Philip Fogarty SJ takes a look at the circumstances behind the writing of the Gospel of St John, which emerged from the tension between early Christian communities and Jewish leaders.
Towards the end of the first century AD, the great city of Ephesus, in what is now Turkey, had a population of about 250,000, and was famous for its philosophers, artists, poets, historians, and rhetoricians as well as the grandeur of its gymnasium, its stadium or racecourse, its great theatre and, above all, for its Temple of Artemis.
Cult of Artemis
Artemis was the great Greek goddess of the woods and hunting, as well as the patron of women in childbirth. Religious artefacts from her cult have been found as far away as Spain and as far east as Palestine. Her temple in Ephesus, with its one hundred marble columns over fifty-five feet high, was the largest Greek temple in antiquity and was regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
St. Paul had visited the city in the fifties and sixties, and his preaching had resulted in a riot among the silversmiths who made religious artefacts connected with the cult of Artemis (Acts 19:2141).
Gospel writers
It was probably in or near this sprawling and argumentative city that John’s gospel was written somewhere between 80 and 110 AD. It was penned by a member of what later became known as the Johannine community and, later still, added to by someone whom scholars call the redactor or editor, also a member of the community.
One man – never named – an insignificant figure during the ministry of Jesus, came to be known as the Beloved Disciple (Jn.19:26 and 21:7), and he may well have been the community’s founding figure. He could be the source of much of the material in the fourth gospel that is quite different from what we find in the other three.
A mixed group
The Johannine community was formed in or near Palestine sometime in the 70s or 80s, moving on later to preach to those of a Greek cultural background in the areas around the city of Ephesus. The community was made up of Jews, including some followers of John the Baptist, and Gentiles, who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. Some Jews, opposed to the Temple authorities, also joined the community, and this group made converts from among the people of Samaria.
Jews regarded the Samaritans as a group of spurious worshippers of the God of Israel and they were detested even more than pagans. The origins of the distrust lie deep in early Israelite history but there was no deeper breach of human relations in the contemporary world than the feud between Jews and Samaritans. The breadth and depth of Jesus’ teaching on love would demand no greater act of a Jew than to accept a Samaritan as a brother or sister.
Jewish hostility
The fact that many Gentiles and Samaritans were accepted into the community and intermingled with Jewish Christians who still frequented the synagogue, may have contributed to Jewish hostility to the community. For a time at least, some synagogues may have accepted Jewish believers in Jesus in their midst.
However, when the Johannine Christians spoke of Jesus in terms of his pre-existence with the Father and as the incarnate Word of God who revealed the Father to humanity (Jn. 1:1-2), there were fierce debates with those Jews who thought that the followers of Jesus were abandoning the Jewish belief in the one, true God by making Jesus a second God (Jn.5:18).
In the end, the Jewish leaders had the Johannine Christians expelled from the synagogue (Jn.9:22). The invective against ‘the Jews’, that runs through John’s gospel, arose out of this conflict situation.
It is important to remember, as many later Christians did not, that ‘the Jews’ referred to here were not Jews in general but rather those leaders who expelled the early Christians from the synagogue or Jews who were extremely hostile to the Johannine community. Anti-Semitism does a profound disservice to the memory of Jesus, himself a believing and practising Jew.
Process of separation
Because of the hostility of some local synagogue leaders and the persecution Christians often encountered, Johannine Christians saw parallels between what was happening to them and what had happened to Jesus. Gradually from the 50s until perhaps 125-150, a process of separation continued until finally, Christians and Jews saw themselves as belonging to different religions.
John’s gospel tends to lay such heavy stress on Christ’s divinity that at times it seems to underplay his humanity. (The First Epistle of John tries to correct this over-emphasis.) This provoked deep divisions, even within the community itself. Some people left and finally the community split with some members linking themselves to the broader Christian community while others joined groups that held that Jesus was not truly human or that the world was so distorted that it was not God’s creation.
Context of scripture
John’s gospel was addressed not to ‘the Jews’ or to those Gentiles who refused evangelisation, whom John refers to as ‘the world’, but primarily to members of his own community in order to strengthen their faith, partly shaped as it was by the hostility of the synagogue leaders and those who denied the divinity of Christ. The author of John’s gospel tells us that his account was written so that ‘you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life through his name’ (Jn.20:31).
In reading the gospel, one has to remember that John was writing after a period of fifty or sixty years of community reflection on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and so the words he puts in Jesus’ mouth are interspersed with reflections that may not be the actual words that Jesus used during his ministry but rather theological elaborations on what he had said.
This accounts for the difference we find between how Jesus speaks in the other gