third and fourth centuries, almost all of whom assumed that the Gospel and Epistles were the work of John the apostle, did believe both were written against heresy. This is easier to see in the Epistles than in the Gospel. John 19:35 is the only obviously anti-Gnostic assertion of the Gospel, while the Epistles are an extended, point by point, argument against something like Marcionism. It is however, important to note that the prefaces of both the Gospel and 1 John, while their style and vocabulary argue unity of authorship, also argue hard that God who made the world is Logos and light, that there is no darkness in him, an argument that can best be understood in the context of the doctrine offered in somewhat different ways by Marcion, Valentinus, and Cerinthus that the God of creation is malign or imperfect. Irenaeus saw that John 1:1–14 cast the net wide, that it was written to counter Marcion, Valentinus, and other Gnostics, no one of whom believed that the “Word was made flesh,” or that God was the good Creator. On these points the argument of the Gospel’s preface is more extensive (if less direct); the world is the realm of darkness which cannot comprehend the light. But both prefaces assume the existence of the belief on the part of those addressed that God did not create the world or that there is darkness in God, and while the preface to the First Epistle does not defend the incarnation, it elsewhere calls those who deny Jesus’ coming in the flesh antichrists (1 John 4:2–3, 2 John 7). We know very little about the way in which the spiritual heresies presented themselves. While some forms of gnosis bear the stamp of alien mythologies, the heresy the Presbyter combated in the Epistles was home grown. The Johannine community, Raymond Brown wrote, had “become divided over the implications and applications of Johannine thought.” Presumably the dissenters had been called into the church by the Paraclete as much as had John’s adherents, but, seduced by false doctrine, “They went out from us because they were not of us” (1 John 2:19).29 The only name we have for the leader of the opposers is the Diotrephes of 3 John 9, but we know as well that the heresies Justin and Irenaeus opposed had coalesced around a great religious genius, the stability and flourishing of each secured under the sponsorship of a convincing, articulate teacher: Hymenaeus and Philetus in first-century Corinth, Marcion in Pontus, Valentinus in Egypt, and Cerinthus in Asia in the second century. From the historian’s point of view it is to be regretted that Ignatius, in his letter to Smyrna (5), had not thought it fit “to record in writing” the names of those schismatics he opposed “until

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they repent and return to the passion,” but the catholic party had its slogans, none of which was impersonal. “He who denies that Jesus came in the flesh is antichrist;” “He who says that there is neither resurrection nor judgment is the first-born of Satan.” Polycarp’s answer to Marcion’s request for recognition was: “I know you are the first-born of Satan.”30 Whether Polycarp’s broader reference in his letter to the Philippians (7), where the use of the phrase “first-born of Satan” may apply more generally, or John’s stricture against those who denied Jesus’ advent in flesh (ἐν σαρκί) refer specifically to Marcion is unclear. John wrote that many antichrists had gone into the world (1 John 2:18). What the First Epistle does establish is the credibility of John’s rejection of any Marcionite-like system, and collaterally the reasonableness of the claim that the author of the Epistles, John the Presbyter, had rejected Marcion. The great principle on which John’s argument against those who deny Jesus’ coming in the flesh (4:2), who believed their own evil should be imputed to a flaw in God or his creation rather than to the lawlessness of their own wills (1:5–10, 3:4), and who preferred gnosis to the anointing of the Holy Spirit rests is the grand assertion of the prologue: “God is light; in him is no darkness at all.” Adherents of Valentinus’ disturbed pleroma, of Marcion’s wrathful god, or of Cerinthus’ lesser god could never expect to be recognized by John, but that Marcion believed such recognition might have been gained argues the relevance of Raymond Brown’s thesis that Johannine orthodoxy and spiritual heresy were, at least to some degree, alternative interpretations of the same inheritance. 1 John shares with Marcionism an intellectual ambiance defined by love and knowledge. While the Gospel of John is, as a succession of scholars from Lightfoot to Robinson have maintained, Jewish to the core—the story was witnessed by the Beloved Disciple who was a Palestinian Jew—the Johannine Epistles, written perhaps two or three decades later, are strangely distanced from the Old Testament, references to which, with the exception of the mention of Cain in 1 John 3:12, are few and allusive. It is possible to wonder if this reticence was because the author, when the Epistles were written, lived and worked on the catholic side of a faint but distinct line that separated him and his communities, led by right believers like Demetrius of 3 John, from an alternative, ‘spiritual’ interpretation of the tradition, so that, in pursuing his disciplinary task, the author of the Epistles, although quick to note the necessity of Jesus’ propitiatory death, chose, either as an apologetic strategy or because such appeals had become controversial, not to call in

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evidence the books that witnessed to what the ‘spirituals’ saw as the wrathful Old Testament God of history and creation. Marcion had his reasons for seeking out the Presbyter; that John might have met Marcion at the beginning of his career and in John’s old age is not impossible. The AntiMarcionite Prologue suggests that early on Marcion considered himself a Johannine Christian, or at least believed that John might have sympathized with his views. In any event the purported intersection of the biographies of John and Marcion at the turn of the century need not influence decisively the dating of the Fourth Gospel, for which, whether chapter 21 was written a few months or a few years after the fact, the date of the death of the Beloved Disciple is arguably determinative. That date, if the Beloved Disciple was of the generation of the Twelve, would typically fall between 60 and 80. We know that Peter was martyred in the sixties, when he was old (ὅταν δὲ γηράσῃς), and the synoptic order, in which Peter is always named before Andrew, would suggest that Peter may have been the elder of the brothers. That John the Presbyter lived into the reign of Trajan is a consistent element in the tradition, supported by the claim that he was the teacher of Polycarp (69–156), which can hardly have taken place before the 90s, and by his association with turn-of-the-century heretics, Cerinthus and perhaps Marcion, but in any event with a spiritual heresy like that engaged by Ignatius in the first decade of the century. This suggests that John the Presbyter was born in the thirties. He was a disciple of apostles, notably Andrew but also of Philip and Thomas, but he had experienced and remembered Jerusalem and the hostility of the Judeans to the disciples of Jesus. John presided at the collegial composition of the Gospel soon after Andrew’s death, which was, if the silence of the Gospel about the first Jewish war is taken as significant, before 66 but which may have been as late as 80. The latter date is favored by the absence from the Gospel text of concerns about the law found in Paul and Acts; the former is favored by the witness of John 21:20–23 to a vivid expectation of the return of Jesus. John then lived into the reign of Trajan to be an eminent vehicle of tradition at the turn of the first century, when Papias would have expected him to visit Hierapolis and when Polycarp would have heard him.31 When Trajan inherited the Empire in 98, Polycarp would have been rising thirty and may have already been made bishop of Smyrna—Irenaeus says he was appointed by apostles, although this may not refer to one of the Twelve. Papias would have been a somewhat

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older contemporary, and John the Presbyter was an old man. Cerinthus, and perhaps Marcion, stood at the beginning of their careers as teachers. John was not a bishop, for bishops were, like Papias, not itinerants but presidents of local churches, while John was in Irenaeus’ words an “apostolic presbyter,” who traveled among Christian communities in Asia Minor and perhaps elsewhere. Hierapolis was only one of the churches John the Presbyter visited; there were others in which his authority was, or at least had been, respected. That the Diotrephes of 3 John, wherever he was, could expect a visit from the Presbyter mirrors Papias’ assumption that John was likely to show up at Hierapolis, and if he visited Hierapolis, it is certain that John visited Colossae and Laodicea as well. Ephesus lay about one hundred miles west, just south of the point where the Kayster reached the Aegean, and the association of the author of the Gospel with Ephesus is persistent from the apocryphal Acts of John about 150. If there were no literary tradition associating John with Ephesus it would still be improbable that an apostolic teacher who visited up-country Phrygia would have neglected Ephesus.32 The First Epistle, as has often been noticed, is not properly a letter, at least not a letter to an individual, but a circular tract, written at a time of crisis, addressing specific points of theology and morality and intended for many readers.33 Its form, didactic, without specific address, indicates the author’s responsibility for several, perhaps many, churches. The two short letters, 2 and 3 John, presuppose John’s authority and are addressed to at least two other churches, the church to whom the third letter is addressed and the church troubled by the self-seeking Diotrephes to which John’s emissaries have been sent.34 That these emissaries require support and hospitality— the addressee of 2 John is asked to “help them on the way”—suggests that the three communities are separated by journeys of some days (5–7). The use of the title “elect lady” for both the church from which John wrote 1 John and the recipient of his letter, infers communion but establishes no geographical relationship. Well-supported tradition locates John in Ephesus (Acts of John, Epistle of the Apostles, Irenaeus) and makes Ephesus the place of his death and burial (Polycrates, Eusebius), but there are indications of a wider Johannine geography. The Mingana colophon to the Gospel says that John the Younger spoke Greek in Bithynia, the assertion of an author whose first language was probably Syrian and who did not assume the ubiquity of koine. Bithynia at the turn of the century was administered as one province with Pontus, the territory lying along the southern shore of the

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Black Sea. Peter had evangelized or at least corresponded with Christians in Bithynia, probably before 60, and just after the turn of the century Pliny, the Roman governor from 108 to 111, was much vexed by the persistent presence of Christians, who constituted a movement of an age then to have had (now apostate) members in the seventies. Hoffman, in a revisionist study that took up Harnack’s view of Marcionism as Paulinsm gone wrong, wrote, “The geographical matrix of Marcionism is more comprehensible if we imagine a mission centering, in the first place, on Pontus-Bithynia.”35 The Pontus connection expands Johannine territory, as does the brief notice pointed out by Conybeare: “Johannes scripsit illud graece Antiochiae, nam permansit in terra usque ad tempus Traiani,” which agrees with the common claim that John lived into the reign of Trajan while making Antioch the place of writing.36 There is also a tradition, found in many manuscripts of the Epistles, that titled the Johannine letters Ad Parthos. This designation, accepted by Augustine and many reliable witnesses from the fourth through the eighth centuries, would locate the churches to whom 1 and 2 John were addressed as far east as the bilingual Greek-Aramaic borderland of Anatolia.37 Typically discounted as untrustworthy, it should be remembered that Parthians were named first among those who heard the Gospel in their own language at Pentecost (Acts 2:9), and that at the turn of the century Edessa on a tributary of the Euphrates and Dura-Europos further south on the right bank were frontier towns of Parthia, a geographically vast empire that at the height of its power stretched from China to Syria, its north-western border contiguous to eastern Cappadocia. Between 129 B. C., when the Parthians destroyed the army of Antiochus Sidetes and 116 A. D., when Trajan invaded and punished Parthia, Edessa enjoyed local autonomy under Parthian suzerainity.38 Parthia, never unresponsive to the politics of its Syrian neighbor, had intervened in Jerusalem in 39 B. C. to displace Hyrcanus II in favor of Antigonus, who was made king and high priest. Edessa, where Christianity had flourished early, located perhaps one hundred miles from the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, would later be included in Armenia, which itself claimed an ancient Christian tradition.39 The Syriac History of John, a wonder-filled but not heretical work, says that Ephesus was the first city to receive the gospel of Christ after Edessa, and even granting the late date of the Syriac text it is noteworthy that the point was raised.40

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One of the most obvious literary and intellectual relationships in early Christian literature is the similarity between the Ignatian letters, the Gospel, and the Johannine Epistles.41 Both John and Ignatius oppose the spiritualists who deny the incarnation and Ignatius sees that this denial leads to denial of the resurrection and the Eucharist. If John the Presbyter can be taken as the author or editor of John 6, Ignatius and John are together the earliest extrasynoptic witnesses to the doctrine that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus. The unanimity of orthodoxy is never easy to explain—Irenaeus wondered that the unlettered German barbarians had the same doctrine that was professed in civilized Gaul and attributed it to the fact that the Church has one heart.42 But the similarity of voice and thought between John and Ignatius is nonetheless so striking that it has been the occasion of muchfrustrated attempts to show some direct literary dependence of Ignatius on John.43 On this question the doctors differ; the verbal similarities being striking but inconclusive, depending upon the standard of proof one expects. But what is certain is that both these writers, with Polycarp, stand at the source of that catholic faith which Irenaeus presupposed and perfected in the Adversus haereses.44 The only hints we have suggesting Syria as the Gospel’s place of origin are Ignatius’ connection with Syrian Antioch, the similarities between the language of the Johannine and Ignatian epistles, and Theophilus of Antioch, who, in the first unambiguously orthodox citation of the Gospel, about 150, did not call John an apostle, but, citing John 1:1, simply located him among the spirit-bearing (πνευματοφὁροι) writers.45 Sanday speculated, “I have long thought that it would facilitate our reconstruction of the history of early Christian thought, if we could assume an anticipatory stage of Johannine teaching, localized somewhere in Syria, before the apostle reached his final home in Ephesus. This would account more easily than any other hypothesis for the traces of this kind of teaching in the Didache, and in Ignatius, as well as in some of the earliest Gnostic systems.” 46 Speculation then and speculation still, but the suggestion that the Gospel had a Palestinian or west Syrian origin has won ever-wider support since Sanday wrote.47 This hypothesis is driven in part by the distinctive nature of Johannine language. John writes an impeccable but unaccountably simple Greek in which Aramaists nonetheless discover the influence of that language; in Robinson’s words the Gospel is “the Greek of a man who has had it as his second language from youth but who still writes it with an accent. In other words he would have come from a bi-lingual part of Palestine and

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would have been perfectly competent in Greek even though it was not his native tongue.”48 Alternatively, it might be suggested that the Greek of the Gospel and First Epistle, displaying as its does a limited vocabulary and simple grammatical constructions, reflects the author’s careful regard for the audience to whom these were addressed. The territory in which Aramaic and Greek shared the linguistic ground stretched northward from Palestine to Syria and into Parthia. While the Ad Parthos claim, which implies that at the turn of the century John visited territory still considered Parthian, might seem improbable, especially when interest tends to settle on the westward expansion of Christianity, it is also a reminder that Christianity spread north and east from its cradle in Palestine into lands the common languages of which lie at the periphery of Greek linguistic influence and hence beyond the ready attention of much modern scholarship. The Gospel was propagated throughout the empire by the indefatigable travels of the apostolic and sub-apostolic generations, the details of which we are largely ignorant. 49 If the address of his first letter is descriptive of his journeyings, Peter, beginning at Antioch, had established congregations across interior Asia Minor including Pontus and Bithynia, Cappadocia and Galatia, before bearing witness in Rome. Paul, beginning in Syria had preached across Anatolia, through Cilicia, Phrygia, and Galatia, then, avoiding Asia and Bithynia by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, turned west at Troas to preach around the Mediterranean from Jerusalem to Illyricum.50 Ignatius reflected on a destiny that had brought the bishop of Antioch from Syria to the West.51 For John the Presbyter to have begun in Palestine (as Paul did) and then to have covered a territory that stretched from Ephesus to Hierapolis to Pontus-Bithynia and extended across Anatolia to Edessa would hardly have been considered heroic by first century standards. According to tradition Parthia was evangelized by Thomas, one of the twelve who is given a part in the narrative only in the Fourth Gospel, and whose relics were brought from distant India, where he is still venerated as the apostolic founder of that Church, to Edessa in the fourth century.52 If John’s territory stretched from Ephesus to Parthia on the headwaters of the Euphrates, it was no more extensive than that implied by the address of 1 Peter and by Paul’s missionary journeys, which he hoped would finally bring him to Spain. John came to Hierapolis and to the other churches he visited bearing the title presbyter that conferred authority and as representative of a tradition, the

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tradition in which Andrew stood first, before Peter, Philip having the second place of importance, and which included Nathanael, Thomas, and Matthew. Where he would have encountered this tradition or these apostles, a tradition so obviously eccentric to the Synoptics, is hidden in the much-obscured years between Pentecost and the destruction of the city in 69. The story was told differently by Peter in Rome and by Matthew writing in Hebrew or Aramaic in Jerusalem. There is no better guess than the tentative conclusion of Dodd that Johannine tradition belonged to Asia, and the claim that Marcion sought John’s approval are consistent with Irenaeus’ certainty that John wrote in Ephesus. The Muratorian tradition does not locate the gathering in which John had responded to the desire of the Church to have a written account based on the traditions he and his contemporaries knew by presiding at the Spirit-filled assembly at which the shared memories of what Andrew, Philip, and others of the Johannine seven had said were written down. Apart from accounts remembered, the authority John claimed was the authority of tradition, knowledge of what had been held by the Church from the beginning, which knowledge was rooted in experience of Jesus made accessible by the truth-inspiring Paraclete. Whether John had known all the principal apostolic voices represented in the Gospel (Andrew, Philip, Nathanael, Thomas) at first hand or simply known their traditions is problematic; John had surely known the Beloved Disciple Andrew. It is puzzling that Papias, although he knew the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John, was still much interested in the traditions recounted by the Presbyter and Aristion, preferring the living voice to written books, even though he recorded testimonies from John’s First Epistle, cited John frequently, and was able to give brief descriptions of the origins of Mark, Matthew, and John, the account of Markan origins resting on the authority of “the Presbyter.”53 Papias lived in a world in which there was both much writing, which the mid-century plethora of apocryphal gospels, letters and apocalypses attests, as well as an intense interest in many traditions about Jesus that were not written down. Papias did not yet view things written, the Gospels for example, as necessarily more reliable or complete than “the living and surviving voice.” It is discomfiting to think that the account of Jesus’ appearance by the Sea of Tiberias might have been lost had John not felt compelled to explain Jesus’ words to Andrew, this text being among the many things Jesus had done in the presence of his disciples (John 20:20, 21:25) which neither John (in chapters 1–20) nor perhaps any other Gospel

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had recorded, events known to the tradition but nowhere written down. The Gospel canon was not yet perfectly stable; Papias cited as scripture the Gospel of the Hebrews, a work in Aramaic that hovered about the fourfold canon for three centuries. Amidst this uncertainty, and granting his preference for remembered tradition, the Johannine corpus was valued by Papias and the church in Hierapolis. Papias had commented on the Apocalypse, had quoted 1 John and in one of the Five Books had said something about the writing of the Gospel of John. The Papias text claims that John was alive and speaking before Papias’ Interpretations was written, and the reference of the Anti-Marcionite Prologue to Papias’ description of the writing of the Gospel also dates the Gospel before the Interpretations, written perhaps about the turn of the century.54 When John the Presbyter visited his churches, he came as the bearer of remembered tradition resting on a testimony of a list of seven, effectively five, members of the Twelve, the order and composition of which echoes the use of the Fourth Gospel. It does not make much difference to the chronology whether that Philip who rested at Hierapolis was, as Polycrates claimed, and as the church in Asia believed, one of the Twelve or whether he was the evangelist of Acts, for in either case he would have been a (perhaps slightly younger) contemporary of the first Christian generation, and granting him at least six decades might have died about 70. His daughters, born perhaps in the thirties or forties, would have been alive at the turn of the century, when Papias, according to Eusebius, heard a wonderful tale in Hierapolis from one of the prophetesses who knew of one raised from the dead in their father’s lifetime. Where John the Presbyter might have learned what was said by Andrew, Peter, Philip, Nathanael and Thomas is a matter of speculation. Important as these Johannine apostles were, they were not named among the great lights of Asia by Polycrates because they rested elsewhere and were therefore not sources of authority for the church in Asia. Andrew at Patras in the Peloponnesus and Thomas in Edessa or India lent no authority to the church in Ephesus, nor, of course, did Peter or Paul, who awaited the resurrection in distant Rome, being thereby Victor’s principal witnesses to Roman tradition and authority. John traveled and taught as a stalwart of the church Ignatius calls catholic, a church which about 100 looked something like an important party to an ongoing controversy. Whatever the exhaustive meaning of the adjective may be, and however complicated and controversial its development in the post-

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Constantinian age, Ignatius’ catholic church had distinctive characteristics that the Johannine literature mirrors. Its life was framed around objective historical witness rooted in the apostolic mission. Routinely, letters from authorities written during the first two centuries exhort their readers to remain faithful to a given standard taught them by apostolic tradition. For Paul and John this was the teacher’s own authority as apostles sent by God representing a gospel delivered in the beginning. Paul delivered to the Corinthians what he had received from the Lord (1 Cor 11:23). John taught obedience to what was in the beginning. The point need not be labored. Paul tells the Galatians that if an angel should teach them another Gospel they are to consider that angel accursed (Gal 1:8). John says that to be in communion with God the readers must be in communion with him. 55 Elaine Pagels has explained in detail how exclusive, odious, and unrealistic that doctrine was in the opinion of the Gnostics, all of whom believed the experience of Christ was self-authenticating and subjective, the discovery of the true self and of God within.56 The ‘spirituals’ (πνευματίκοι) were scandalized by the exclusive historical claims of Paul, John, and Ignatius: “Others, outside our number…call themselves bishops and deacons as if they received their authority from God…. Those people are waterless canals.” 57 Themes of John’s three letters show that he was embroiled in the same controversy, perhaps at a somewhat earlier, less-defined stage, in which Ignatius and Polycarp were involved.58 Jesus had not come in the flesh; one might sin and still claim fellowship with God, the Eucharist was not the body and blood of Christ, salvation was effected through gnosis not regeneration, there would be no future judgment. The most certain fact we have about this spiritual heresy viewed generically is its ubiquity across a geography that stretched from Bithynia (Marcion), down the Ionian shore to Ephesus (the Ignatian epistles), to Antioch (Ignatius again), west to Rome and Gaul, south to Egypt (Valentinus), including, if the Ad Parthos ascription can be taken into account, Edessa at the border of Parthia. Ignatius, the first extracanonical Christian writer to oppose this system comprehensively, refused to name its exponents, and while Irenaeus and Justin named names, they wrote as though Marcion and Valentinus were species of one overarching error. 59 The heresy engaged by John, as represented in his letters might be Valetinianism or Cerinthianism, but the Prologue names Marcion as John’s opponent,60 and no convincing evidence can be offered that would gainsay the claim that the heresy John opposed was Marcionism or proto-Marcionism.

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Marcion, like John’s opponents, taught that there was darkness in God, at least in the sense that one could claim fellowship while ignoring the moral claims of love; that Jesus had not come in the flesh; that sin did not require confession or salvation righteousness.61 None of the great heretical systems could have been propagated with a success that called forth alarm and attack from men like Ignatius, John the Presbyter, Polycarp, Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian had they not been answers to challenging moral and theological questions that existed within or at the edge of Christian communities and had they not resonated to some degree with their members’ anxieties, hopes, and experience. The heresy the New Testament inveighs against, while it took the coloration sometimes of theosophy, sometimes of an exaggerated (and misunderstood) Paulinism, sometimes of alien, exotic, pagan themes, was generated within the church, or at least found there a friendly matrix, and in its most popular (and challenging) forms it represented itself as more universal, accessible, realistic and more rational than the theology of Ignatius (Valentinus) or as a more satisfying, dramatic, exciting recovery of the true meaning of the Pauline epistles (Marcion). While Irenaeus complained that the Valentinians introduced books alien to right doctrine, he also remarked bitterly that the Valentinians seemed to accept the scriptures but interpreted them in a sense alien to the catholic faith. When Ignatius traveled up the Asian coast heresy was no new thing. From Paul’s strictures against those who denied the future resurrection, to the lengthy denunciation in 2 Peter of those who promise liberty while they are themselves servants of corruption (3:15), presumably misinterpreters of Paul, to the obscure but ubiquitous and threatening Nicolaitans of Revelation, to the incarnation-deniers of Ignatius’ letters and the Johannine epistles runs an unbroken line. The Johannine communities were at the center of the storm as Christians attempted to deal with the heresy that had developed, inspired at least partly by the ‘realized’ eschatology known to Paul, Ignatius, and Polycarp as it was interpreted in the light of an experience of the Paraclete, that through its power might deprive the second advent of the importance it held for Pauline and Johannine Christians (1 Thess 4:13–18, John 21:22–23). This tone is evident in the Gospel and Epistles. In the Fourth Gospel, in Robinson’s words, eschatological concern runs deep, but it is pushed into the background by present experience and characterized by the pious caution of John’s assurance: “We do not know what we shall be but we know that when

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he appears we will be like him for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Love for the person of Jesus who first loved us is in the foreground, the sweeping themes of the apocalyptic drama, represented by the vision of the prophet John, while affirmed as part of the Gospel, are in the penumbra. Yet eager anticipation of the Lord’s return was central to Johannine faith to a degree that made the death of the Beloved Disciple before the Parousia a disconcerting difficulty requiring the resolution proposed in John 21: 22–23. In the contest of ideas evident in the Epistles, John’s victories, if any, were qualified by his sharing, at least verbally, of certain themes with the schismatics, and, on a more practical level by his evident failure to prevent schism.61 Marcion’s disregard for the God of the created order and his contempt for the flesh overlapped the Johannine argument against “the world” although having in the long run very different meanings for John and the Marcionites. Raymond Brown has argued persuasively that the two parties represent two interpretations of the same Johannine gospel. John has an explanation for the principle on which the fellowship that constitutes right faith rests; the same principle implied by Irenaeus’ observation that the church has one heart; “They went out from us because they were not of us” (1 John 2:19). The second letter warns the church not to receive those dissidents who deny that Jesus has come in the flesh. The Third Epistle displays the Presbyter’s anxious concern for a flock that is being ravaged by a ‘spiritual’ religion. There are now those who will not extend hospitality, an act of practical importance having almost sacramental significance to his emissaries. In this situation John makes the dramatic claim that communion with him is the test of communion with God. The presbyter’s admonition: “We belong to God, anyone who listens to us belongs to God, anyone who does not listen to us does not belong to God ” (1 John 4:6) is an exposition of Jesus’ prayer for his disciples, “As Thou didst send me into the world, so I send you” (John 17:17), and of his commission to them of 20:21: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” The disciples go into the world with the authority of the Father to teach and to forgive. Fortunately, we can know something of the teaching of John the Presbyter from his three letters, all written in an attempt to confirm the faith received “from the beginning” and to set right those of ‘spiritual’ mind who believed that there was darkness in God, that sin was the result of createdness, that gnosis was better than regeneration, and above all, that Jesus had not come in the flesh. These polemical points are propaedeutic to the great

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themes of Johannine teaching. The problem of post-baptismal sin would challenge the church into the early third century, when it was still a matter of controversy capable of causing schism. In part this difficulty was caused by the experience of Christians who even after faith had led them to the sacraments fell into sin. The difficulty the experience of the Church raised is mirrored in the warning of Hebrews (6:4–6,10:31–36) that those once forgiven who fell away would find no repentance and hence no forgiveness, as well as the question of the meaning of the “unpardonable” sin. 62 The Shepherd of Hermas, which might be considered a treatise of post-baptismal sin, now often seen as puzzling and prolix, was bound with the Codex Sinaiticus, and can be read as teaching (guardedly) that there may be repentance for post-baptismal sin, a position and a book that Tertullian described with derision.63 1 John 5:17 attests the belief of the Johannine community that deadly or mortal, sins for which the prayers of the church are ineffective, were part of Christian experience, an experience that was to be read in the context of the promise of forgiveness in 1 John 1:7–10, and especially in the light of John 19:22–23, a text the implications of which were not realized until, in the controversy of the 220s between Pope Callistus and Hippolytus the power of the apostolic ministry to forgive mortal sins was established. 64 The alternative solution, proposed by John’s opponents in 1 John and in one form or another by other Gnostic teachers offered enlightenment rather than regeneration, knowledge rather than repentance. John’s erring children claim that they may “know” Jesus and persist in sin. The author’s answer, rooted in his own experience of Christ and anchored in tradition, is a double reference to the holiness of God (in whom there is no darkness) and to believers who say “I know him” but do not keep his commandments. John claims that sin is real, “sin is unrighteousness,” not simply a failure of selfunderstanding. Sin is a fact of Christian experience; the claim that we have not sinned makes Jesus Christ a liar. Sin is not an unavoidable condition caused by createdness but a fault of the will that must be confessed so that it can be forgiven and cleansed by the blood of Jesus. The heart of 1 John is the message of the condescending love of God who has sent his son to accomplish the atoning sacrifice and given to the church the Paraclete, and it is the work of the Paraclete to create in Christians a righteous heart. What would later be seen as the law-grace tension in Paul is reconciled in 1 John as it would be characteristically in the future by the assertion that the love God has poured into our hearts is realized in us by obedience, an

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obedience not under the law but an obedience of the new heart which is enabled by living in Jesus Christ through the empowering grace of the Paraclete. It is perhaps anachronistic to say that first century writers predicted later problems and proposed their solutions, but it is certain that this principle was at the heart of the answer given by the church in its journey through time: life in Christ is a gift of love that produces holiness. John 20:21, the Johannine version of the gift of the keys, here given to all the Johannine apostles not only to Peter, is the answer to forgiveness of those sins for which the prayers of the Church are ineffective, for which nothing less than a renewed appeal to the cross of Christ mediated by those whom Jesus has sent will be sufficient. In the long run, after two centuries of wrestling with the problem John had in principle solved, the Church would answer that no sin is unforgiveable. The crisis came in a nexus of events that involved Hippolytus, the Johannine writings, the Logos doctrine and the lingering problem of postbaptismal sin. The communities over whom John exercised authority were rich in apocalyptic expectation. Asian eschatology was not developed simpliciter in response to this Gnostic de-historicizing, for the Apocalypse was rooted in Old Testament prophecy and pre-Christian inter-testamental apocalypses. Eusebius was wrong in making Papias the principal exponent of the doctrine he and Dionysius found too materialistic or ‘Jewish,’ a doctrine wellestablished long before Papias wrote.65 The Apocalypse of the prophet John and its developments, orthodox and heretical, nonetheless provided an answer to the ‘spiritual’ theology of the Gnostics and Marcion. It is remarkable that during the first half of the second century both Montanism, with its pronounced tendency to realize the kingdom in Phrygia, and Marcionism, with its radical depreciation of history, sought, not without some success, to occupy Asian ground. At mid-century Paul’s high regard for prophecy as the most desirable gift was shared by the Didache (with a nascent reserve), Justin, and the Phrygian millenarians. Irenaeus clearly thought fear of prophecy unwarranted. By mid-third century Gnosticism, despite efforts like those of Clement of Alexandria to baptize gnosis, had been marginalized, and although Epiphanius would find Valentinians in Egypt in the fifth century, he could describe their heresy as the bones of a dead serpent. 66 Gnosticism, ‘spiritual’ religion, would survive outside the Great Church, in the Paulicians—the name tells their story—, the Bogomiles and the medieval sects

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of which the Albignesies were most virulent. The community of the Presbyter was familiar with, was marked by, and had surmounted the challenge of both ‘spiritual’ religion and heretical prophecy. On the eschatological question the literature of the Johannine communities ranged across the metaphorical scale from the realism of Papias, through the stark, mythic beauty of the canonical Apocalypse, to the confident imaginal agnosticism of John the Presbyter: “We know not what we shall be, but when he appears we shall be like Him” (1 John 2:28, 3:2), which was nevertheless set in the context of the day of judgment (1 John 4:3).67 Papias’ affection for the strong images of the Apocalypse did not inhibit his use of John’s First Epistle. The author of the Epistles and the editor of the Gospel, John the Presbyter, was a uniquely gifted writer and theologian, remembered by Polycarp from his youth in Smyrna, who had known apostles and apostolic traditions, whose identity was subsumed into that of the son of Zebedee on the evidence of Irenaeus. It is not difficult to sympathize with Irenaeus’ anxious care that the Gospel of John be given a defensible apostolic history or to see that he was convinced Polycarp had known that John whom he believed had been an eyewitness and who therefore just might be the son of Zebedee. But this literary genius and profound teacher of the truth who loved and lived within the adventure of the Paraclete deserves a better place in the memory of the church he gave some of its greatest writings. If there were two tombs bearing his name in Ephesus, one was surely that of John the Presbyter, who “fell asleep in Ephesus.” The written witness of John of Ephesus, the teacher and presbyter, holds a unique place in the history of the faith of the Church as it would unfold in the conciliar period. Because the Gospel lives perfectly in the heart of the Church, Scripture cannot be said to establish the faith. It does, as Newman pointed out prove the faith by bearing witness to the truths the Church teaches from its apostolic heart. If the Gospel of John and the First Epistle had not existed, the teaching of the church would have developed as it did, but because of the very existence of these books it is possible to see just how the church unfolded the teaching that it had always possessed. The Gospel of John does not use the word Trinity, but in its text are found the expression of the relations of the Father to the Son in the Holy Spirit. And of course the text does not use the word ‘transubstantiation,’ but one who comes to John 6 with knowledge of that doctrine will find it there. Neither Gospel nor the First Epistle details confessional practice, the regularizing of which would

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take centuries—if indeed it has ever been completely regularized— but if one comes to the text with the sense of medieval and modern practice, one finds that practice supported by John 20:21–23 and 1 John 5:16–17. The journey from the practice and faith of the Church of the third century to the Gospel and First Epistle and back again is obvious and easy; absent the Fourth Gospel that journey would have been difficult. 68

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The Johannine Corpus after Irenaeus But someone will say to me, you adduce a thing strange to me, when you call the Son the Word. For John indeed speaks of the Word, but it is by a figure of speech. Nay, it is no figure of speech. Hippolytus, Against Noetus

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renaeus identified the author of the Gospel as John the disciple of the Lord, the Beloved Disciple, and called him an eyewitness, allowing, if not encouraging, the inference that he was an apostle, the son of Zebedee, one of the Twelve. A certain tentativeness on the part of Irenaeus—he could have settled what has been a centuries-long dubitatio with one sentence—and the unwillingness of Polycrates, while accepting Irenaeus’ identification of John as the Beloved Disciple, to call the John he knew the apostle John, did not prevent the almost universal assumption that John was one of the Twelve. Irenaeus also assumed that Gospel, Epistles, and Apocalypse were by the same apostle John. After 200 the conviction that John the Son of Zebedee was the Beloved Disciple and author of all five books was embedded in Christian imagination so deeply that the criticisms of Dionysius of Alexandria and Eusebius could not shake it.1 As far as the evidence goes, the period of most intense argument against the orthodoxy of the Gospel was not mid-century, when Heracleon and Valentinus were using the Gospel to make their case, but 180 to 250, when for a time there would be an attempt on the part of authorities later taken as representatives of catholic orthodoxy (Gaius, Dionysius of Alexandria as

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well as nameless ‘conservatives’) to discredit the Johannine books, not only through putative associations with Gnosticism or even because of the Gospel’s dissimilarities to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but as the matrix of doctrinal error. This attempt began with a charge with which Irenaeus was familiar: the Gospel’s doctrine of the Paraclete supported prophecy at a time when prophecy was passing into disfavor.2 In the background was the Quartodeciman controversy, the Asian conviction, supported by Polycarp, Apollinarius of Hierapolis, Melito of Sardis, and Polycrates of Ephesus, attributed to the apostle John himself, that Easter should fall on the very day, 14 Nissan in the Jewish calendar, rather than on the Sunday following, which was the Roman custom. When Polycarp visited Anicetus in Rome about 154, the two agreed to disagree, but forty years later Pope Victor, still attempting to suppress the eastern custom, proposed to excommunicate Asia, calling forth Polycrates’ famous appeal to the ‘great lights’ who slept in Asia, an early attempt on both parts to settle doctrinal questions by appeal to apostolic authority and ancient tradition. By the turn of the century, the tensions between Asia and Rome had effloresced into fundamental questions about the Christian doctrine of God, and once again the Gospel and Apocalypse were at the center of the storm. Broadly, the contest could be seen as the protest of Hippolytus, Irenaeus, and Justin (seconded by Tertullian of Carthage) against the conservative orthodoxy of the period 200–220, represented by Gaius, Zephrinus, Callistus, and Sabellius at Rome, and in Asia by Praxeas and Noetus. The countervailing tradition of Hippolytus held for the legitimacy of prophecy, a certain moral rigorism, an eschatology that emphasized the resurrection of the flesh and the dramatic renewal of creation upon the return of Christ, and the Logos doctrine while the Romans and their allies defended the generous forgiveness of even serious post-baptismal sins, remained leery of the eschatology of the Apocalypse, and were convinced that the Logos doctrine might prejudice the unity of God. The controversy would be marked by a bitterness that ended in a schism between Hippolytus and Pope Callistus that lasted into the pontificates of Callistus’ successors Urban (222–30) and Pontianus (230–35). The representatives of these two enconstellated opinions did not contest all of the four ideas with equal conviction, but each played a part in the arguments of the protagonists.

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By 200, as the Church sought to enunciate its apostolic heritage fully, the claim that Jesus is truly God, the Son of God, as experienced by Christians and as described in John 1:1–14 and Colossians 1:15–20, had brought the inherited monotheism of Judaism under intellectual pressure. Two ideas about the very nature of God had, unsurprisingly, been advanced; Justin Martyr represented the belief that God is Father, Logos, and Prophetic Spirit. In his teaching the tri-personal nature of God was clearly stated, but his exposition was subject to the charges that the divine unity was not fully protected and to the imputation of a kind of implicit subordinationism in which the Father enjoyed a priority in time and importance. 3 Against this stood the inherited conviction that the Lord is One God, the first principle of the theology of the prophets. The highly sophisticated ideas of non-temporal origin and dependent equality, the Son and Holy Spirit existing eternally; the assertion that there was not when He was not; the derivation of the Son or Word and Holy Spirit from the Father (the monarchy of the Father); these ideas were in the making and would not begin to be settled until Nicea in 325, and would remain controversial into the present, when the question of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, from the Father and the Son, separates much of eastern Christendom from the Latin West. Meanwhile one party, the heirs, broadly, of Justin Martyr, called advocates of the other Patripassians because if the Persons are not real, God the Father, not the Son, must become incarnate and suffer. To the Patripassians, defenders of the Logos tradition of Justin would be, as Callistus named Hippolytus, “ditheists,” believers in two gods.4 The Gospel and Apocalypse of John lay at the center of the argument, for they contained the proof texts for the defense of prophecy and for the Logos doctrine, while the Apocalypse was prophecy achieved. As early as 185 Irenaeus had faulted those who objected to that aspect of the Gospel of John in which Jesus promised to send the Paraclete. 5 Those whom Irenaeus chastised were not Valentinians but were those suspicious of the persistent tradition of ecstatic prophecy, highly valued by no less an authority than Paul, which from the beginning, because its advocates claimed immediate inspiration, posed a challenge to good order, a challenge evident in I Corinthians, implicitly disruptive in the Didache, that required disciplinary notice. It is impossible to show that the New Prophecy that appeared in Phrygia about 150 was untouched by pagan influences, but it is clear that the move-

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ment drew on sources internal to the church of Irenaeus, and equally clear that he did not consider it a heresy. The Quartodeciman controversy about Easter, the Phrygian difficulty about prophecy, the tension between defenders of Monarchianism and the advocates of the Johannine Logos doctrine were not matters easily composed, partly because there was no clear geographical line between the various protagonists and their schools at the turn of the century. Some Asian advocates of the New Prophecy, Noetus of Smyrna and Praxeas, who, according to Tertullian took the heresy to Rome, were also Patripassians, a doctrine associated with the conservative Monarchianism of the Roman Church.6 The exact nature of the Phrygian heresy, described so trenchantly by its enemies, is also debatable, and it is still impossible to square charges of licentiousness and covetousness brought against the prophetesses and the movement generally with the conviction of Tertullian that the new prophecy was raised in opposition to the carnality of the Great Church. Proclus thought he was arguing Asian tradition, and no less a mind than Tertullian adhered to the Phrygian heresy about 207, while Hippolytus acknowledged that the Montanists, routinely denounced as heretics, shared the faith of the Church about God the creator and “receive many things as the Gospel testifies concerning Jesus Christ.”7 On its moral side Montanism, rigorist as it may have been, presented itself as an attempt to maintain what its authors conceived to be the ancient praxis in the face of the increasing tendency of the church to find itself at home in the world, a church Tertullian described as “carnal-minded.”8 Even the Roman bishop Victor (189–98) vacillated when his attempt to bring Asia to the Roman custom regarding the date of Easter proved unpopular and was at first unsure that the prophet and prophetesses of the Phrygian heresy were heretics. For these actions Victor was something of a hero to Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus; to Irenaeus because he had relented on the paschal question. Hippolytus, called Victor blessed and compassionate, and Tertullian praised Victor because he had at one time recognized the prophetic gifts of Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla. 9 But when Victor died in 198 the church was set for a many-dimensioned crisis, with concerns about prophecy and the date of Easter expanding to involve the development of Trinitarian doctrine, an enterprise that necessarily implicated the Gospel of John with its dramatic assertion that the Logos is the pre-existent Son.10

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This body of conflicting ideas broke into a many-faceted controversy that engaged the Church East and West when about 200 the Roman presbyter Gaius wrote his Dialog against the Asian Montanist Proclus, attacking the Apocalypse and probably the Gospel, and supporting his argument with an appeal to Peter and Paul, whom he put up against the claim of Proclus that prophecy was an ancient tradition represented by Philip and his daughters. Proclus was an important teacher among the adherents of the Phrygian heresy whom Tertullian would describe as Proclus noster. That Gaius was an enemy of the new prophecy, after about 200 identified with Montanus and Montanism, and that this caused Gaius to reject the Apocalypse is certain, a rejection that alone might have prompted Hippolytus to write his now lost Heads Against Gaius,11 the argument of which may have been developed in his lost On the Gospel and Apocalypse of John. From other works, On Christ and Antichrist and On Daniel, it is known that Hippolytus was a friend of prophecy and an advocate of John with its Logos doctrine. At about the same time Noetus and Praxeas undertook a defense of a strict Monarchianism, a doctrine that stressed the unity of God to the point of making the Persons mere aspects or functions, against defenders of the Logos doctrine, a hostility that Praxeas took with him from Asia to Rome, where it found sponsorship in the Monarchian circle of Sabellius. Sabellius and his sympathizers, who at one point included Pope Callistus, were vigorously attacked by prophecy-friendly defenders of John’s doctrines of the Logos and the Prophetic Spirit; Hippolytus wrote Against Praxeas about 213, charging that Praxeas “did a twofold service for the devil at Rome; he drove away prophecy and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete and he crucified the Father.” Praxeas denied both the legitimacy of the new prophecy and, refusing to accept the Logos doctrine, denied the tri-personal nature of God, becoming thereby a Patripassian. In his treatise Against Noetus, Hippolytus argued against those who considered it a strange thing to call the Son the Word, citing as authorities the Gospel and the figure of Christ the Warrior King, the Word of God, from the Apocalypse (19:13), and attacking Callistus in his Refutation not only for laxity but for encouraging Sabellianism, a Monarchian defense of the unity of God that necessarily derogated the Logos doctrine.12 Epiphanius, writing a century and a half after the imbroglio of the period 200-230, in a too-clever play on words, named the opponents of the Gospel ‘alogi’ on the grounds that “they do not accept the Word [Logos] that John preaches.”13 These were not obscure, ‘irrational’

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heretics but representatives of the Monarchians, Asian and Roman, of the pontificates of Victor (189–98), Zephrinus (198–217) and Callistus (217–22). Dionysius of Alexandria described Calistus a half-century after the fracas as teaching “great blasphemy against the Almighty God,…and containing much unbelief respecting his Only-Begotten Son and the first-born of every creature, the Word.…”14 Noetus, Praxeas, and Sabellius would have replied that they were defending the unity of God against the dangerous novelty of the Logos doctrine. This was the context in which Hippolytus wrote his now lost Defense of the Gospel and Apocalypse according to John, in which he defended the Johannine doctrine of the Logos and Revelation against the Monarchians and prophecy against its gainsayers. 15 The tradition that the apostle John was the author of the five Johannine books went unchallenged until the criticism of Dionysius of Alexandria in the third century. Hippolytus may or may not have been a disciple of Irenaeus—Photius makes this claim about 850—but in Hippolytus Irenaeus’ defense had been made secure. By mid-third century, whatever doubts the Roman church may have entertained about the Johannine books in the age of Hippolytus were dissipated; the Logos doctrine had become the centerpiece of the developing doctrine of the Trinity, and the eschatology of the Apocalypse was the established orthodoxy of the Roman church. But the controversies of the period 185–220 left their mark. The defense of Quartodecimanism would issue in the paschal controversy that has persisted, one cause of the unreconciled schism between East and West.16 Criticism of the eschatology of the Apocalypse, begun by Dionysius in his controversy with Nepos and perpetuated in Eusebius, would result finally in its near exclusion from the liturgy in the East.17 There are at least thirty-six catacombs around the city of Rome, the largest concentration lying between the Via Appia and the Via Ardentina, in an area which includes the Catacombs of Callistus and Priscilla. Contemporaneous with Hippolytus’ Defense, perhaps a half-century earlier, scenes taken from the Gospel of John appear in both these catacombs. The Samaritan woman at the well and the raising of Lazarus, images that must rest on familiarity with the Gospel of John, are among these. These images were dated to the early second century by Giuseppe Wilpert, although the early dating has been contested and a late second or early third century date is now generally accepted.18 The Apocalypse, which had required defense at the turn of the second century, by mid-fourth century enjoyed a dramatic triumph in the West. The

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fathers of the third century wrote doctrinal tracts and apologetic works but seldom commentaries on the text of any canonical book. Victorinus of Pettau’s commentary on the Apocalypse, written perhaps about 280, is among the first, and displays an intense interest in the images that work presents. Victorinus was a Greek speaker who lived near the eastern border of Pannonia. The same interest was much in evidence in Rome, where an iconography based upon the Apocalypse became part of a common public architecture that appeared in the apses and on the triumphal arches of the great Roman churches for at least seven hundred years, from Santa Prassede at the foot of the Esquiline about 394 to San Marco in the Piazza Venezia of 1100 and Francesco Rutusi’s thirteenth-century façade mosaic at Santa Maria Maggiore. This iconography was canonized in 440 when Leo I made the Apocalypse the subject of frescos on the faćades of St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s. This pattern would soon appear across Rome, at Santa Prassede, Santa Maria Maggiore, SS. Cosmas and Damian, and a dozen others still standing. 19 This attachment to the Apocalypse of John and to the theology of history it represents, involving as it does the transformation or renewal of the created order at the return of Jesus, would become one of the defining characteristics of Latin Christendom. Walter Lowrie wrote, “It is interesting to note this unquestioned reliance upon the Apocalypse at a time when its canonicity was seriously questioned in influential quarters.” 20 The characteristic Roman mosaic composition featured three registers or zones: the first, on the flat surface of the triumphal arch, presented the company of heaven as represented in Revelation 4:2–5:14. Centered on the arch is the rainbow-encircled throne of the Lamb, the rainbow representing the One. Before the Lamb lies the scroll of history with its seven seals, this flanked by the seven lights, three on one side, four on the other, representing the sevenfold presence of the Holy Spirit (Isa 11:2–3; Rev 5:6). Surrounding this central image were the four great animals (not originally identified with the four Gospels), who in the Apocalypse praise the Lamb unceasingly (Rev 4:8), and the angels, the whole framed in the spandrels of the arch by the twenty-four elders, twelve on each side, offering their crowns to the Lamb (Rev 4:9–10).21 The apse itself depicts the return of Christ to an Edenic or paradisial world of Genesis (2:10) and Revelation (22:1) represented by a miniature landscape with two palm trees (sometimes with the phoenix of eternal life), and including some representation of the sea that is now no home for Leviathan, and in that sense “is no more” (Rev 21:1) but still is

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beautiful or glassy. At the center of this central zone Christ is returning, with Peter and Paul “caught up in the air to meet the Lord” (I Thess 4:17). 22 The third zone, across the bottom of the apse composition, based on Revelation 18:1–5, depicts the sheep of Christ moving from aediculae, Jerusalem, the church of the patriarchs at the right; Bethlehem, the church of the New Covenant at the left, toward the Lamb of God who stands on Mount Zion, from which flows the river of Genesis 1:10–13 with its four streams, now became the river of life of Revelation 22:1. Thus the setting of the liturgy directed the faithful to contemplate God the Blessed Trinity and the whole company of heaven, the certain return of Christ to a renewed creation at a time soon or late known to the Father, and the blessedness that awaited the companions of Christ in the New City. This composition does not always appear entire but its elements are almost always indicated. In Roman fashion the Renaissance showed some respect for these splendors but also did much damage, as at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Santa Prassede, the Church of Cosmas and Damian at the Forum, and Santa Maria Maggiore where the apse mosaics were cut down or replaced to suit Renaissance architectural taste. 23 This common iconography is represented with variations of style, sometimes with mythic realism, sometimes with an allegorical spareness. At Santa Pudenziana (c. 394) the scene was rendered with Hellenistic naturalism and at Santa Prassede, two centuries later and perhaps five hundred yards up the Esquiline, the more common stylized, Italo-Byzantine version appears. In one well-represented iteration of the idea, the Lamb gives way to a naturalistic depiction of Christ’s face and in another to an enthroned cross representing the Lamb slain, as at San Paulo fuori le Mura. Typically prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, were included in the spandrels of the triumphal arch with the elders. This image appears on sarcophagi of the third and fourth century. 24 There being no place for the grand panorama on a sarcophagus, the second and third registers are synthesized, typically depicting Christ, the Lamb of God, having returned to Mount Zion, the four rivers of Genesis and the Apocalypse always represented by four distinctive tear-drop or rope-like shapes. The depiction of the four rivers was sometimes taken as an opportunity to include harts, drinking from the waters of life that flow from the mountain, a reference to Psalm 42:1, as in the great Torriti apse mosaic at San Giovanni in Laterano. The paradisial character of the renewed creation is represented in abbreviated form, by two palm trees that bracket the figure of Christ.

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The new creation is represented in the Apocalypse by a garden, but the garden is walled and is called a city, “the holy city, New Jerusalem” (Rev 21:2). In Santa Pudenziana Christ has returned to the New Jerusalem, here imagined as the perfection of the Palestinian city, its skyline dominated by Constantinian churches. There, in what is perhaps the earliest surviving example of the Roman apse pattern, Jesus and the Twelve are modeled in Hellenistic style and the two cities are represented not by aediculae at the margins of the apse composition, which is typical, but by two women, one identified by her dress as Jewish (Jerusalem), the other Greek (Bethlehem). The four great animals, not yet holding Gospels, hover above the renewed creation, which is represented by two palm trees that bracket the figure of Christ. The New Jerusalem found allegorical architectural expression at San Stephano Rotondo on the Caelian hill which, while perhaps also influenced by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, was designed to mirror the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21, with its three gates at the four compass points.25 The chronological and geographical influence of the Roman traditional iconography, ubiquitous in Italy, extended across the West and persisted into the fifteenth century. At Canterbury Cathedral about 1360 Edward the Black Prince looks up into a tester depicting Revelation 5. Just beneath the surface of Jan van Eyck’s “Adoration of the Lamb” at St. Bavo’s in Ghent, certainly one of the most remarkable creations of the fifteenth century or indeed of any time and place, lies the traditional Roman iconography, transformed into an unexampled late-Gothic elegance.26 As at Santa Prassede a thousand years earlier the scene is paradisial, the walled city containing a garden of Revelation 21. A single palm tree recalls the paired palms of the Roman original. The Lamb standing on the altar pours his blood into the chalice of salvation. The fountain in the foreground discharges its waters in four streams, recalling the four rivers. The angels swing their censers, while the entire contemporary company, saints, virgins, hermits, pilgrims, bishops, offers adoration and praise. The rainbow surrounds the representation of the Holy Spirit. The elements are composed differently in Ghent in 1430 and there are distinctively fifteenth-century touches—the pillar that recalls the second sorrowful mystery of the rosary for example—but the reference to the iconography of the Apocalypse as it appeared in fourth-century Rome is unmistakable.

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What the Roman program of icon-making represents is the triumph in the West of the Pauline-Irenaean theology, the culmination of an incarnational theology that argued from Paul’s reflection that the whole world will burst into glory at Christ’s return to Irenaeus’ principle that real things must have a real future, not passing away into things that are not but advancing into things that are.27 But as the Apocalypse became established in Rome and the West, it was increasingly unpopular in the East. About 250 Dionysius of Alexandria, in his attempt to answer Nepos, who had written Against the Allegorists, a defense of what Dionysius considered a Jewish-like understanding of the Last Things, was unwilling to reject the book because many held it in high esteem. He nevertheless counseled reserve because its Greek was barbarous and its representation of the Last Things too patient of an ‘unspiritual’ eschatology.28 St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Theodoret did not include it in the canon at the time that the Apocalypse was emblematic of orthodoxy in Italy, and the book was originally omitted from the Peshitta and the Armenian texts. Amphilochius of Iconium, at the precise moment (ca. 394) when the mosaicist was covering the apse of Santa Pudenzianna with the Christ in the New Jerusalem, wrote “The Revelation of John some approve, but the most consider it spurious.”29 When the facades of the great Roman basilicas were covered with images taken from the Apocalypse the walls of churches in Constantinople were bare.30 Greek distaste for the vivid, mythic images of the Apocalypse did not fade; at the Trullanum, the Greek synod of 692, the representation of Christ as the Lamb was prohibited, upon which Pope Sergius, rejecting the decision of the synod, introduced at the fractio in the Mass the Agnus Dei: Ecce Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. It was Sergius who renewed the image on St. Peter’s façade taken from the Apocalypse 5.31 Given that the Johannine books, despite eastern reserve regarding the Apocalypse, were valued in the Church, what, apart from knowledge gleaned from these texts themselves, could be known from external sources about the author or authors between the second century, the earliest date proposed for the Anti-Marcionite Prologue and the Muratorian Canon, and the sixteenth century? Granting that the apostolic authorship of the Gospel was not seriously questioned until about 1800, texts that pointed, albeit ambiguously, toward another tradition were always available. The Anti-Marcionite Prologue to John was not an uncommon text. The extant manuscript tradition

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runs to the ninth century, with scholarly consensus locating their original in the third century, and these texts depended perhaps on the shadowy Ecclesiastical History and, at least in the case of the Prologue to John, on the second of Papias’ Five Books, a work widely available in the early Middle Ages. After the text of the Prologue was published by Thomasius in 1689, others manuscripts were identifed.32 Wordsworth and White published two in the 1898 edition of the Latin New Testament. In 1901 F. C. Burkitt described one of these, Codex Toletanus of the tenth century, as giving “the earliest form known to us of a very remarkable theory of the origin of the Fourth Gospel,” and in his 1928 article De Bruyne cited ten manuscripts. So the constellation of apologetic claims: that Johannine authorship was not anachronistic, that Papias had written something about the Gospel, and that John had rejected Marcion when he brought writings from the brothers in Pontus was widely available. The rejection of Marcion by John is well-represented in the miniatures and illuminated evangelaries of the tenth and eleventh centuries.33 The account included in the Muratorian Canon now appears as a unique witness to an otherwise undocumented history, but this was probably not always the case, and whether the lines describing the composition of John belong to the second century or the fourth, wherever it was current the reflective reader would have been challenged to reconcile the account given in the famous four lines, which account clearly differentiated the writer and the apostolic source, from the surrounding context formed by the common assumption that the Gospel of John was written by the apostle, a witness, who was the Beloved Disciple. And finally there was the text of Papias’ Five Books itself, referenced in the Anti-Marcionite Prologue and available throughout the first millennium. Every reader of the Prologue was reminded that Papias had written something about the Gospel of John. Whether it was Papias or the lost Ecclesiastical History or some other unknown source, there is something behind not only Eusebius but also behind Jerome and Victorinus of Pettau, all of whom reminded the reader that the Gospel was a spirit-inspired, communal effort. A cluster of texts of the second to fourth centuries: the Prologue, the Muratorian Canon, Papias, Jerome, and Victorinus points toward an alternative account. And even if an account suggested by these sources was not taken to challenge the common tradition directly, so many indications of its existence might have caused second thoughts.

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Perhaps the circumstance that established most firmly the idea that the apostle and the Beloved Disciple were one, the son of Zebedee, was the invention and popularity north of the Alps of the rood, its crucifix flanked by the Blessed Virgin and the Beloved Disciple, assumed to be St. John, which drove home the conviction that John 19:25, thus interpreted, settled the question of authorship. What the rood did not establish the Last Gospel, read at every Mass from 1200 to 1965, surely encouraged. After critical scholarship blossomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the traditional claims were challenged, but the persistent conservatism of popular religious experience in English-speaking lands, augmented by romantic poetry, notably Robert Browning’s Death in the Desert, fixed in imagination a conviction that Tübingen could not efface. 34 This popular belief persists, occasionally supported still by impressive scholarship but challenged by a scholarly majority who hold, with varying certainty, that John the Apostle had no part in the making of the Fourth Gospel. But there is another tradition. That tradition is founded on one whom, in the opinion of his disciples, Jesus loved, who returned that love by imitating the humility of the Lamb of God. If the Gospel of John is read not as a complement to Synoptic tradition but as a work representing an independent tradition, written by John the Presbyter and given apostolic authority by Andrew, whose memories, as with the memories of his brother Peter and the other Johannine disciples Philip, Nathanael, and Thomas, it renders intelligible and credible, much that is often considered unreliable and puzzling, leaving unresolved only one claim: the implied evidence of Irenaeus that John was the son of Zebedee, one of the Twelve, and the Beloved Disciple. Once that claim is seen by a scholarly majority to be at best uncertain, the field of evidence can be read to illuminate the interpretation of the Gospel’s text here proposed, and along the way to shed new light on the history of the church in the first century.

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Coda: Andrew after Constantine Andrew was verily a brother of the glorious Apostle Peter, through the fate of birth, through the community of faith, through the dignity of belonging to the apostolic college, and through the glory of martyrdom, so that they whom Your Grace has united during the course of this life with so many bonds of piety are joined in the heavenly kingdom with a similar crown. Leonine Sacramentary, 5th century

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he middle decades of the second century are the years in which the Gnostic exegetical involvement with the Gospel of John represented by the writings of Valentinus, Ptolemaeus, and Heracleon were most intense and during which the apocryphal writings bearing Andrew’s name (as well as the names of other Johannine apostles, notably Philip and Thomas) were being written. Among these the Acts of Andrew, popularized in a recension by Gregory of Tours, offered a catalog of the miracle stories with which the Middle Ages were much taken. Gregory’s version holds a special place in vernacular Latin literature alongside a longer version marked by Gnostic tendencies. The Acts locate Andrew in Patras, where he was martyred, in Ephesus, Epirus, just north of Patras across the Gulf of Corinth, and in Byzantium, Philippi, and Thessalonica.1 This apocryphal geography, whatever factual elements it may or may not preserve, fixed Andrew in imagination as an apostle of the East, so it was to be expected that when, early in the fourth century, with the founding of Constantinople and the coordinate necessity that the new city have a great

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church similar or perhaps superior to Rome’s St Peter’s, the tradition of Andrew’s martyrdom at Patras would be advanced and Andrew would begin to emerge, orthodoxy unquestioned, as the great apostle locally available to Byzantium. Since at least the late second century the presence of apostolic witness, attested by the possession of the apostles tomb and hence of his relics, had undergirded the claims of particular churches to speak with apostolic authority, an idea explicit in Irenaeus’ assertion of the indispensable nature of the witness of the Roman see because it had been founded by Peter and Paul and implicit in the exchange between Gaius and Proclus in the 190s. 2 Thus Constantine, intending the new city to be the equal of old Rome, and with an eye to his own burial among the apostles and inferentially as one of their number, began before his death in 337 the great search for relics that would bless his new city, a search continued by his successor Constantius II. Jerome is one authority for the claim that Constantius in 357 was able to secure relics of Andrew, Luke, and Timothy. Relics of Andrew were brought, presumably from Patras, to the Church of the Holy Apostles. 3 Obviously Constantine, who has sought the relics of all of the Twelve, thought of their witness as a corporate unity. Despite considerable hagiographical interest dating from the fourth century, the claim that the apostolic authority of Constantinople derived principally from Andrew was advanced later, first proposed by Dorotheus of Tyre near the middle of the fifth century. 4 The relation between authority and apostolic relics, never asserted as fervently in the East as in Rome, was nonetheless always in the background. While Francis Dvornik argues that Andrew was never put forward in the fourth century as an apostolic counterweight to Rome, there are hints of a more than ordinary interest in the apostle, so that St. John Chrysostom could praise Andrew as “Peter before Peter.”5 Paulinus of Nola recorded with approval Constantine's desire to bring the relics of Luke and Andrew to the Church of the Holy Apostles, a project accomplished after Constantine’s death. Saint Jerome asked, “Are we sacrilegious to go to the churches of the holy apostles? Was the Emperor Constantius sacrilegious when he brought the holy relics of Andrew, Timothy, and Luke to Constantinople?” 6 Andrew’s feast day on November 30 appears in the fourth century Gothic Calendar, the work of Ulfilas (d. 381), who had spent his early years in Constantinople, and at the same time in the Sacramentarium Leonianum, which includes propers for the Feast of St. Andrew.7

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From the fifth century there was a persistent association, pious more than political, of Andrew with Constantinople as of Peter and Paul with Rome. In 499 the Pope’s legate complained that there was no church dedicated to Peter and Paul, the apostles of Old Rome, in the new capital, which may have prompted the building of the Church of Peter and Paul by Justinian about 518. The next year, 519, relics of Peter and Paul were requested from Rome.8 Before the seventh century there is no evidence of any adversarial identification of Andrew with the East as counterweight to Petrine claims, but, perhaps presaging Eastern ecclesiology, while Peter and Paul are given great honor, Peter appears as an apostle among apostles. There are not many images from the Christian East belonging to the period before Iconoclasm, but one of these, from the sixth century, now in the Cleveland Museum, is a Byzantine tapestry of Egyptian provenance with medallions of the Twelve framing the image of the Virgin, which locates Andrew in the upper left-hand corner of the composition and Peter second down in the right-hand border.9 Andrew was always popular in the West, as the addition to St. Peter’s of an oratory dedicated to St. Andrew by Pope Symmachus (498–514) suggests. At about the same time (early sixth century) the archepiscopal chapel in Ravenna was dedicated to St. Andrew. In Rome there was a clear recognition that after their own apostles Peter and Paul, Andrew held a preeminent place. Thus the Roman liturgy, notably the Communicantes and the Libera nos, remember Peter, Paul, and Andrew in that order.10 Gregory the Great in 575 named his monastery on the Caelian hill for Saint Andrew, and John the Deacon wrote that Gregory administered the monastery not alone but with St. Andrew “non solus, sed socialiter cum beato Andrea apostolo,” perhaps a sixth century example of the spiritual ubiquity of the apostles, especially Andrew.11 And what is to be made of the panel in Santa Prassede’s Chapel of St Zeno that depicts John and Andrew flanking a central object, with Peter displaced to Andrew’s left, or of the much reworked Torriti mosaic of 1288– 94 in St John Lateran that locates Peter and Paul together on Jesus’ right and on his left John holding the first words of his Gospel: In principio erat verbum, with Andrew standing next? Liturgy, iconography, and churchbuilding mark Andrew’s importance for West as well as East, and there are what may be interpreted as hints of some relation between Andrew and John (identified as the author of the Gospel). The four identifiable apostolic portraits found in the newly discovered (June 2009) Catacomb of St. Thecla, dating from mid-fourth century, near St. Paul’s outside the walls are Peter,

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Paul, Andrew and John. In post-Constantinian iconography Andrew is the only apostle other than Peter and Paul who is presented in a consistent and identifiable way, always recognizable by his unruly hair and serrated beard; although that stereotype is challenged by the almost beardless Andrew in the catacomb of Thecla.12 It must have been in the period subsequent to the Latin invasion of Constantinople in 1204 that relics of St. Andrew were dispersed across Europe, to Amalfi, southeast of Naples, where Peter of Capua brought important relics of Andrew, including his skull, in 1208, and also to Milan, Brescia, Rouen, Nola, and Foldi. The story of St. Andrew as the apostle of Scotland is rooted in the tradition that St. Regulus, a priest of Patras, warned in a dream that Constantine would remove relics of St. Andrew, sequestered some of Andrew’s body and took it to the limit of the Empire, to the site in Scotland that became St. Andrew’s. Improbable as this may seem, devotion to St. Andrew flourished there until the relics were scattered by a reforming mob in 1559. In 1879, the hierarchy having been reestablished in Scotland, the Archbishop of Amalfi sent Archbishop Strain of Edinburgh a portion of Andrew’s shoulder, and in 1967 Paul VI gave Joseph Cardinal Grey of Edinburgh another relic of Andrew’s body. The Warsaw Church of St. Andrew and St. Albert and St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Chelyabinsk later joined the list of churches claiming possession of relics of St. Andrew. This dispersion, however good the claims of these churches may be, evinces the enthusiasm for the spiritual sponsorship of Andrew that made him the national patron of Scotland, Russia, Greece, Malta, and Romania. Throughout the medieval dispersion of his relics, St. Andrew’s head never left Patras, or so the evidence would suggest. In 1460, when Patras was threatened by the Turks—it was overrun in 1461—, Andrew’s head was rescued by the last Byzantine governor of the Morea (northern Achaia), Thomas Paleologus, who became its de facto custodian. Pope Pius II Piccolomini gave Paleologus his asking price: a pension, and a suitable residence in Rome. One of the greatest medieval spectacles was the reception of St. Andrew’s head at Rome on Palm Sunday 1462, when the relic was welcomed to “mother Rome, hallowed by thy brother’s precious blood,” by Pius II and Cardinal Bessarion outside the Flamian Gate. The procession that accompanied the relic from the chosen point of entry at the north gate of the city to St. Peter’s was so large that the clergy leading reached the Vatican before the

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Pope had left the Piazza del Populo. The basilica, its paving and steps renewed for the occasion, was brilliantly illuminated. Fountains ran with wine. 13 When Sant’Andrea della Valle, begun in 1591, was finally completed in the 1600s, Dominichino Zampieri and Marcian Preti, following an account found in Pseudo-Abdias tenth-century Apostolic History, painted the magnificent St. Andrew cycle in the apse of the new church. The marble panel depicting Pius II’s reception of St. Andrew’s head was brought from St. Peter’s and installed high on the left of the nave in Sant' Andrea, but St. Andrew’s head would remain at St. Peter’s, located after the new basilica was completed in one of the tribunes (the high, balcony-like structures) in the four great pillars flanking the Bernini altar, embellished (1629–1633) by François Duquesnoy’s larger-than-life sculpture of St. Andrew and his cross. In 1964 Paul VI, anxious to make an ecumenical gesture, returned the head of Andrew, the Beloved Disciple born in the village of Bethsaida, who had believed John the Baptist’s words, recruited his brother for the great mission, followed Jesus to his death on the cross, and cared for the Lord’s mother as his own, to Patros, to the East where, as the principal among those Galileans whose memories the Gospel of John would enshrine, he had borne witness to Jesus and had ‘written’ the book that John of Ephesus, priest, witness and teacher, published in his own name. That in any event is the argument, which, using the Muratorian tradition to interpret the Gospel text and the text to contextualize the Muratorian account and its cognates, suggests that with Paul VI’s gesture the head that had leaned back against Jesus to ask his brother’s question had come home.

 Notes C

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Quoted in Sean Kealy, John’s Gospel and the History of Biblical Interpretation (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Biblical Press, 2002), superscript to the Preface, and by Martin Hengel, The Johannine Question (London: SCM Press, 1989), 2. 2 . Ernst Haenchen, A Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. Robert W. Funk, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1984), 1:20‒30. 3. Kealy’s observation: “One could summarize and say that up to 1800 the apostolic authorship of John was never seriously examined or denied” (John’s Gospel, 366) is seconded by James H. Charlesworth, who notes “the myth among scholars that until the last few decades Johannine specialists defended, almost en masse, the conclusion that the author of [the Gospel] was John the Son of Zebedee, and that he was the Beloved Disciple,” remarking that “for over two hundred years experts…have argued that the author of the Gospel cannot be John the Apostle” (The Beloved Disciple: Whose Witness Validates the Gospel of John? [Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1995], 129). For a review of eighteenth-century continental criticism see R. A. Culpepper, The Johannine School: An Evaluation of the Johannine-School Hypothesis Based on an Investigation of the Nature of Ancient Schools (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1975), 1–3. 4. Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965), 304, note 1. 5. Adolf von Harnack, R. H. Charles, B. H. Streeter, E. Käserman, and Martin Hengel. 6. Charlesworth (Beloved Disciple, 197–212) catalogs the defenders of the traditional identification, providing a survey of various theories about the identity of the Beloved Disciple. See also Culpepper, John, the Son of Zebedee (313–20) for a discussion of con1.

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA temporary critics (Leon Morris, D. A. Carson, John A. T. Robinson, Stephen S. Smalley) who defend the traditional authorship. For a summary of the demurrers of Schnackenburg and Raymond Brown from the traditional identification of the author of the Gospel as John the son of Zebedee see Charlesworth, 219–22, and on C. H. Dodd’s rejection of the traditional theory see Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, 304, note 1. D. M. Smith, represents the contemporary majority view: “There is no firm basis in the Gospel for the traditional identification of this disciple with John, the son of Zebedee,” John (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1976), 42. Not that attempts have been lacking. Charlesworth (127–224) catalogs twenty scholarly identifications before making the case, convincingly researched, that the Beloved Disciple was Thomas. For the opinion that the Beloved Disciple was an ideal figure or a symbol of the Church see Charlesworth, Beloved Disciple, 134–40. Bultmann was one of the few canonical Johannine scholars who defended this view. See Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1941), note 369. W. O. E. Oesterley, The History of Israel, 2 vols. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:439, 441. Oesterley, History of Israel, 2:319–22; D. S. Russell, The Jews from Alexander to Herod, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 219–49. J. A. T. Robinson, The Priority of John ([London: SCM Press, 1983; Oak Park, Ill.: Meyer Stone Books, 1987], 15) quoting C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to John, 2d. ed. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminister Press, 1978), 22. Rylands Papyrus 457 containing John 18:31–33, 37, 38, dated before 150, is the earliest extant fragment of any canonical gospel. The exception to the stability of the Johannine text is 7:53–8:11, the story of the woman taken in adultery, regarding which see Barrett, Gospel according to St. John, 490–91. C. H. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1958), 345: “The central block of the Book of Signs, chapters vii and viii, bears the appearance of a collection of miscellaneous material. It consists of a series of controversial dialogs, often without apparent connection, apart from a general reference to the conflict between Jesus and the ecclesiastical leaders of Jerusalem.” “The material has been digested and expressed organically in an organism which is primarily theological,” Barrett, Gospel according to John, 15. And R. T. Fortna: “These aporias incongruously dot an otherwise smooth narrative” (The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988], 4). For a less favorable view of the author’s ability to synthesize his sources see John Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd ed. (Oxford: University Press, 2007), 1–36. B. W. Bacon, The Gospel of the Hellenists, ed. Carl H. Kraeling (New York: Henry Holt, 1933). See also D. Moody Smith, John Among the Gospels: The Relationship in Twentieth-Century Research (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1992), 15–20. Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: the Christian Experience in the Modern World (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 320: “Even the alternative of Palestinian Judaism or Hellenistic Judaism of the diaspora is a false one.” See also Oscar Cullmann, The Johannine Circle: Its Place in Judaism, among the Disciples of Jesus and in Early Christianity,

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16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

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trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM, 1976), 30. And see Barrett, writing in 1958: “More recently the tide seems to have turned against the belief that John’s background has to be sought in the Hellenistic, or at least non-Jewish, world. The most important factor in this change of view has been the discovery of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls” (Gospel according to John, 136). “The all too often prevailing western parochialism is unfortunate when it becomes more and more obvious that [the Gospel] took shape not in Ephesus, but in the Middle East, perhaps in Western Syria, which in 100 [A. D.] included Galilee,” Charlesworth, Beloved Disciple, 8. Burney made the case for a Syrian background (Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel [Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1922], 127–30). And see F. C. Conybeare, “Ein Zeugnis Ephräms über das Fehlen von c.1 und 2 im Texte des Lucas,” Zeitschrift für neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (1902): “Johannes scripsit illud graece Antiochiae, nam permansit in terra usque ad tempus Traiani” (192). Percival Gardner-Smith, The Gospel of John and the Synoptics (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1938), x. Anticipating in part the argument of J. A. T. Robinson, E. R. Goodenough wrote in 1945 that the Gospel was formed by the range and limitations of the evidence available to the Gospel’s author, and that it was therefore probably written early by one who did not know the Synoptics. See “John: A Primitive Gospel,” JBL 64 (1945): 169–204. Robinson, Priority of John, 26. See also C. H. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 449: “It is now widely recognized that the main factor in perpetuating and propagating the Christian faith and the Gospel story was oral tradition in its various forma. There is therefore no strong a priori presumption that resemblances in early Christian documents are due to literary dependence.” Robinson, Priority of John, 1. D. Moody Smith, John among the Gospels, 130. Robinson noted that maintaining the priority of John does not mean denying that John knew and used the Synoptics but that the author’s dependence on them can “no longer be assumed,” Priority of John, 3. C. K. Barrett, “John and the Synoptics,” ExpTim 65 (1974): 233. Robinson, Priority of John, 94. Robinson (Priority of John, 142) commented, “I do not accept that excessive skepticism is a matter of indifference. It is corrosive….” The Prologue was published by Christian Thomasius in 1689 and by Wordsworth and White in 1898, and scholarly criticism began with F. C. Burkitt (Two Lectures on the Gospels [London: Macmillan & Co., 1901]), who suggested that the Prologue “gave the earliest form known to us of a very remarkable theory of the origin of the Fourth Gospel” (94). Debate was promoted with the near-simultaneous publication by Dom Donatien De Bruyne of “Les plus anciens prologues latins des Évangiles,” (Revue Bénédictine 40 [1928]:193–214) and by Adolf von Harnack of “Die ältesten Evangelien-Prologue und die Bilding des Neuen Testamentes,” Sitzungberichte der königlichen classischen Academie der Wissenshaft zu Berlin, phil.-hist. Klasse 24 (1928): 322–41. B. W. Bacon encouraged discussion with “The Latin Prologue of John,” JBL 32 (1913): 194–217 and “The Anti-Marcionite Prologue to John,” JBL 49 (1930): 43–54.

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The Muratorian Canon was published by Jans van Gilse (Inest disputatio der antquissimo librorum sacrorum nove foebris catalogo, qui vulgo fragmentm Muratorii appelantur (Amstellodami: apud Johannem Muller, bibliopolam]) in 1852 and in translation by the English biblical scholar Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (Canon Muratorianus, the Earliest Evidence of the Books of the New Testament (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press) in 1867. The text was again edited and published by E. S. Buchanan, JTS 8 (1906–1907): 537–45. Tregelles, who neither attended a university nor held a university appointment, was a considerable scholar whose works included An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament (1854) and a critical edition of the Greek New Testament (1857– 1872). 27. Charles E. Hill’s Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) is a welcomed attempt to overcome “the predominantly negative evaluation of the extent and quality of the second century evidence pertaining to the origins of the Johannine works” (2). Wilbert Howard summarized the early history of criticism of the prologues (“The Anti-Marcionite Prologue to the Gospels,” ExpTim 47 [1935–36]: 534– 38). Skepticism regarding the second century date was voiced early by Robert M. Grant (“The Oldest Gospel Prologue,” AThR 23 [1941]: 241–45) and Engelbert Gutwenger, “The Anti-Marcionite Prologues,” Theological Studies 7 (1946): 393–409. Richard Bauckham (“Papias and Polycarp on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel”, JTS, n. s. 44 [1993]: 45, note 68) represents the persistent view that “no weight can be given to the socalled Anti-Marcionite Prologue to John.” Geoffrey Hahneman, (The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon, [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], 213–14) argues that the Muratorian Canon belongs to the fourth century. And see R. A. Culpepper, John, the Son of Zebedee: the Life of a Legend (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 128–29. 28. Jerome cites Papias confidently. See De viris ilustribus. 18, PL 23, col. 669 (Thomas Halton, trans., Saint Jerome On Illustrious Men [Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988], 37); Ep 71, Ad Lucinium, PL 20, col. 671; Ep. 75, Ad Theodoram viduam, PL 22, col. 687. Eusebius considered Papias a reliable authority on the history of Matthew, Mark, and John (HE 3.31.3, 3.32.4) despite the fact that Eusebius’ Origenistic sympathies prompted him to deprecate Papias’ eschatology (HE 3.39.12). In the fifth century Papias is cited by Andrew of Caesarea (Josef Schmid, ed., Der Apocalypse-Commentar des Andreas von Kaisereis [München: Karl Zink Verlag, 1955], 10, 129) and by Philip of Side in the ninth. George the Sinner cited Papias’ second book on the martyrdom of John the son of Zebedee. See Barrett, Gospel according to John, 103, notes 2, 3. Papias is elsewhere called “great” and“illustrious” (Horace Abraham Rigg, Jr., “Papias on Mark” Novum Testamentum 1[1966]: 164, note 1). Papias’ work was in cathedral libraries as late as Nîmes in 1218 and Stams in 1341, Edgar J. Goodspeed, A History of Early Christian Literature (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 164. 29. See Raymond Brown’s treatment of this question as it then stood in The Epistles of John, (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1982), 19–29. The relation between the Gospel and Epistles remains an open question despite the recent tendency to attribute these to two or even three authors. The literary relation of the Epistles to the Gospel is certainly more evident than the relation of Ephesians to Romans. Raimo Hakola’s careful

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30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

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cataloging of similarities and differences does as much to encourage the conclusion that the same mind is at work in the Gospel and Epistles as it does to prove his own conviction that different authors were involved. See Hakola’s “Reception and Development of the Johannine Tradition in 1, 2, and 3 John,” in Rasimus, ed., Legacy of John, 19–29. The Gospel was an evangelical expression of the faith of the Johannine circle reflecting at its earliest ‘witness’ level the hostility that existed, necessarily before 70, between the Judean ‘establishment’ and those who accepted the messiahship of Jesus. The Epistles were written in the heat of controversy between John the Presbyter, representing what would become Ignatian, Christianity, and some version of the Gnosticizing, illuminist heresy of which Valentinus and Marcion were in different ways representative. HE, 7.25. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 124‒26. This spiritual quality encouraged second and thirdcentury writers, like many modern commentators, to conclude that John must have been written last. The Fourth Gospel is “presenting the history ‘remembered,’ internalized, and understood in the light of Scripture and the Spirit,” Robinson, Priority of John, 144; Smith, John, 93–94. T. E. Pollard (quoted in Robinson Priority, 363) remarked that “the Synoptists see Jesus and his words and actions from the outside; through the eyes of the disciples: John enters sympathetically into the mind of Jesus.” And the means of this sharing is the action of the Paraclete in vivifying memory. That the Gospel’s overarching purpose was evangelical does not preclude the possibility that its author also wrote with the intention of refuting along the way a pervasive ‘spiritual’ heresy. There are contemporary analogies to this kind of hyperbole. See Raymond Brown, Gospel according to John, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1970), 2:1130. 1 John is not addressed, as is the Gospel, to a public that doubts or needs assurance so that they may believe or believe steadfastly, but to the church at a time of crisis, “that you may have fellowship with us” (1:3), “that your joy may be full” (1:4), “that you may not sin” (2:1). “While we can never exclude the possibility that John knew the Synoptic Gospels (as long as we assume that John is actually later than the Synoptics), the evidence that he did not use them as a principal source, if he used them at all, has been mounting in recent years. It has now reached such a point that the burden of proof may be said to lie upon the scholar who wishes to maintain that John knew and used them,” D. Moody Smith, Johannine Christianity: Essays on Its Setting, Sources, and Theology (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), 105. Birger Gerhardsson wrote of the Johannine circle: “We see here the deliberateness with which they work with the Jesus tradition, striving better to understand both it and the sacred Scriptures. They feel the Lord himself has authorized them to do this, the Lord who has been glorified and who has sent his Spirit to guide the church into “the whole truth” (The Origins of the Gospel Tradition [Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1977], 83). T. E. Pollard’s reference to R. G. Collingwood’s distinction between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of events, cited by Robinson (Priority of John, 362–63), points to the philosophic presupposition that in his gospel “the Johannine author has elevated a received tradition into a history more penetrating and more revelatory of Jesus than the

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37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA synoptic accounts.” Pollard quotes E. M. Sidebottom on the point that the Fourth Gospel should be understood “as a complement to the others not in the sense that it interprets them but that it shows us how to interpret them” (The Christ of the Fourth Gospel in the Light of First Century Thought [London, S. P. C. K., 1961], 87). Charlesworth, 392; Oscar Cullmann, Peter: Apostle, Disciple, Martyr, trans. F. V. Gilson (London: SCM, 1953), 27; R. A. Culpepper, John, the Son of Zebedee, 62. See below Chapter V. “We should have no doubt that the beloved disciple is meant here,” Hengel, Johannine Question, 125. Jerusalem at the Passover Feast when Jesus was hailed as king, betrayed, and crucified was a hotbed of speculation about Jesus and his followers. The Pharisees had repeatedly inquired as to Jesus’ claims and his intentions (Matt 15:12, 19:3; Luke 6:7). The temple party was anxious and divided, with Gamaliel unwilling to disallow Jesus’ claims outright and some among the Pharisees willing to believe (John 18:15). The circumstances that would lead to Jesus’ death were in play, but the die was not yet cast. It would have been uncharacteristic had the Sanhedrin not attempted to cultivate contacts among Jesus’ disciples, and it might be assumed that the leaders among Jesus’ followers were “known to the high priest.” Charlesworth has argued that an “acquaintance of the High Priest” could hardly have been a true disciple, that “another disciple” was probably Judas (Beloved Disciple, 356–57). Judas was in contact with the Sanhedrin, but it does not follow that others among Jesus’ followers were not known to the high-priestly household. The mention of the other disciple who stood with Andrew in 1:35–39 may be a characteristic Johannine fact, a detail, accurate in itself, introduced unselfconsciously, perhaps to display the author’s reassuring command of the historical terrain, perhaps because without another disciple’s presence Andrew’s actions would have been unwitnessed. “The practice of traveling in pairs is Jewish,” Vincent Taylor, The Gospel according to Mark (London: Macmillan and Co., 1957), 303. Disciples were sent in pairs, as in Mark 6:7, 14:13, Luke 7:18, 10:1, 19:29, and in Acts, when Paul is accompanied by Barnabas or Silas. See also Acts 18:19. Charlesworth, (Beloved Disciple, 134–39) surveys the advocates of the theory that the Beloved Disciple is an ‘ideal’ figure. Of course the Beloved Disciple is idealized and is ideal in the sense of exemplary. Rev 19:10; Justin, I Ap. 13, 29. Eusebius preserves an account of the writing of John that mentions the urging of the fellow disciples (HE 3.24.11, 6.14) and which Hill (Johannine Corpus, 386–94) believes may refer to an original in Papias. Commentarium in Matthei, PL 24, col. 19. Quoted from St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, trans. Thomas Scheck (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of American Press, 2008), 54. “What we have tried to do is to grasp behind the dramatic futures of John 14–16 the facts of Church life in John’s day: ‘the spirit-paraclete will dwell…,will teach…,will bear witness’ means that Christians had acted in all these ways to embody the life of the Church, a communion of the Friends of Jesus. Was it not only because the promises had been marvelously, if partially, fulfilled that John took the trouble to record his version of

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‘the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us’?” George Johnstone, The Spirit Paraclete in the Gospel of John (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1970), 147– 54.

C

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1. Reservations regarding the exercise of prophecy had surfaced as early as the Didache (11–13), in which the problem of honoring itinerant prophets while managing the abuses which sometimes accompanied their ministry loomed large. 2. “Others, that they may set aside the gift of the Spirit do not admit that aspect of John’s gospel in which the Lord promised that he would send the Paraclete” (AH 3.11.9). See also Irenaeus, Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. Joseph Smith (Westminster. Md.: Newman Press, 1978), 99–100. The presumed unity of the Johannine corpus would have been fostered by linking in imagination the books that presented most fully the work of the Prophetic Spirit, the Apocalypse and the Gospel. The Gospel promises and presupposes ‘prophetic’ knowledge of Jesus’ will for his followers when the Paraclete, who is the Holy Spirit, has come (14:26) as well as prophetic knowledge of “things that are to come” (16:14), while the Apocalypse, a book of prophecy (Rev. 1:3, 21:7), assumes that the witness to Jesus is the Spirit of Prophecy (19:10). Ronald E. Heine (“The Role of the Gospel of John in the Montanist Controversy,” Second Century 6 [1987–88]: 1–19) doubts that the earliest Montanists in Phrygia made use of the Gospel of John; certainly Irenaeus believed they did so in the 180s. For Justin (1 Ap. 31) as for the prophet of the Apocalypse (Rev 19:10) the name of the Paraclete was Prophetic Spirit or Spirit of Prophecy. The prophet of Patmos and John the Presbyter would have been linked geographically and might have been the occasion of there being, still, after three centuries, two tombs of John in Ephesus (HE 7.25.16). 3 . AH 3.11.8. 4. Hill’s thesis (93–98) does not answer the circumstance that at mid-century apologists for the Johannine books typically took care to assert the author’s independence from and opposition to heresy. Accepting pro tempore the traditional date, about 190, the author of the account of Johannine origins embedded in the Muratorian Canon, or its editor, argued that the differences of John from the other Gospels should not disturb the faithful. About 200 Gaius of Rome argued that the Apocalypse was the work of the Gnostic Cerinthus— Irenaeus had already claimed that John was written against Cerinthus (AH 3.11.1, 16.5). According to the anonymous source cited by Didymus of Alexandria (313–83), Montanists used texts from the Gospel of John to support their Monarchianism. See H. J. Lawlor, “The Heresy of the Phrygians,” JTS (1907–1908): 483, and also David E. Aune’s comment: “Montanism is particularly closely associated with the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse of John, their emphasis on the Paraclete was drawn from the former, and their preoccupation with the New Jerusalem (which was expected to appear in Pepuza) was gleaned from the latter” (Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World [Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1983], 313). At mid-century Dionysius of Alexandria doubted that the Gospel and Apocalypse were by the same author (HE 7.25). At about the same time—perhaps

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5..

6.

7.

8. 9. 10 .

ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA somewhat later―the Ante-Marcionite Prologue, claiming the authority of Papias, assured the reader of the Gospel that it was not a posthumous work but was written while John was still alive (adhoc in corpore constituo) and that the author had not ‘recognized’ the heretic Marcion. About 215 Hippolytus wrote his (now lost) On the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse and in 258 Victorinus of Pettau located the writing of the Gospel in the context of the proliferation of heresy. See Victorin de Poetovio, Sur l’apocalypse et autres écrits, ed. M. Dulaey (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1997), 92. Insofar as these defenses are framed against ‘spiritual’ heresies, they echo (at a century’s distance) the argument of the First Epistle, whose author was deep in controversy with docetic, illuminist opinions. Robert M. Grant, while admitting the possibility that Justin had cited John 3:4, assigned the first clear quotation of John to the Epistle of the Apostles (c. 160) and attributed the restrained or non-existent use of John to the Gospel’s Gnostic associations, “The Gospel and the Church,” HTR 35 (1942): 102–104. In 1943 J. N. Sanders argued that Gnostic use had suppressed orthodox appeals to the Gospel of John in The Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1943), 86. Hill’s careful analysis of second-century texts found citations and allusions that supported orthodox use before 150 (Johannine Corpus, 444–45). Concern over the differences between John and the Synoptics was pervasive, as in the Muratorian Fragment and Eusebius (HE 3.24.18). See Haenchen, Commentary on the Gospel of John Chapters 1–6, 17–19. Dionysius of Alexandria was cited by Eusebius (HE 7.24) as the opponent of Nepos, who had written a Refutation of the Allegorists, in which he presumably defended the Asian interpretation, the central claim of which was that there would be a reign of Christ in a renewed creation. Whether Nepos was defending the narrow claim of Rev 20:4–6 that Jesus would reign with the chosen saints on earth for a thousand years or the broader claim of chapter 21 and 22 that the New Jerusalem would come down from heaven to renew the created order is unknown, for Nepos’ work is lost. In either case Dionysius would not have supported enthusiastically the expectation of a new heavens and earth found in Justin, Irenaeus, Melito, and Hippolytus, all of whom to Eusebius’ mind had gone astray on these matters, misled by none other than Papias (HE 3.39.13). Defenses of the resurrection of the body, a popular genre in the second and early-third centuries (Justin, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Methodius, Hippolytus, Nepos), would have told not only against Gnostic opponents of Ignatius’ catholic church, but against orthodox Christian ‘spiritualizers’ such as Dionysius, Origen, and Eusebius. Jerome adds Victorinus and Lactantius as being attracted to the Irenaean view. See De viris ilustribus 18.4, PL 23, col. 669 [Halton, trans., Saint Jerome On Illustrious Men, 37]. HE 23.2, 24.9–11. Polycrates “great lights” are στοιχεῖα, “planets” or “luminaries” in late Greek, but the word also refers to something standing erect and presumably stable, and in another sense to things fundamental or elemental. All or any of these lie within Polycrates’ meaning. HE 2.25, 5.24. Irenaeus, Epistle to Florinus, HE 5.20. On Irenaeus’ reticence in calling John an apostle see C. F. Burney, Aramaic Origin of the Forth Gospel, 138–42. In forty-five references to John in AH, forty-four of which associ-

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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ate John with the Johannine corpus, Irenaeus calls John a disciple of the Lord in a context that would not imply the attribution of the Gospel to John. There are texts in which John the disciple is included that describe an office or position like “the Twelve,” “apostle,” “presbyter,” or “bishop,” and expressing a relationship that might be (and was) applied to any of the above. In two instances (AH 9.2, 3) Irenaeus uses the title apostle to include John by inference among the Twelve, but Irenaeus never uses “the apostle John” or “John the apostle” in references to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel and never identifies the Johannine author as the son of Zebedee. “Nowhere in Irenaeus is the John known to Polycarp identified as the son of Zebedee,” Robert Eisler, The Enigma of John (London: Metheun & Co., 1938). In AH the Epistles are the work of John “the disciple of the Lord” (1.16.3; 3.16.8). When Irenaeus wrote, the title apostle was being more narrowly defined, typically to mean one of the Twelve, the fact that St. Paul was not an apostle in this sense usually being ignored. Of the four Gospel authors, only Matthew is consistently named an apostle by Irenaeus (Burney, Aramaic Origin, 139). Barrett, Gospel according to John, 101. AH 3.4. Beyond Belief (New York: Random House, 2004), 30–73. The stance of the Acts of John toward the Johannine writings is overtly critical or adversarial. See Hill, Johannine Corpus, 258–70. “It appears that Valentinus, or more probably Ptolemy, was the creative genius who engineered a reinterpretation of the abstract nouns of the Johannine Prologue to adapt to a theory of pleromatic aeons the syzygies which had been borrowed from ‘the Gnostics,” Hill, Johannine Corpus, 293. AH 5.3.3. AH 3.16.6. Brown, Epistles of John, 69–71; The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 103–109. Ignatius, To the Ephesians 11. The provocative thesis of Martin Werner (Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas (Tübingen: Katzmann-Verlag, 1954; E. T., New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957]) that Christian dogma was born of disappointment that the Kingdom had not been established as the culmination of Jesus’ ministry, while certainly correct in the claim that dogma was a post-Pentecostal development, is misleading in its failure to recognize that there is no significant literature of disappointment—2 Peter 3:3–13 is unique—and no self-conscious attempt to ‘reconstruct.’ This absence of concern that the Lord had not returned can perhaps best be understood on the thesis that the experience of Pentecost, “the present grace” in Ignatius’ words, was compelling and satisfying. The great Gnostics did not claim to have solved a problem but to have found a true and better way in the light of historical circumstances. The ‘spiritualizers’ of the Johannine Epistles were convinced that they were the true church and thus St. Paul found Christians at Corinth who while denying the resurrection were apparently confident in their version of the Christian profession and had, at least before Paul wrote, shown no inclination to leave the church. When the Johannine Epistles were written the anti-incarnational advocates of a ‘spiritual’ Christianity had “gone out” from the church of the Presbyter (1 John 2:19), apparently to join or found another community.

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19. Gospel of Thomas 51, NHL 1:123. 20. It is telling that Ignatius felt constrained to argue the reality of the “birth, passion, and resurrection which took place in the time and governorship of Pontius Pilate” on the grounds that “these things were certainly and truly done by Jesus Christ” (Ignatius. To the Magnesians 11). Quoting (apparently) the extra-canonical Gospel of Peter, in a text that parallels John 20:24–25, Ignatius insisted that Jesus was “in the flesh even after the resurrection” (To the Smyrnaeans 3). 21. 1 Corinthians, especially chapter 15, was interpreted by Gnostic theologians as an invitation to deny the resurrection of the flesh on behalf of an anti-incarnational spiritualism. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1975), 80–86, 109–112. 22. Polycarp, To the Philippians 7. The ‘enlightened,’ ‘spiritual’ Christians were within or at the periphery of the Johannine churches. See Elaine Pagels, The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis: Heracleon’s Commentary on John (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1973); Raymond Brown argues that the secessionists of the Johannine Epistles had misunderstood the Gospel of John, the normative nature of which both they and their opponents assumed (The Community of the Beloved Disciple [New York: Paulist Press, 1979], 103–109). 23. That the body is a tomb of the spirit, from which the spirit was released at death, was universal in the Roman world, as in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. 24. On Marcion’s Paulinism see E. C. Blackman, Marcion and His Influence (London: S.P. C.K., 1948), 109–12. 25. Gospel of Truth, 16.1–18.34, NHL 1:123. 26. As at 1 Cor 15:57, 1 John 5:4. 27. The contemporary evidence is impenetrably confusing. Hippolytus (Refutation 22.7), following Irenaeus (AH 1.26.1; 3.3.4), attributes a Marcionite-like dualism to Cerinthus, and Irenaeus says the Gospel was written to refute him (AH 3.11.1), while Gaius of Rome in a work written against the Montanist Proclus makes Cerinthus an expositor, and presumably a defender, of the Apocalypse. See Charles Hill, “Cerinthus, Gnostic or Chiliast: A New Solution to an Old Problem,” Journal of Early Christian History Studies 8 (2000):135–72. Charles Hill, in questioning the theory of Robert M. Grant and others that the Gospel gained currency among Gnostics before it was widely accepted by the orthodox, along the way presents evidence showing that at mid-century the Gnostics had made the Gospel their own (Johannine Corpus, 205–92). Irenaeus was fighting a two-front war, to save the Gospel from the Gnostics and to defend prophecy, and thus not only the Apocalypse but the Gospel as well, in a context in which the Montanists had drawn prophecy into discredit. The Gospel of John says nothing about ecstatic prophecy of the kind Acts 2:4, 18 and 1 Corinthians 13:5 may describe, but the pneumatology of the Gospel was an authority for the enunciation of spirit-inspired truth (John 16:13) that would be realized in prophecy (Rev 1:10). 28. Hill’s argument that “Irenaeus does not defend the Fourth Gospel, he merely uses it” not only seems to ignore a majority position—as Hill recognizes elsewhere (Johannine Corpus, 98)—and overlooks specific passages (AH 1.1–11, 2.14, 39) that justify

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29.

30. 31.

32.

33 . 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

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Irenaeus’ title: Against the Knowledge Falsely So-Called. Hippolytus wrote A Defense of the Gospel and Apocalypse of John about 215, the title of which evinces his belief that the prophet of Patmos and the author of the Gospel were one, and which presupposes opposition to the Johannine writings such as that voiced by Gaius of Rome. A work defending the eschatology of the Apocalypse by the Egyptian Nepos titled Against the Allegorists was challenged by Dionysius of Alexandria in On the Promises (HE 6.24.1). Bernard Mutschler, “Was weiss Irenaeus vom Joahnnesevangelium?” in Kontexte des Johannesevalgelium, eds. Jorg Frey und Udo Schnelle (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 742. Culpepper, John the Son of Zebedee, 89. HE 5.20.6, 7. The apocryphal Acts of John (18) locates John in Ephesus about 150. See M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (London: S. P. C. K, 1924), 228–39. For a recent study see Pieter J. Lalleman, The Acts of John: A Two-Stage Initiation into Johannine Gnosticism (Leuven: Peeters, 1998). Whatever else Irenaeus knew or did not know, by 185 the tradition that John had taught in Ephesus, supported by Rev 1:9, the Epistle of the Apostles, and (within the decade) Polycrates, was well established. The common authorship of the Gospel, Apocalypse, and Epistles was accepted by Irenaeus, and if modern scholarship sometimes hesitates on this point, it at least assumes a common intellectual milieu, a conclusion supported by impressive similarities of style and vocabulary. Wilbert Howard’s conclusion (The Fourth Gospel in Recent Criticism and Interpretation [London: Epworth Press, 1931], Appendix B, 276–96) that “there is so much that is common to Gospel and Epistle [1 John], both in language and in thought, that presumptive evidence favors the substantial unity of authorship,” with the caveat that “certain differences call for an explanation,’’ is a judgment that is widely supported eight decades later, although, as Robinson points out (Priority of John, 113), there is now a drift toward diversity of authorship. That drift was encouraged by Dodd’s early article “The First Epistle of John and the Fourth Gospel,” (BJRL 21[1937]:129–56) and reiterated by Raimo Hokola in “The Reception and Development of the Johannine Tradition in 1, 2, and 3 John” in Tuomas Rasimus, ed., The Legacy of John: Second Century Reception of the Fourth Gospel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 17–47. AH 3.3.4. AH 3.1.1, 4.20.1. To the Romans 4. The description “disciple of the Lord” expressed the relation of discipleship in which apostles and presbyters shared, while these titles denoted offices with ministerial responsibilities. The Didache assumes the presence of many apostles who, should they visit, were to be entertained no longer than a day or two, hardly advice appropriate to the Twelve. The Shepherd of Hermas (Vis. 3.5) mentions “apostles and bishops and teachers and deacons who have lived in the holiness of God,” some of whom had fallen asleep, some of whom were still living, in which context these “apostles,” whether living or asleep, were not among the Twelve. AH 2.21.1. HE 5.24.2. Of course it is possible that Polycrates was mistaken in thinking Philip of Hierapolis was one of the Twelve. That Philip the evangelist of Acts 21:9 also had

140

39.

40. 41.

42.

ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA prophetic daughters suggests some confusion, but convinced as Polycrates was, he placed Philip first among the Asian “great lights,” and the tradition of the apostle’s presence and death in Hierapolis, which Papias attested about 100 (HE 3.31.4, 3.39.9), resulted in the fifth-century construction of an impressive martyrium. Dodd asked (Historical Tradition, 304), “Did they [the evangelist of Acts and the apostle of Hierapolis] both have remarkable daughters? Or is it possible that the same Philip has by some means got into both lists—the seven and the twelve?” AH 3.10.2, 5.18.3. Barrett wrote of the interpretation of 1:14 that posits ‘historical’ knowledge of Jesus on the part of the author, “It must be admitted that this is a possible interpretation but it is not a necessary, nor the best, interpretation of them,” Gospel according to John, 99; C. H. Dodd, The Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1958), 206): “There is here (1:14) no longer any thought of visible light or radiance accompanying Christ in his earthly life; but…the evangelist holds, the divine presence and power were apprehensible by those who had the faculty of faith.” The Johannine author had been vouchsafed an appearance of Jesus no less profound than Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 15:6. The claim to have seen, heard, and touched points toward an experience different in kind from even the most profound assent of faith in proposed truths or absent persons. Raymond Brown argues that the verbs of 1 John 1:1 “are meant to underline the importance of witness to the realities of Jesus’ preresurrectional appearances,” Epistles of John, 163. One seldom-canvassed possibility would suggest a relation between 2 Pet 1:17–18, parallel synoptic accounts (Matt 17:1–87, and Mark 8:2– 8, Luke 9:28–36) and the “we beheld” texts, John 1:14 and I John 1:1–3, each of which might describe the same event as reported by a witness or remembered at second hand. Barrett, Gospel according to St, John, 143: “The Church itself is thus the heir of the apostles and of their authority.” Raymond Brown (Gospel according to John, 1:13) cites Seraphin de Ausejo, “¿Es un himno a Christo el prólogo de San Juan?” Estudios Biblicos (Madrid) 15 (1956): 406407. A. E. Brooke, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Johannine Epistles (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1912), 2. Two ideas, neither ‘natural’ in the sense Brooke intended, mark the consideration of the appearances of the risen Jesus, the Gnostic belief that he appeared as un-material, ‘spiritual,’ in fact ghost-like; and the Pauline-JohannineIgnatian-Irenaean testimony that he appeared in glory or δóξα. The former was a Gnostic construct, calculated like all Gnostic ideas to avoid any historical claim or involvement; the latter, founded in a Pauline and Johannine ‘theology of glory,’ rooted in the Old Testament idea of the glory of God, was accompanied by an almost overpowering awareness of the presence of Jesus, on which occasions the question of his genuineness did not arise. The claim of the writer of John 1:14 that he beheld the Lord’s glory, a glory as of the only Son of the Father, like the hyperbolic language of 1 John 1:1–3 in which the author claimed to have seen, handled with his hands, and heard, as well as the report given by Paul in Acts 22:6–10, in which Paul was blinded by the glory of the great light that he knew to be Jesus; these are representations of encounters with the Risen Lord that were anything but ‘spiritual’ or ghost-like. Thomas’s encounter with the risen Christ makes this point (John 20:26–29). The contrast between a system based on a matter-spirit metaphysic and the resolution of Johannine-Pauline thought in the theology

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43. 44.

45 . 46.

47.

48.

49.

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of Irenaeus’ fifth book, where the principle, rooted in the Old Testament, Paul and John, and, consciously or unconsciously, in Aristotle, that real beings must have a real fruition, lies at the heart of the catholic-Gnostic controversy. For Paul and Irenaeus and Peter the created order is passing from corruption to glory. For the Gnostics the world-order is passing from the realm of necessity and corruption represented by matter into the spiritual or pneumatic realm. It is noteworthy that the resurrection is an experience to which Paul and John testify while among Gnostics writers it is, characteristically, a theory, an idea or insight. Schillebeeckx, Christ: the Christian Experience in the Modern World, 382; Robinson, Priority of John, 95. AH 4.20.11. Irenaeus’ identification of the author as the son of Zebedee is inferential: 1) the author was an eyewitness to Jesus’ life (John 1:14, 1 John 1:2–3), 2) Polycarp knew John the author of the Gospel, who was an apostle (to Irenaeus one of the Twelve), 3) John, assumed to be the Beloved Disciple, had lived and written in Ephesus, 4) the author and the historical witness, the Beloved Disciple, were one (John 19:35). Each of these four presuppositions reinforced the other three and all were (arguably) mistaken, resting on Irenaeus’ claim that the author was the Beloved Disciple of John 19:35. Nevertheless J. A. T. Robinson is right when he observes that assertions implying apostolic authorship “are inferences which one may be reasonably sure Irenaeus intended,” Priority of John, 101. Robinson, Priority, 100, note 273, citing AH 1.9.2, 2.22.5, 3.3.4; HE 5.20.6. The Didache’s claim (13.3) that “the prophets are your high priests,” suggests that Polycrates’ phrase had some context. Polycrates obviously considered the information that John the teacher was a priest wearing the πέταλον, the breast plate or crown worn by the high priest in the LXX (Exod 28:36), important to the credibility his argument. Epiphanius (Panarion 77.14) says as much of James the brother of the Lord. It may be, as Barrett notes, that the meaning of Polycrates’ claim simply escapes us (Gospel according to John, 101, note 2), but Polycrates can hardly have intended this evidence of the ancient authority of the Ephesian church to be enigmatic. Bauckham treats Polycrates’ puzzling phrase extensively, observing that whatever else it means, it tends to preclude the possibility that the Beloved Disciple was the son of Zebedee (“Papias and Polycarp,” 43–44). For Theophilus John is one of those inspired by the spirit (Ad Autolycum 2.22). Ptolemaeus (AH 1.8.5) attributes the Gospel to “John the disciple of the Lord.” Ignatius’ failure to mention John is, in Barrett’s words, “no common argument from silence” (Gospel according to John, 102), but it is also possible that Ignatius thought of John as a fellow-laborer, a near contemporary whose ideas and vocabulary he shared, but not, as John would seem to Irenaeus, a weighty, ancient authority. The theory of the unitary authorship of the Johannine books “by the Apostle and Evangelist” was assumed by Hegesippus at mid-century. See Hill, Johannine Corpus, 88–89. Defenders answered the charges that the Gospel was posthumous (the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, discussed below), that it was written by a Cerinthus (Hippolytus against Gaius of Rome), that Marcion had once counted the author a possible ally (Anti-Marcionite

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50.

51. 52.

53.

ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA Prologue), that it differed from the Synoptics (Muratorian Canon and Eusebius), and that it gave aid and comfort to Montanism (AH 3.11.9), to name a few. See Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John, ed. Francis J. Maloney (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 27, note 1 for a catalog of contemporary defenders of the traditional attribution of the Gospel to John the son of Zebedee. Wilbert Howard had summarized in 1931: “The Evangelist was almost certainly not the Apostle John,” Fourth Gospel in Criticism, 228. Harnack was an early defender of the idea that the Gospel was the work of John the Presbyter, whom he considered a disciple of the apostle, Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1897), 1:36–40. Acts of John, 18 [James, Apocryphal New Testament, 229]. And see Hill, Johannine Corpus (88–89) on Hegesippus.

C 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

H A P T E R

T

H R E E

Dodd, Historical Tradition, 12. Dodd, Historical Tradition, 423. Brown, Gospel according to John, 1: xcvii. Alphonse Mingana, “The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel: A New Document,” BJRL 14 (1930): 331–36. The manuscript, which derives from the East Syrian or Nestorian church, is dated 1749, but copies faithfully an eighth century text. The title “John the Younger,” can only have been intended to distinguish the author from the son of Zebedee or perhaps the prophet of Patmos. Famously, Pliny’s letter to Trajan shows that Christianity was flourishing in Bithynia about 112. Mingana noted (339) that this text supports Harnack’s contention that the Gospel was the work of John the Elder, John the Presbyter. See also Dodd, Historical Tradition, 11. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 111; “What Papias Said about John (and Luke): A ‘New’ Papian Fragment,” JTS 49 (1998): 582–629. F. C. Burkitt posited some relation among the Prologue, Canon Muratorianus, and the Papias text in Two Lectures on the Gospels, 67–72. See also Charles E. Hill’s discussion of the relation among these three texts in “’The Orthodox Gospel’: Reception in the Great Church,” Tuomas Rrasimus, ed., The Legacy of John: Second Century Reception of the Fourth Gospel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010): 285–90. Robinson, Priority of John, 47. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 388–94. The surviving episcopal list makes the first bishop Heros, appointed by the apostle Philip. See W. M. Ramsay, The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, 2 vols. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1895): 1:120. HE 4.27, 5.16.1 Polycrates may have meant the Roman province, which would have included Caria, Lydia, and Mysia; or he may have meant Asia as a synecdoche for Anatolia, since Polycrates was marshaling the most extensive evidence.

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12. HE 3.31. 3,4 Ekrem Akurgal, Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey (Istanbul: Haset Kitabevi, 1973), 176–77. See also Francisco D’Andrea, Hierapolis of Phrygia (Pamukkale): An Archaeological guide (Istanbuhl: Ege Yayinian, 2003). 13. Just as the line between the prophecy Irenaeus approved and the prophecy practiced by the Phrygian ecstatics was not easily drawn, the advocates of a ‘spiritual’ doctrine of the age to come tended to confuse the eschatology presupposed by the Pauline-Irenaean theology of glory with an unacceptable historicizing or Judaizing tendency. This difficulty was encouraged by the prominence given Revelation 20:4–6, which describes the reign of the martyrs with Christ for a millennium, a text that provides a transition from the sin-scarred creation to the new heaven and new earth. Even if this text had not been part of Christian prophecy, the idea it represented would necessarily have been proposed because without this brief vindication of the historical order the Christian understanding of history would have been undefended from the Gnostic idea that the first creation gave way to, indeed was replaced by, a ‘spiritual’ order. It was Irenaeus’ appreciation of this fact that caused him to describe so carefully in the conclusion of his book the remaking or perfecting of history, its transformation from φθόρα to δόξα (AH 5.36; cf. Romans 8:20–22): “There shall be a new heaven and a new earth, in which the new man shall remain, always holding converse with God” (5. 36. 1; cf. 2 Pet 3:8, Rev. 21:1–12). In the second and third centuries the argument was focused on the difficulties inherent in defending the resurrection of the body, or, more commonly, the resurrection of the flesh—that souls survived was a cultural commonplace—from a range of gainsayers whose thought would have run the gamut from the Gnostic denial that anything created or material would enjoy a redeemed future to the ‘spiritual’ eschatology of Origen and Dionysius of Alexandria. Tertullian, Justin, Irenaeus, and Methodius defended the resurrection of the flesh, in graphic terms. 14. Irenaeus (AH 5.33.3–4) quotes Papias’ description of a renewed, Edenic creation, reminiscent of Isaiah 11:6–9, in which nature will be superabundantly productive and “all the animals, using these fruits which are products of the soil, shall become in their turn peaceable and harmonious, obedient to man in their subjection.” 15. HE 3.39.16, Schmidt, ed., Der Apocalypse-Commentar des Andreas von Kaisereis, 20, 129. 16. HE 3.39.3–4. Author’s translation. 17. HE 3.39.17. 18. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 386–88. “There should be no doubt that Papias knew the Fourth Gospel,” Bauckham, “Papias and Polycrates,” 44. 19. Rupert Annand makes Papias Polycarp’s older contemporary, “Papias and the Four Gospels,” Scottish Journal of Theology 9 (1958): 48. 20. Ignatius, To the Philadelphians, 8. The written tradition was not yet stable. Given the evidence of tradition and Christian experience, the argument as to what was in the written records and what was not seemed fruitless. 21. John Chapman, John the Presbyter and the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1911), 49–72.

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22. Annand, “Papias and the Four Gospels,” 48. The opinion that the difference in tenses is merely stylistic carried the authority of Lightfoot (Essays on the Work Entitled Supernatural Religion [London: Macmillan and Co., 1889], 150, note 3). 23. Lightfoot, Supernatural Religion, 144. 24. Burney, Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel, 135, note, referring to Lightfoot’s Essays on Supernatural Religion, 146. 25. As used πρεσβύτερος is itself amphibolous, having about it always the connotation that one so described is “elder” or “older” (and therefore wiser) while being at the same time the title of an identifiable office in the church as represented for instance by Ignatius, who links presbyters with the bishop as liturgical officers. 1 Timothy 6:17 distinguishes presbyters who teach and preach from those who do not. All presbyters were to be honored, but especially “those who toil in preaching and teaching,” who were to be remunerated. Polycrates calls the John he associated with Ephesus, probably John the Presbyter, a priest, martyr, and διδάσκαλος. Lightfoot noted that while “modern critics have stumbled over this two-fold sense of the word πρεσβύτερος,” it would have created no difficulty for Papias and his contemporaries, who would have known the sense intended from the context (Supernatural Religion, 146). In the Papias passage cited the title presbyter describes 1) members of the Twelve, 2) itinerants who visit Hierapolis from whom Papias seeks knowledge about the presbyters who are in fact members of the Twelve, and 3) John “the Presbyter,” who is Papias’ contemporary, all of whom were presbyters. 26. Robinson, Priority of John, 103. But Robinson believes that Papias’ two lists do not distinguish two generations and does not think Polycrates or Polycarp knew John the Presbyter. 27. C. H. Dodd noted of the call of the first disciples in the Gospel, “The order is that of Papias,” Historical Tradition, 305; and Hill: “Scholars from Lightfoot to R. M. Grant have seen a Johannine influence in the order and identities of the disciples named by Papias....” (Johannine Corpus, 386). Cf. Bauckham, “Papias and Polycrates,” 44. 28. Dodd, Historical Tradition, 305. 29. Grant, Second Century Christianity, 17; Hill, Johannine Corpus, 130–33. 30. Whatever the precise meaning of the much discussed nuperrime temporibus nostris which the Muratorian author used to relate publication of the Shepherd to the reign of Pius I and to his own testimony, the information thus established would have little relevance for a fourth or fifth-century reader, although the lingering claim of the Shepherd to canonical or near-canonical authority is attested by its inclusion in Codex Sinaiticus about 350. For dating of the Muratorian Fragment to the fourth century see Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon, 34–37, 215– 18. But the assumed date of the canon whether in the second century or the fourth does not provide a secure dating of the Muratorian account of the writing of John’s Gospel. The Muratorian text can hardly have had a simple history, including as it does in the case of John and the other Gospels, information, if it has any historical value, that must run to a first or early second-century source. 31. Grant, Second Century Christianity, 107; Tertullian, Against Marcion, 4.4.2. 32. See Everett Ferguson, “Canon Mutatori: Date and Provenance,” Studia Patristica 17/2 (Oxford, 1982): 677–83.

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33. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 130. 34. E. S. Buchanan, “The Codex Muratorianus,” JTS 8 (1906–1907): 554–55, translation from Grant, Second Century Christianity: A Collection of Fragments (London: S. P. C. K., 1957), 117–19. 35. The Muratorian account, ‘”in which John and Andrew are contrasted as ‘one of the disciples’ and ‘one of the apostles,’ must preserve Papias’ attribution of the Gospel to John the Elder” (Bauckham, “Papias and Polycarp,” 59). 36. In contrast with the other prologues, which refer to the writing of the Gospels with some form of describere. See Gutwenger, “The Anti-Marcionite Prologues,” 396. 37. But the signs source cannot have been Q, which was a collection of sayings. 38. Whether the Gospel was composed early or late, the claim that the Gospel rests on memory and oral tradition cannot mean that nothing had previously been written, no notes, no sayings, and it would be impossible to prove that the Johannine author did not know, for example, Mark. What it may reasonably be taken to mean is that the Johannine author was dependent on no other Gospel and relied on the sources he knew best and trusted most, the intense but scattered memories of the Johannine community. Gerhardsson wrote of the Johannine community: “They worked on the basis of a fixed, distinct tradition from, and about, Jesus—a tradition which was partly memorized and partly written down in notebooks and private scrolls, but invariably isolated from the teaching of other authorities,” Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Lund: G. W. K. Gleerup, 1961), 335. 39. There will be επίσκοποι as soon as the church moves into the Greek world, as soon as Christians are no longer mostly Jewish, and as soon as it is appreciated that the diffuse authority of the presbyters, some (but not all) of whom teach and preach, cannot suffice for a church that requires doctrinal unity and certainty. The only (nugatory) account of the transition from the apostolic generation, men often, even typically, on the road, is I Clement 42, in which the author, writing perhaps about 80, views the appointment of bishops as a settled historical fact. 40. et ideo licit uaria sin/gulis euangelorum libris principia/doceantur nihil tamen differt creden/tium fedei cum uno et principali spū de/clarata sint In omnibus omnia de natiui/tate de passione de resurrectione/de conuesatione cum decipulis suis/ac de gemino eius adventu/ Primo In homilitate dispectus quod fo/it secundum potentate regali pis pre/clarum quod foturum est. See also Hippolytus, Fragment XXII, NPNF 5:247. 41. The Canon’s defense of the double advent (Primo in humilitate…secundum potentate regali) supports a second century date, the insistence that Christ would return to judge and to bring the new creation being part of the anti-Gnostic apology. 42. HE 3.24.13; Hill, Johannine Corpus, 386–88. The claims that John was urged to write and that the Gospel was inspired by the Holy Spirit are narrative elements that mark the earliest accounts of the writing of John’s gospel, found in Papias or (according to Jerome) in the illusive historia ecclesiastica. Clement of Alexandria, writing about 200, knew what by then was the common account, describing the Gospel as “inspired by the Spirit” and written at the urging of John’s friends (HE 6.14.7).

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43. Clement’s lost Hypotyposes, quoted by Eusebius at HE 6. 14. 7 includes two elements relating it to the Muratorian account, the urging of friends and the inspiration of the Spirit, as do the accounts given by Victorinus about 258 and Jerome somewhat later. 44. J. B. Lightfoot, Biblical Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904), 197–205. 45. Quoted by H. E. Edwards, The Disciple Who Wrote These Things (London, Macmillan and Co., 1953), 28. 46. Fortna, The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor, 6. 47. Wayne Meeks, “The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism,” JBL 91 (1972): 48. Cited by Robinson, Priority of John, 18–19. 48. Commentarium in Mattaeum, PL 24, col. 19 [St. Jerome Commentary on Matthew, trans. Scheck, 54]. 49. Nam et evangelium postea scripsit. Cum essent Valentinus et Cherinthus et Ebion, et caeteri scholae Sathanae diffuse per orbem, convenerunt ad illum de finitimis provinciis omnes et compulerunt ut ipse testimonium conscriberet.” See Martin J. Routh, Reliquiae Sacrae (Oxonii: E Typographeo Academico, 1846), I, 408; Victorin de Poetovio, Sur l’apocalypse et autres écrits, ed. M. Dulaey, 92. 50. quid ergo/ mirum si Johannes tam constanter/ singular etiā In epistulis suis proferam/ dicens In semeipsu que uidimus oculis/ nostris et auribus audiuimus et manus nostrae palpauerunt haec scripsimus uobis. Sic enim non solum uisurem sed auditorem. 51. See above Chapter 1, note 26. From Codex Regina Suetiae, quoted from Christian Thomasius, published in John Wordsworth and Henry J. White, trans. Novum Testamentum Latine. 3 vols. (Oxford: At the University Press, 1889–1898), I:491. Brought to light by De Bruyne and Burkitt who believed it might contain historical material of value, the prologue has subsequently been viewed with skepticism. See B. W. Bacon, “The Anti-Marcionite Prologues,” JBL 49 (1930): 43–54; R. M. Grant, “The Oldest Gospel Prologues,” AThR 23 (1941): 231–45); Engelbert Gutwenger, “The AntiMarcionite Prologues” Theological Studies 7 (1946): 393–409. The fact that the preface contained a reference to a book commonly available suggests that whatever elements common with other accounts of Jerome or Tertullian it may contain, it deserves consideration as an often-published document that at least claimed historical verisimilitude. 52. See above notes 34.35. 53. The fragment published in Corderius’s Catena makes Papias the scribe. “John…dictated the Gospel to his own disciple, the virtuous Papias of Hierapolis….” 54. Georgius Monachus (ninth century) and the epitomist of the historian Philip of Side (c. 430) cite Papias’ second book on the point that John the brother of James was killed by the Jews, a reference that Irenaeus could with relative ease have verified in Papias’ Five Books. See Barrett, Gospel according to John, 103, notes 2, 3; Eisler, Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, 59–72. 55. Jerome is surely following the prologue tradition when he writes that according to ecclesiastical history John, urged by “deputations from many churches to write more profoundly concerning the divinity of the Savior,“ agreed to do so if the group would pray and fast and, the fast concluded, “being filled with revelation, he burst into the

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heaven-sent preface ‘In the beginning was the Word….’” Commentarium in Mattaeum, PL 26, col. 19 [St. Jerome Commentary on Matthew, trans. Schenk, 54]. HE 7.25.16. See above note 4. HE 2.15. HE 3.39.15. HE 6.14.6–7. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 386–88. AH 3.1.2. Acts 16:9. Papias is the exception (HE 3.39.4–7). The book the origin of which second century fathers (Justin, Irenaeus) seem most certain is the Apocalypse. Argued effectively by Raymond Brown, Community of the Beloved Disciple, 103–109. Eusebius (HE 3.26.6) says that the Acts of Andrew were quoted by heretics. Kirsopp Lake cites Pacian of Barcelona (4th cent.) on the Montanists’ claim to the authority of Andrew (“Acts [Apocryphal]” in Hastings, ed., Dictionary of the Apostolic Church). Among the Nag Hammadi texts the Gospel of Thomas shares many saying with the canonical Gospels, although often giving them deviant meanings and the Gospel of Philip is an overtly Gnosticizing text. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), xv-xvii. See also Giles Quispel, “The Gospel of Thomas and the New Testament,” Vigiliae Christianae 11 (1957): 189–207. Brown, Epistles of John, 69–70, 92–103; Pagels, Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis, 11–19. AH 2.22.5, 3.3.4. HE 3.39.15; Taylor, Gospel According to Mark, 2. C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1946), xlvii–xlix. Robinson, Priority of John, 59. Martin Hengel, Johannine Question, 119. “Viewed from one angle the evidence that the Gospel was written, as tradition affirms, by John the son of Zebedee, seems overwhelming; from another it is very unsatisfactory. Within the Gospel there are passages which read like the recollections of an eyewitness; there are others of which it seems impossible to vindicate the historical credibility…because they bear the marks of long reflection and meditate upon earlier tradition,” Barrett, Gospel according to John, 4. As is suggested below, interpretation of the Gospel is complicated by the existence of both an ‘eyewitness’ level, resting upon the witness of the Beloved Disciple and his contemporaries to Jesus’ words and deeds and the post-Pentecostal reflections of those same witnesses and their disciples, notably John the Presbyter, reflecting the experience of the period 33-69. Dodd noted that while John may reflect a distinctive Asian tradition, “the tradition was hardly formed there, since it shows interest in Palestinian topography” (Historical Tradition, 310).

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1. Apart from the Synoptic texts enumerating the Twelve (Matt 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:18), Andrew is named once in Matthew, twice in Mark, and five times in John. Andrew is ‘also present’ in the Synoptic references, but in John he is central to the call of Peter, the feeding of the five thousand and the account of the Greeks who wished to see Jesus. 2. Dodd, Historical Tradition, 309. 3. Bultmann, Gospel of John, 458. See also Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 447: “The Passion-narrative is continuous and detailed…. The narrative of the ministry, on the other hand, is largely discontinuous and episodic….” 4. Bultmann, Gospel of John, 457. 5. Fortna, The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor, 5. 6. However precise the references to “the next day” (1: 29, 35, 43) and “the third day” (2:1) are intended to be, they construe a tight temporal sequence. See Robinson, Priority of John, 161. 7. As in Mark 6:7 and Luke 10:1. See Taylor, The Gospel According to Mark, 303. 8. “[The author] is at pains to prove that he knows who is who, what words, names and titles, mean, what actually happened and where, the location, historical background, and identifiable features of significant landmarks, what was actually said and what was misunderstood and misreported. He goes out of his way to establish that his record of events is the reliable account of an eyewitness which can be tested and verified by lexicography, topography, and family history,” William W. Watty, “The Significance of Anonymity in the Fourth Gospel,” ExpTim 90 (1979):210. That the name of the slave whose ear was severed was Malchus (18:10) is one of thirty instances of seemingly gratuitous precision cited by Watty. See Robinson’s comments (Priority of John, 160–61) on the Gospel’s use of οὕτως, “virtually untranslatable in print” but meaning “thus” or “like this” or “in this way” in the context of John 13:23–25. 9. There is an extensive literature on the ‘rivalry’ or ‘competition’ theory as it might be represented in John 13–21. See Bradford B. Blaine, Jr., Peter in the Gospel of John: the Making of an Authentic Disciple (Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 7– 22; Brown, Community of the Beloved Disciple, 83–84. 10. That there would be two disciples who provide ‘access’ for Peter would strain the convention the writer has carefully crafted. Barrett (Gospel According to St. John, 525) concedes that here “another disciple” might be the Beloved Disciple, yet “there is no definite ground for doing so.” The ground, never certain but compellingly suggestive, is this disciple’s role in providing ‘access’ for Peter, his unvarying relation to his brother. The use of ἄλλος μαθητής may be stylistic, as in John 20:3. 11. The first, perhaps the only, proposal that Andrew is the Beloved Disciple was made incidental to the argument of E. C. J. Lützelberger in Die kirchliche Tradition über den Apostels Johannes und seine Schriften in ihrer Grundlosigkeit (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1840). “This hypothesis is not impossible,” Charlesworth, Beloved Disciple, 180. 12. Robinson, Priority of John, 104–105. The verb γράψας is causative. See Charlesworth, Beloved Disciple, 24–27.

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13. D. Moody Smith, Jr, “Johannine Christianity: Some Reflections on its Character and Delineations,” NTS 21 (1975): 236.

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1. Johannine tradition, like others, did not float free. See Birger Gerhardsson: “The carriers of the tradition belong to the tradition within which they operate and with which they interact. Not all exegetes draw realistic conclusions from the fact that Jesus had disciples and other devoted adherents. Nobody can have had greater interest than Jesus’ disciples and adherents in his person, his actions, his teaching and his destiny; and nobody can have had greater reason for preserving the legacy from him. Nor can anyone have been regarded as better informed about him than they were. In other words, the gospel tradition had a social frame that did not disappear with Jesus, a fellowship as well as an institutional tradition with a certain ranking, distinction of roles, and an incipient organization was taking shape and would live on as the church. Many exegetes speak as if the gospel material lived a life of its own,” (“The Secret of the Transmission of the Unwritten Jesus Tradition,” NTS 51 [2005]:15). “The links of the Johannine tradition are not with those around Stephen, like Philip the evangelist,…but with Philip the Apostle and Andrew from Greek-speaking Galilee,” Robinson, Priority of John, 62, note 128. Andrew and Philip were from Bethsaida-Julia, “Bethsaida in Galilee” (John 12:21), built as his capital by Philip the Tetrarch, just east of the Jordan in Gaulanitis; “Galilee of the Gentiles, across the Jordan” (Matt 4:15), not in Galilee proper. “He [Philip the Tetrarch] also raised the village of Bethsaida on Lake Gennesaritis [Mark 8:23, 26] to the status of a city [Luke 9:10, John 1:44, 12:21]…. He named it after Julia, the emperor’s daughter,” Josephus, Antiquities 18.28. However one understands “the Jews” of John’s Gospel, Jews were not Galileans and some contrast is implied. See Jouette M. Bassler, “The Galileans: A Neglected Factor in Johannine Community Research,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981): 243–57. Synoptic tradition makes the native place of Peter and Andrew Capernaum, about five miles west of Bethsaida, across the Jordan on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, which John twice calls the Sea of Tiberias (21:1, 23). Jesus was considered a Galilean, reared in Joseph’s home in Nazareth. It was to Galilee that Jesus directed his disciples after his resurrection (Matt 28:10, 16) and at the Sea of Tiberias that he appeared to them in John 21. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, and he would enter Jerusalem to cleanse the temple and to die in Jerusalem as King of the Jews, but from his first miracle at Cana, Galilee competes with Jerusalem as the geographical center of the story. Jesus had once fled from Jerusalem to Galilee “because the Jews (probably Judeans) sought to kill him” (John 7:1). In the Gospel the Jews, Judeans whom the author considers especially guilty of Jesus’ death, might be thought of as ‘the establishment,’ as in John 19:7, 11, 14, while the Pharisees are the pious religious party, who as a group partly coincided with the temple establishment and partly did not. See Robinson, Priority of John, 83–89. 2. Gustaf Dolman. Sacred Sites and Ways: Studies in the Topography of the Gospels (New York: Macmillan Co., 1935), 165, cited by Robinson, Priority of John, 62, note 127.

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3. The same care is shown in 21:1, which identifies Nathanael as from Cana in Galilee. 4. As the Beloved Disciple, Andrew serves as a synecdoche for the Johannine apostles, Philip, Thomas, and Nathanael, but Dodd notes that “Philip held a special place in the regard of the Church in Asia, and Papias provides evidence that an oral tradition purporting to derive from him was current in the second century” (Historical Tradition, 310). 5. Although the Gospel knows of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the city of David (7:42). 6. Robinson, quoting Cullmann, Johannine Circle, 78 (italics Cullmann’s), Priority of John, 108; Brown, Community of the Beloved Disciple, 34. 7. Robinson, Priority of John, 114. Robinson goes on to note that importance of Capernaum, where in Synoptic tradition Jesus called the sons of Zebedee. But in John Bethsaida has its own importance. 8. Dodd, Historical Tradition, 424. Whether these linguistic characteristics are to be attributed to the Beloved Disciple himself or to the Johannine author-editor, they reflect the milieu in which the Gospel was composed. 9. The Beloved Disciple took Jesus’ mother εἰς τὰ ἴδια (19:27); “into his house,” but “into his care” is also possible. 10. Lightfoot, “The Authenticity and Genuineness of the Gospel of John,” Biblical Essays, 169–79. 11. In John there is no evidence of conflict with Gentiles such as marked Paul’s ministry and in the Epistles there are no warnings against Gentile idolatry or immorality. There are no ethnoi in the Gospel. The Greeks are Greeks who had “come up to worship at the feast” (12:20), Gentile proselytes (Robinson, Priority of John 70). 12. Robinson, Priority of John, 84. 13. In which text Andrew is displaced to fourth, after Peter, James, and John. 14. Cullmann notes that the Johannine disciples “were probably aware of the difference which separated them from the Church going back to the Twelve and also saw that their particular characteristics laid upon them the obligation of a special mission, namely to preserve, defend, and hand on the distinctive traditions which they were sure had come down from Jesus himself” (Johannine Circle, 87). See also Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 484. 15. B. W. Bacon, “The Motivation of John 21:15–25,” JBL 50 (1931):73. 16. Bultmann, Gospel of John, 483. 17. Peter M. Peterson, Andrew, Brother of Simon Peter: His History and His Legends (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1958), 2.

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1. Among the Nag Hammadi documents the Gospel of Thomas, while decidedly Gnostic in character, incorporates sayings and events that belong to the Irenaean fourfold canon, especially Luke and Matthew, although these are interpreted differently by the community in which Thomas was written than by the church of (for example) Ignatius.

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“Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels share a significant amount of material in common. Roughly half of Thomas’s sayings have parallels of one sort or another in the Synoptics,” Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge Press, 1993), 17. Elaine Pagels was persuaded that John was written against the Gospel of Thomas (Beyond Belief, 30–73), while Charlesworth argued in The Beloved Disciple that Thomas is the disciple whom Jesus loved. See Gregory J. Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered, Thomas and John in Controversy (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1995), 101–29. Defense of the claim that the resurrected Lord appeared not as a ghost or apparition but in glorified flesh was essential to the incarnational character of Johannine-IgnatianIrenaean Christianity. See Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 2; Preaching of Peter 14, 18, in James, Apocryphal New Testament. In Asia Philip was the best known of the Twelve, and his claim to a place as a kind of second-best-beloved should not be overlooked. Philip found Nathanael just as Andrew had found Peter, and in the Johannine hierarchy it was Philip who initiated the introduction of the enquiring Greeks and Andrew who with Philip took the Greeks’ request to Jesus (12:20–22). Savvas Agourides, “The Purpose of John 21,” in Studies in the History and Text of the New Testament in Honor of Kenneth Willis Clark, Studies and Documents 29, eds. B. L. Daniels and M. J. Suggs: (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1967), 167. “There is every reason to suppose that [the third appearance] represents a very early form of the tradition of the resurrection,” Robinson, Priority of John, 295. Barrett, Gospel according to John, 581; Edwin Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel, ed. F. N. Davey (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 556. This is the ultimate “misunderstanding,” a form common in the Fourth Gospel. Jesus’ words could have been interpreted to give the Beloved Disciple the promise of great age but not of supernatural longevity. Whenever Jesus returns, there will be those of whom it can be said that they did not taste death, die, or sleep. Jesus’ words as misunderstood required his return within a lifetime. John 21 does not speak to the manner of Andrew’s death or claim him as a martyr. It is an anomaly of the history of the canon that more than ninety percent of the citations of gospel material before Irenaeus can be explained on the thesis that these late first and early second-century writers possessed M (gospel material unique to Matthew) and Q (the agreements of Matthew and Luke outside Mark). This neglect of Mark in the preIrenaean pattern of citation is astonishing on the thesis that Christian writers of the second century possessed the synoptic canon as we have it, in which case they possessed not only Mark, but Mark in Matthew and Mark in Luke. Thus Vincent Taylor noted that citations of Mark from the first half of the second century “are uncertain and cannot be regarded as affording more than a knowledge of Synoptic tradition, ” The Gospel According to Mark, 1. The most obvious explanation is that Mark, like John, was a local production that was incorporated into Matthew and Luke after a time when including the Roman gospel was perceived as a mark of right faith and lacking it at best a weakness. For synoptic tradition Mark was not so much prior as essential. D. M. Smith (John among the Gospels, 193) asked, “Is it a safe assumption that any first-century (or second-

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14. 15.

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ANDREW OF BETHSAIDA century) Christian who undertook to write a gospel would have felt it necessary to follow Mark to the extent that Matthew and Luke did?” Smith answers in the negative because the writers of apocryphal gospels sat loose to Mark, but this hardly resolves the anomaly posed by the weak pattern of Markan influence. The failure of second-century Fathers before about 160 to quote John is no more remarkable than their failure to quote Marcan material, and the failure of Clement of Rome to cite Mark convincingly no more startling than the (putative) silence of Ignatius with regard to the Fourth Gospel. “Jesus’ three probing questions offer gentle and excruciating reproach,” Paul D. Duke, Irony in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta, Ga.: John Know Press, 1973), 98. AH 3.2.2. The Gaius-Proclus argument presupposes their agreement (HE 2.25.7–8) that the possession of apostolic relics was a sign, if not the very basis, of the authority of the churches founded by those apostles. Origen as cited by Eusebius (HE 3.1) makes Scythia Andrew’s mission territory. J. H. Bernard writes “that the first disciple to note the presence of the grave-clothes in the tomb did not actually go into it first is not a matter that would seem worth noting, to anyone except the man who refrained from entering,” John II, 660. But Jesus’ appearance “first to Peter” was an essential element in the tradition. Birger Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2001), 139. See also Charlesworth, Beloved Disciple, “The Beloved Disciple and Peter: A Rivalry between East and West,” 390–413. “more than these.” Aidan Nichols, Rome and the Eastern Churches (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 17, 134.

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1. HE 7.25, 22–25. 2. B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (London: Macmillan and Co., 1924), 430–61; Friedrich von Hügel, “John, Gospel of St.,” Encyclopedia Britannica 15 (1911): 457; Hengel, Johannine Question , 78–81. 3. Robinson, Priority of John,, 112–13. 4. Hengel, Johannine Question, 32–33. 5. Brown, Epistles of John, 35; Hakola, “Johannine Tradition in 1, 2, 3 John,” 24–29. 6. The conviction that the opening verses of the Gospel and 1 John are from the same hand can be suppressed only through determined skepticism. Brown suggests that 1 John 1:1–4 is a reinterpretation of John 1:1–14, presented “in order to refute adversaries who are distorting the meaning of the Gospel prologue” (Epistles of John, 178). 7. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 115–30. Darkness occurs elsewhere, as for example in 1 Peter 2:9 and 1 Thess 5:4, but nowhere with the thematic weight given it in the Gospel and 1 John.

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8. The historical connections of turn-of-the-century Christianity to mid-century Palestine are themselves (while much canvassed) not very dense and are the result of a historical backward glance undertaken at mid-second-century when the Church began to recognize itself as a successful empire-wide movement with a useable, and essential, past. Paul’s career and his letters offer an exception to this tenuous historicality; hence their location at the heart of the church and hence the interest Acts shows in bringing Paul to Rome, which, undertaken consciously or not, connected Palestine and Italy. The Church of the second century did not have much reliable information about the careers of the Twelve. When Irenaeus at the beginning of book 3 gives his catalog of apostolic sees, he is sure of Peter and Paul at Rome, claims the John-Ephesus connection, and makes Alexandria apostolic on the strength of Mark’s presence. Had Eusebius not gathered up the sources in the 340s we would know very little about the three centuries preceding. However wellinformed Polycrates’ may (or may not) have been, his locating John’s burial place in Ephesus tells decisively against J. J. Gunther’s argument that “the association of John and the Johannine writings with Ephesus reflects uncritical piety’’ (“Early Identifications of Authorship of the Johannine Writings,” ExpTim 31 [1980]: 427). 9. Apart from the widespread awareness of the burial places of Peter and Paul at Rome and the persistent claim made for Philip, little was known with any certainty about the resting places of the Twelve. The search for relics undertaken by Constantius II in the 350s discovered Andrew in Patros in Achaia. The relics of St. Thomas were brought from India to Edessa in the fourth century. 10. The martyrium marking the site of Philip’s relics was built at the end of the fourth century on an area measuring 20m by 20m. The surviving remains demonstrate that it was flanked by rooms on four sides and by porticos on two sides, with eight chapels separated from each other by polygonal rooms. A central chapel and octagonal cloister were entered through the surrounding rooms. See chapter three, notes 9, 12. 11. Burney made this point in 1922: “If one of the most famous members of the original Apostolic band had preceded him in his own see, he would certainly have named him first of all,” Aramaic Origin, 134. Although not one of the Twelve, the weight of John’s authority in nearby Phrygia is indicated by Papias’ frequent citation of John’s traditions and his First Epistle, HE 3.39.14, 16. 12. “the bishops whom you [Victor] required me to summon, and I did so” . 13. “Wir haben nun also hier aus bester Quelle erfaren, dass unser Verfasser ein Jude aus priesterlichem oder hohepriesterlichem Geschlecht, und nicht die Apostel Johannes war…. Meine Auffasung ist also keine Hypothese sondern ein historischer Fund,” Das vierte Evangelium (Husum: C. F. Delff, 1890), 72, quoted in Henry W. Watkins, Modern Criticism Considered in its Relation to the Fourth Gospel (London: John Murray, 1890), 292. See Burney, Aramaic Origin, 133–34, Hengel, Johannine Question, 74–108, and Richard Bauckham, “Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel, JTS 44 (1993): 41–43. 14. Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, 2 vols. (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1990), 1:100–103. 15. Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 1: 659–80. 16. Burney, Aramaic Origin, 129.

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17. J. Louis Martyn observed that the Gospel can be compared to an archaeological site that displays many levels, reflecting communal “interests, concerns, and experiences” and exhibiting “a remarkable degree of stylistic and conceptual homogeneity,” noting that this point is “grasped by many interpreters.” See The Gospel of John in Christian History: Essays for Interpreters (New York: Paulist Press,1978), notes 137, 138. 18. The Birkat ha-Minim, which belongs to the period after 70, does not mention Jewish believers in Jesus messiahship, but contemporary glosses suggest that the “slanderers” and “apostates” condemned were Jewish Christians. 19. Hengel, Johannine Question, 119. 20. Schnackenburg recognized that the apostle, John in his opinion, formed in the Judaism of the period before the destruction of Jerusalem, provided the apostolic witness which the evangelist (the author/editor) recast “in his own consistent mould of thought,…to make the Apostle’s story and message accessible to his readers,” presumably Gentiles or Hellenized Jews. See Gospel according to John, 1:102. 21. Hengel, Johannine Question, 119. 22. HE 4.14.6. 23. Blackman, Marcion, 49. 24. HE 3.24.13. 25. Victorinus of Pettau, ANF 7: 353. 26. Justin Martyr, I Ap. 26, 58. 27. Blackman, Marcion, 20–21. 28. Adolf von Harnack, The Gospel of the Alien God, translated by John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Durham, N. C.: Labyrinth Press, 1990), 15: “The date of his birth may have been at about the year 85 or later.” 29. Brown, Epistles of John, 69. 30. Polycarp, To the Philippians 7; HE 6.14.7. 31. Schnackenburg (Gospel according to John, 1:80) saw that the figure who lived to visit Hierapolis could not have been the son of Zebedee. 32. Impossible as Polycrates’ implied chronology may be, his locating John’s burial place in Ephesus tells decisively against J. J. Gunther’s argument that “the association of John and the Johannine writings with Ephesus reflects uncritical piety,” “Early Identifications of Authorship of the Johannine Writings,” ExpTim 31 (1980): 427. 33. Brown, Epistles of John, 86–90. 34. “The mere existence of this group of epistles indicates that there was more than one community of believers who shared the same traditions, vocabulary, doctrines, and ethical principles,” Culpepper, Johannine School, 279. 35. R. Joseph Hoffman, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity: An Essay on the Development of Radical Paulinist Theology in the Second Century (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984), 247. 36. Conybeare, “Ein Zeugnis Ephräms über das Fehlen von c.1 und 2 im Texte des Lucas,” 193.

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37. Parthia was a much-Hellenized territory whose rulers imitated the Seleucids, but about 10 A. D. a change of dynasties provoked a pro-Iranian reaction that encouraged a revival of Mazdaism. The Romans never completely subdued Parthia despite a series of costly wars, but in 226 the Sassanids attained hegemony in northwest Mesopotamia and the Parthians, a somewhat notional kingdom dominated by a fighting, mounted aristocracy, disappeared. 38. J. B. Segal, Edessa ‘Blessed City,’ 2nd ed. (Piscataway, N. J.: Gorgias Press, 2005), 9–14. Resistance continued until 214, when Edessa was declared a colonia. 39. “As the destination of 1 John, Parthia finds no scholarly support today,” Brown, (Epistles of John, 772–74) provides an appendix in which he contrasts the historical view with an opinion that Ad Parthos is the misunderstanding of a Greek original that addressed the First Epistle to the virgins or parthenoi. 40. Segal, Edessa, 65, note 1. Mentioned also by Robinson, Priority of John, 48, note 71, citing Edward W. Wright, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, 2. vols. (Cambridge, 1871; repr. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 2: 3–20. See also Eusebius, HE 1. 13. 41. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 426–29. 42. AH 1.10.2. 43. On the Latin tradition that Ignatius was the disciple of John see Brown, Introduction to the Gospel of John, 203. 44. That both the meaning of the adjective ‘catholic’ as used by Ignatius and Irenaeus and its relation to the word in its later uses are controversial does not justify the suppression of the term, which was typically used by second-century writers to distinguish their church from variant interpretations of the meaning of Jesus’ Messiahship. 45. Ad Autolycum 2.22. 46. William Sanday, The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 199. 47. The Gospel “is now rightly (in my opinion) situated in the East, perhaps in Western Syria, which would include upper Galilee (a region we now know was distinct from lower Galilee), Charlesworth, Beloved Disciple, 19. 48. Robinson, Priority of John, 110-111. And see D. M. Smith on Bultmann’s claim that the signs source was written in “Semetizing Greek, and many of its stylistic characteristics are Semetisms,” The Composition and Order of the Fourth Gospel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 33–44. 49. Segal, Edessa, 65: “At the beginning of the Christian era, Edessa lay in the Parthian, not the Roman, sphere of influence.” “Seen from Rome, Abgar of Edessa was a Parthian, and this notion continued well into Byzantine times, when even Syriac poets described Edessa as “Parthian” or “daughter of the Parthians” (31). 50. About 55 A. D. Paul chose not to visit territory in which another had already preached the Gospel (Acts 15:41, 16:8–9, Rom 15:19–21). The territory he avoided was largely coincident with that described in the address of 1 Peter: Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. 51. To the Romans 2.2. 52. Segal, Blessed City, 132, 174–75, 182.

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53. HE 3. 39. 15–17; AH 5. 30. 1; Hill, Johannine Corpus, 385–394. If as Hill maintains Eusebius (HE 3. 24. 5–13) does display reliance on Papias, it is nonetheless difficult to distinguish in the text what Papias said from Eusebius’ apology for the Johannine differences, offered in the context of Eusebius’ conviction that John was written to supplement the other gospels. 54. Irenaeus’ information that Papias was Polycarp’s contemporary is useful but of course inexact, and would not tell against Papias’ having been born in the fifties. If, as Eusebius maintains, Papias was a hearer of John, and if as the present tense of HE 3.39.4 indicates John was alive and speaking when Papias wrote, his Interpretations belongs to late first or very early second-century, 90 to 110. Papias had no direct contact with the generation of the Twelve. 55. Gerhardsson notes that Paul, the paradigmatic apostle, was “well aware of his apostolic exousi…. He knows himself to have been chosen and set apart, even before his birth…. He has been entrusted with carrying the Gospel to the Gentiles. He has been equipped with sophia and gnosis in good measure. He has been granted unusually exalted revelations…. His message and his teaching can be seen to be filled with the Spirit and with power…. To be sure he is aware that this is all a result of pure grace….” (Memory and Manuscript [Lund: G. W. K. Gleerup, 1961], 292). To agree with Brown (Epistles of John, 35. note 84) that “in 1 John there is none of the emphasis on structure and on authoritative teaching offices that one finds in 1–2 Timothy and Titus” is to confuse a formality of the age of Ignatius with a fact of two or three decades earlier. John clearly taught with authority; some refused that authority as many would refuse the authority of Ignatius, and Paul. 56. Pagels, Beyond Belief, 45–55. 57. Cited by Pagels from the Apocalypse of Peter 79, 22–30 in NHL, 343. An ecumenical metaphor. See also 2 Peter 2:17. 58. Hakola’s warning (“Reception and Development of Johannine Tradition,” 35–37) against deriving the opponents beliefs from orthodox criticism and polemic has merit—the orthodox were capable of painting their opponents in darkest colors on what might be considered insufficient evidence—but his claim that “whether we should read 1 John 4:2 [John’s condemnation of the opponents’ denial that Jesus had come in the flesh] as an expression of anti-docetic polemic” is not self-evident, seems disingenuous. 59. Irenaeus says in AH 2.31.1 that his arguments against Valentinus also tell against Marcion. 60. “It is not in dispute that in this heresy we are dealing with some form of incipient Gnosticism—incipient, if only because there is no trace of the idea of the Gnostic redeemer,” J. A. T. Robinson, “The Destination and Purpose of the Johannine Epistles,” NTS 7 (1969–1961): 61. But for early Christian Gnosticism—perhaps Marcionism is the model—Jesus, who came into the world, but not in the flesh, is just such a redeemer. For Cerinthus the divine Christ descended upon Jesus at his baptism (AH 1. 26.1; Hippolytus, Refutation, 22.7). 61. However Elaine Pagel’s broad thesis that orthodoxy represents only one possible hermeneutic may be evaluated, her scholarship has demonstrated the relative ease with which Gnostics might plausibly interpret a Pauline text in favor of their system. See The

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62 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

157

Gnostic Paul, 1–12. Irenaeus argued persistently that Valentinian gnosis rested on a misinterpretation of John and other soon-to-be-canonical books. Robinson, Priority of John, 240. Tertullian, On Purity, 10 [ANF 4:85]. In his treatise On Purity (19) Tertullian read 1 John 5:16 in isolation from John 20:19–23. The decision that sins such as adultery and fornication might be forgiven, which would have been difficult to construe as having the authority of revelation apart from John 20:20–23 and the analogous Matthean text (16:17–20), had far-reaching consequences. That the Christian ecclesia, those called out of the world into holiness, should have the mixed character of the field of Matthew 13:1–8 was conceived as impossible and nearly outrageous by Tertullian and those who sympathized with him. Callistus’ decision meant that throughout history the Church would carry in its wake a penumbra of failure and scandal that would encircle the bright witness of the saints, while the church of Tertullian, could it have been realized, would have been the visible communion of the holy. Implicit in Callistus’ decision was the necessity for restitution, the penance that true repentance presupposed and upon which the Church’s act of forgiveness depended, and this in turn led to the development of the doctrine of purgatory, a means of satisfying the debt of temporal punishment that repentant sinners might not have paid in this life. In effect the Church took the position of Hippolytus and Tertullian that only the holy can see God, while insisting that Christians who had sinned grievously might be healed or cleansed of the effects of sin by the power of the Church when repentant and when some form of restitution has been made, all the while denying the ‘enlightened’ position that sin, even grave or mortal sin, is a psychological event which self-knowledge and private sorrow can set right. Baptism was thus understood to cleanse from the guilt of sin and the punishment sin deserved in an absolute and unqualified way while the ‘second’ baptism effected through repentance for mortal, post-baptismal sins was a more complicated affair requiring the authority of the apostolic gift. The Johannine corpus enunciated the principles. The prayers of the faithful forgive faults and moral failings that lack the character of rebellion against God, things done through ignorance, without full consent (1 John 5:16–17): “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal.” On the other hand one is not to assume that prayer suffices for the forgiveness of mortal sin. But for such sins there is the gift of John 20:19–23. HE 3.39.13. Epiphanius, Panarion 31.7.1. Robinson, Priority of John, 239–42. Finally, one need not revisit the Council of Ephesus or iconoclasm or post-sixteenth century devotional practice to notice that twice (2:5, 19:26–27) the Gospel brings the mother of Jesus into the story, on the second occasion establishing a special relationship between Mary and the Beloved Disciple, or between Mary and the Church.

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C 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

H A P T E R

E

I G H T

“Once the Epistles and Apocalypse were accepted along with the Fourth Gospel as the work of the apostle, references to the apostle and the seer were mingled indiscriminately with references to the apostle” (Culpepper, John the Son of Zebedee, 89). Tertullian (Against Marcion 3.25) illustrates the ease with which apostle, evangelist, and prophet were conflated by early second century. AH 3.11.9. “It may be said that most of the troubles of Asia in the second century were due to the Johannine writings” (Grant, Second Century Christianity, 15). Tertullian “in his defense of the distinction of the Divine persons... did not escape the pitfalls of Subordinationism,” Johannes Quasten, Patrology. 3 vols. (Westminister, Md.: Christian Classics, 1983), 2:286. Hippolytus, Refutation 9.7. AH 3.9.11. Tertullian “withdrew from the carnally minded on our acknowledgement and maintenance of the Paraclete,” Against Praxeas 1. Hippolytus, Refutation 8.12.10. 22–23. Refutation 8.19. Epiphanius, writing about 374, when the local charges against the prophetesses were distant memories, wrote, “They receive the whole of the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, and believe the resurrection of the dead: also concerning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost they agree with the holy Catholic Church,” Panarion 48. 1. Hippolytus, Against Praxeas 1. HE 5. 23,24. “The thirty years after Victor to the death of Callistus are to be considered as forming a definite period, which taken as a whole marks the end of the long doctrinal uncertainty and cleared the way for the ecclesiastical doctrine of the logos to become the official doctrine of the Roman Church,” George La Piana, “The Roman Church at the End of the Second Century,” HTR 18 (1925): 260. See Hill, Johannine Corpus, 178–79. On Proctus see Tertullian, Against the Valentinians 5. Against the Heresy of One Noetus, 15, Hippolytus charged in the Refutation (9.8) that Callistus taught that, “the Father is not one person and the Son another, but that they are one and the same.” [ANF 5:229]. The theologically confused and confusing nature of the early third-century controversy is illustrated by the fact that Monanist Praxeas was a patripassian while other Asian Montanists accepted the Logos doctrine (Hippolytus, Refutation 8.13). Panarion 51. Dionysius of Alexandria, in HE 7. 6. John Gwynn, “Hippolytus and his ‘Heads against Gaius,” Hermathena 6 (1888): 397– 418, as cited by Hill, Johannine Corpus, 178, note 13. The liturgical dispute of the second century became hopelessly entangled with the technical problem of determining the correct date, with Antioch accepting Jewish reckoning of the date of Passover and Alexandria opting for a date that depended upon

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17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

159

the vernal equinox. This problem vexed Hippolytus, who wrote a treatise Determining the Date of Easter, intending by reliance on astronomical facts to make the Church independent of Jewish calculations. This interest is illustrated by the calculations of the date of Easter inscribed on his chair in Pio-Cristiano collection in the Vatican Museum. The Roman practice of solemnly declaring the dates of the major festivals at the Epiphany Mass is one reminiscence of the paschal controversy. See below notes 28, 29. Hill, Johannine Corpus, 156–66. See also Ludwig Heertling and Engelbert Kirschbaum, The Roman Catacombs and their Martyrs, trans. Joseph Costelloe (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Bruce Publishing Co., 1956), 180–196; Norbert Zimmermann, Werkstattgrupen Römischer Katakombenmalerei, (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2002), Plates 31, 78.1, 199. James Montague Rhodes, The Apocalypse in Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 32–33. See also Wilpert, 65, 73 note 53. The façade of San Paolo fuori le Mura, even as somewhat revised after the fire of 1827, shows the influence of the common Roman iconography. The façade mosaic of St. Peter’s, as renewed or commissioned by Leo I (440–461) is depicted in Hartman Grisar, Anal. Rom. I, 463–489, Taf. X–XII. Monuments of the Early Church (New York: Macmillan Co., 1923), 302-304. At Santa Prassede on the Esquiline, as in the Apocalypse itself, the lion, eagle, ox and beast with a man-like face provide a taxonomy of the animal kingdom which Christ has also redeemed and brought to perfection just as the palm trees and the paradisial earth to which Christ returns represent the perfecting of the inanimate order. As early as Irenaeus the four great animals are identified with the four Gospels—part of his argument that there are four gospels, no more, no fewer—, although the identification of John with the lion, proposed by Irenaeus, was amended to pair John with the eagle, Mark with the lion, Luke with the ox, and Matthew with the man-like animal. These great beasts inhabit medieval imagination, as in Assisi at the Basilica and the Cathedral of San Rufino, where they are prominently represented in the eleventh century. As late as 1496, Albrecht Durer in his “Adoration of the Lamb” from his Apocalypse series surrounds the Lamb of God with the four great animals (Peter Schmidt, Adoration of the Lamb, trans, Lee Preedy (Louvain: Davidsfonds, n. d.), 56. The Parousia or “coming along side” is depicted. Jesus is located in the air because he is returning, and the welcoming gestures of Peter and Paul belong to the welcome given to any dignitary, who was always met on the road, or when Jesus returns, given the assumed spatial metaphor, εἰς ἀέρα, in the lower air surrounding the earth.. The verbal form in I Thess 4:17 is ἀπάντησιν and the related noun is ἀπάντησις meeting or encounter. Something of the expectant sense of going forth to meet the Lord is also conveyed by exhortation in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins: ἐξέσϑε εἰς ἀπάντησιν (Matt 25:6). Martha had gone out some distance to meet Jesus while Mary stayed at home (John 11:20, 30). When Fernandino Fuga encased Santa Maris Maggiore in fashionable neo-classical style in the 1740s, he left parts of Francisco Rusuti’s thirteenth-century façade mosaic uncovered, but visible only from the loggia.

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24. Theodor Klauser, Frühchristliche Sarkophage in Bild und Wort (Olten, Schweiz: Urs Graf-Verlag, 1966), Tafeln 23–24 [Arles], 25 [Legem dat], 30 [Ravenna], 40 [Verona]. The Arles sarcophagus shows Jesus standing on the mount with its four rivers, bracketed by Peter and Paul; the phoenix at the upper left. Joseph Wilpert, (La Fede della Chiesa Nascente secondo I Monumenti dell’Arte Funeraria Antica [Roma: Pontifico Instituto di Archeologia Christiana, 1938] figs 58, 59) gives examples. See also Lowrie, figs. 161, 162. 25. Sándor Ritz, The Church: the Supreme Creation of the Past, Present, and Future; the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation; the Everlasting Temple of Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, trans from the Italian by Mary Grovesnor. Rome, Privately Printed, 1976. Published in German and Italian in 1967. 26. Schmidt, Adoration of the Lamb, 55. Schmidt notes that the relation of the Ghent altar piece to the Apocalypse is “loose” and cites other examples of more direct influence. Rhodes, writing in 1927, catalogued more than ninety MS of the Apocalypse (Apocalypse in Art, 44). 27. AH 5:36.1. 28. HE 7. 25. 29. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 310–15, and see Geoffrey Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon: “A thoroughgoing rejection of Revelation did not come about in the East until the second half of the fourth century. Cyril of Jerusalem [c. 380] is the first known writer to exclude Revelation without comment” (24). 30. There was always a subtle iconoclastic tendency in Constantinople, evident in the preference for the imperial iconography. See E. Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 129ff. 31. Rhodes, The Apocalypse in Art, 32–33. 32. Thomasius, ed Vessozi, 1699, 1:344, quoted in Burkitt, Two Lectures on the Gospels, 90–94. 33. Eisler, Enigma of John, Plates XII, XIII, XIV. 34. “Icon: the Apostle in Art and Literature,” Culpepper, John, the Son of Zebedee, 251–76.

C

H A P T E R

N

I N E

1. Petersen, Andrew, 6–8; James, Apocryphal New Testament, 337–63; Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of Andrew (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 184–87. 2. By the time of Polycarp’s’ death in 156 the practice of seeking and reverencing the bodies of the martyrs, described about 250 in Pionius’ account of the martyrdom, was common. The veneration of relics was related to the incarnational character of the religion, expressed in part as the preference for inhumation. The catacombs might occasionally serve as places of refuge, but they were created as places in which the Christian departed awaited the resurrection of the body.

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161

3. Jerome, De vir ill. PL 23, col. 651 [Halton, trans, On Illustrius Men 17]; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.40. 4. Dvornik, 156–58. 5. Dvornik, “The Andrew argument was used for the first time with all its implications in an anti-Latin polemic by Nicholas Mesarites” in 1206 (290). 6. Jerome, Adversus Vigilantium, PL 23, col. 358; Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1965), 47; Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.58. 7. A. I. Schuster, Liber sacramentorum, 6 (Milan, 1941), 70–75. And see Cyril Mango, “Constantine’s Mausoleum and the Translation of Relics,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 (1990): 51–61. 8. See Thomas F. Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy (University Park, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 43–47. 9. Cleveland Museum of Arts, CMA accession number 1967.144, Icon of the Virgin and Child, Egypt, 6th century. Because so much is lost to Iconoclasm and the ascendancy of Islam, the iconographic trail is difficult to follow, but the evidence offered by the covers of the Gospel books suggests the importance of the Apostle Andrew in early medieval Byzantine imagination. See The Treasury of San Marco, Venice. David Buckton, ed. (Milan: Olivetti, 1984), 141–45, 152–53. 10. Dvornik, Idea of Apostolicity, 169. 11. Dvornik, Idea of Apostolicity, 159, note 62; Johannes Diaconus, S. Gregorii Magni vita 1.6, PL 75, col. 65. The association of St. Andrew’s with San Gregorio Magno persisted in the early seventeenth century when Guido Reni painted St. Andrew worshipping the cross, with Patras in the background. 12. Henry Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, 18–19, 42, 56; figures 9, 51. St. Andrew’s unruly beard was still recollected in Dominichino’s apse fresco at Sant’ Andrea della Valle in 1660. The earliest image of Andrew in the newly discovered catacomb of St. Thecla, dating from the fourth century, makes Andrew more youthful than does the medieval iconography, which depicts him heavily bearded. See Biblical Archaeological Review 36, no. 1 (January/February 2010):18. 13. Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998), 175–77; Ruth Olinsky Rubenstein, “Pius II’s Piazza S. Pietro and St. Andrew’s Head,” in Douglas Frazer, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine, eds., Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (London: Phaidon, 1957), 23–33.

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 Index A Acts of Andrew, 81, 123 Alexander, 22 Anastasius of Sinai, 36 Andronicus, 26 Andrew, 12, 13, 34, 39, 43, 48, 50, 55, 57, 60, 64, 66, 69, 74, 80, 81, 91, 101, 124 disciple of John, 56‒57 translation of his relics, 126 Andrew of Caesarea, 36 Andronicus, 26 Anicetus, 112 Anna, 65 Annand, Rupert “Papias and the Four Gospels” quoted, 38 another disciple, 12 antichrist, 20, 94 Antioch, 98 Antiochus Sidetes, 98‒99 Anti-Marcionite Prologue, 1, 8, 34, 44, 45, 50, 60, 92, 120 Apocalypse, 17‒19, 24, 38, 116‒120 Apollinarius, 35, 36, 112 aporias, 5, 44 apostle, false, 26 title, 26 Apostolic Fathers, 20 Apostolic order, 55

Apostolic presbyter, 27 Aramaisms, 6, 66 Aristion, 36, 37, 38, 101 Aristotle, Ethics, 14 Athenagoras I (patriarch), 83 Augustus, 4 Aurelian, 94 B Bacon, B. W., 6, 69, 82 Barnabas, 26 Barrett, C. K. quoted, 5, 7, 19, 29 Basilides, 24 Bauer, Ferdinand Christian, 2 Baukham, XX, 89 Beloved Disciple, 3, 11‒13, 27, 7, 57‒58, 59, 60‒70, 7, 91, 101 Bessarion, 127 Bethany, 65 Bethsaida, 56-57, 63‒64, 87 Bogomiles, 107 Book of Glory, 12, 55, 73, 79 Book of Signs, 39, 55, 57, 59 Brooke, A. E., 29 Bultmann, Rudolf, Gospel of John, ix, 56, 57, 59 Burney, C. F., 38, 89, 91 Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel quoted, 89, 130

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C

E

Cain, 95 Caiaphas, 12, 88 Callistus, 18, 112–13, 115‒16 Cana, 13, 56, 63, 64 catacombs Callistus, 116 Priscilla, 116 Thecla, m 125 Cerinthus, 24, 45, 94, 96, 103 Chapman, John, 38 Church of the Holy Apostles, 124 Cicero, De officiis, 14 Clement of Alexandria, 1, 49, 107; Hypotyposes, 49 Codex Sinaiticus, 106 Colossae, 35 Comforter, 17. See also Paraclete. Conybeare, 98 Constantinople, 88, 124, 126 Constantius II, 124 Corinthian church, 23 Cullmann, Oscar, Johannine Circle, 65 Culpepper, R. A., quoted, 25 Cyril of Jerusalem, 120

Easter, date of, 80, 112‒13 Ebion, 45 Edessa, 10, 80, 98, 100, 103 Eisler, Robert, 88 Ephesus, 19, Ephesian church, 88 Ephesians, letter of St. Paul to, 22, 37 Epiphanius on Gnostics, 107 on Alogi, 115 Essenes, 3 Eusebius, 24, 36, 43, 49 Eyewitness, 3, 13, 25, 28‒29, 53, 59, 65, 68

D De Bruyne, Donatian, 8, 45 Delff, Hugo, 89 Demetrius, 95 Didache, 1, 113 Diesmann, Alfred, 44 Dionysius of Alexandria, 9,2, 37‒38, 85– 86, 116 Diotrephes, 94 Disciple of the Lord. See John. disciple whom Jesus Loved. See Beloved Disciple. Dodd, C. H., 3, 6, 7. 11, 20, 51, 65, 101 “Background of the Fourth Gospel” quoted, 1 Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel quoted, ix, 2, 31, 33, 40 Domitian, 9 Dura-Europas, 98 Dvornik, Anton, 124

F Florinus, 18 G Gabriel, 65 Gaius, 18, 24, 35, 41, 112, 124 Galilee, 15, 53, 59, 63, 66 Galileans, 65 Gardiner-Smith, Percival, 6, 7 Saint John and the Synoptic Gospels quoted, 6 Gaulanitis, 63 George the Sinner, 47 Gentiles, 90 Gerhardsson, Birger Reliability of Gospel Tradition quoted, x, 82 Glory, 18, 29, 56 Gnosis, 20, 23 Gnosticism and Johannine literature, 19‒22 developed within Christianity, 23‒24 insight versus tradition, 80 as ‘realized’ eschatology, 104 Gospel of Thomas, 19, 22 Gospel of Truth, 19 Gregory of Tours, 123 Gregory I (pope), 124 H

INDEX Hanchen, Ernst Commentary on the Gospel of John quoted, 2 Harnack, Adolf von, 8, 45, 89, 98 Hasmonean priesthood, 4, 88 Hellenism, 6, 7, 23, 53, 64, 66, 90 Hengel, Martin, 85, 87, 89 Johannine Questions quoted, 86, 91 Heracleon, 24 Herod the Great, 88 Herodians, 4, 27, 80 Hierapolis, 35, 47, 87, 100 high priest, 12, 58, 65‒66 Hill, Charles E., ix, 18, 0, 43, 50 Hippolytus Against Noetus, 111 Against Praxeas, 115 Defense of the Gospel and Apocalypse, 8, 115‒16 On Christ and Antichrist, 115 On Daniel, 115 Refutation, 115 Hoffman, R. Joseph Marcion on the Restitution of Christianity quoted, 9 Howard, Wilbert Fourth Gospel in Recent Criticism quoted, 17 Hymenaeus, 22 Hyrcanus II, 90 I Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, 17, 21, 24, 99 Epistle to the Ephesians, 22 Epistle to the Romans, 26 Epistle to the Smyrnaeans quoted, 94‒95 Irenaeus, 3, 18, 19, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 104, 113 Adversus haerses, 17, 99; quoted, 25 J James, 39 Jerome, 1, 14, 34, 43, 60, 92, 121, 124 Commentary on Matthew quoted, 44 Jerusalem, 6, 53, 66 fall of, 90 Jews, 91

175 John

apostle, x apostolic presbyter, 25, 89 disciple of the Lord, 25 eyewitness, 13 John of Ephesus, 25, 47, 87 John of Patmos, 34 presbyter, 2, 27, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 48, 50, 52, 53, 68, 89‒109 priest wearing the breastplate, 30 John Chrysostom, 121 John the Baptist, 3, 53, 66 Johannine books unity of authorship, 35, 94 Johannine churches, 81-89 Johannine Epistles 1 John, 21, 29 2 John, 9 3 John, 9, 25 Johannine language, 99‒100 Joseph of Aramathaea Judaism, 88 Second Temple Judaism, 3, 56, 59 Judas, 55, 66 Judas, not Iscariot, 55, 57 Judea, 59 Junia (Junias), 26 K Knox, Ronald, ix L Lamb of God, 4, 15, 56, 64, 65 Laodicea, 35 Lazarus, 66 Levites, 67 Lightfoot, J. B., 38, 44 loaves and fishes, 58 Logos doctrine, 19, 107, 112‒13, 115 Luke, 44 M Mandaeans, 3 Malchus, 65, 114 Marcion, 19, 23, 24, 47, 50, 51, 92-93, 94, 97, 98, 104 Marcus Aurelius, 35

176

A N D R E W O F B E T H S AI D A

Mark, 49 origin, 101 Matthew, 37, 42, 43 Mary (mother of Jesus), 12, 15, 30, 90 Maximus the Confessor, 26 Melito of Sardis, 43, 67 Memory, 52, 68 Messianic expectation, 67 Milenarianism, 17, 37, 39 Mingana Colophon, 34, 47, 97 Monarchianism, 114, 116 Montanism, 35, 107 Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, 40 Muratorian Canon, x, 1, 8, 14‒15, 33, 34, 40‒43, 45, 50, 60, 89, 92, 101, 121 Muratorian Fragment, 40‒41 N Nag Hammadi, 3 Nathanael, 55, 57, 63, 101 Nazareth, 63 New Prophecy, 19, `113 Nicodemus, 67 Nicolaitans, 104 Noetus, 112, 116 O Origen, 1, 50 P Papias of Hierapolis, 1, 34, 35, 37, 38, 50, 81, 87, 92, 101, 107 Andrew listed first by, 82 Apocalypse cited by, 36, 102, 108 biography, 34‒35, 96 Five Books, 8, 35, 36, 39, 45, 46, 102, 121; quoted, 36, 101 in Anti-Marcionite Prologue, 46 John the Presbyter, knew, 40, 81 Muratorian account consonant with, 1, 34, 41 on unwritten tradition, 101‒102 Palestine, 6 Roman ch passion narrative, 12, 56, 57, 59 Passover, 32, 70 Paraclete, 9, 14, 15, 43 Parthia, 9, 98, 103

Patras, 123 patripassianism, 113 Paul, 27, 28, 100 and prophecy, 14. antinomianism attributed, 24 biography, 89 eschatology, 4, 22 knowledge in the Spirit, 48, 49 not historical eyewitness, 26‒28 theology of glory, 18, 37, 38 Paulinism, 19, 21, 22, 24, 91, 93, 96, 104 Paulicians, 107 Paulinus of Nola, 124 Pepuza, 35 Pentecost, 4, 5, 9‒10, 14, 21‒22, 26, 51, 96 Peter, 12, 28, 48, 55, 57, 68, 77, 97, 100, 103 Peter and Andrew, 75‒81 Peter and Paul, 69 relics in Rome, 18, 79‒80 Roman iconography of, 117 Pharisaic Judaism, 21, 68 Pharisees, 4, 56, 66, 67‒68 Philetus, 22 Philip, 30, 35, 55, 57, 74, 80, 101 prophetic daughters, 30, 87, 102 Philip of Side, 47, 48 Photius, 116 Phrygia, 35, 97 Pius I (pope), 41 Pius II (pope), 126 Pontianus (pope), 112 Polycrates, 47, 80, 87‒88, 92, 97, 102, 112 claims Philip apostle, 27, 30 controversy with Victor, 18 makes John Beloved Disciple, 30 Pontus, 47, 97, 100 Proclus, 18, 35, 55, 57, 74, 80, 102 Q Quartdecimanism, 18, 112, 116 Qumran, 3 R ‘realized’ eschatology, 21‒22, 24, 104 relics, 18, 80,124

INDEX resurrection, 21‒22, 104, 112 Revelation. See Apocalypse Robinson, J. A. T., 5, 53, 65 Priority of John, ix, 7, 30, 34, 38, 44 quoted 8, 65, 86, 99, 104 Roman Church, 79 Roman orthodoxy, 112 S Sabellius, 116 Sagaris, 87 Samaria, 65 Sanday, William, 99 Criticism of the Fourth Gospel quoted, 99 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 29 Christ: the Christian Experience quoted, 29 Schnackenburg, Rudolf, 3,89 Schürer, Emil, 2 Sea of Tiberias, 11, 58, 74, 75, 101 Second Temple Judaism, 3, 56, 59. Shepherd of Hermas, 40, 41, 108 Simeon, 65 Simon the Zealot, 4 Smith, D. M., 7 Son of God, 68 sons of Zebedee, 39, 55, 57, 65, 68 ‘spiritual’ religion, 20, 107 spiritual resurrection, 22, 50‒51 Stoicism, 23 Streeter, B. F., 85 Symmachus, (pope), 125 Synoptic order, 55 Synoptics, 7, 10, 18, 39 Synoptic Problem, 6, 10 Synoptic tradition, 65 Syria, 97 T Tabernacles, Feast of, 90 Theodore of Mopsuestia, 120 Theodoret, 120 Thymion, 35 Thraseus of Eumenia, 87 Trajan, 19, 96, 98 Tregelles, Samuel Prideaux, 1, 6, 40 Trullanum, 121

177 Tübingen school, Twelve (apostles), 3, 9, 26, 30, 34, 35, 38 historical witnesses, 27 U Ulfilas, 124 Urban (pope), 112 V Valentinians, 19‒24, 94, 1076, 113 opposed by Irenaeus, 18 prophecy, 14, 20 spiritual heresy of,’ 23 Valentinus, 94, 95, 103‒104, 111,123 dualist, 29 mentioned in Muratorian Canon, 41 thought opposed by John, 102‒103 Victor, 18, 20, 87, 112, 114 Victorinus of Pettau, 34, 92, 116, 126 On the Apocalypse quoted, 45 Vogel, Erhardt Friedrich, 2 Von Hügel, Friedrich, 85 W Wilpert, Giuseppe, 116 Wordsworth and White, 121 XYZ Zampieri, Dominichino, 127 Zealots, 4, 68 Zephrinus (pope), 18, 112, 116

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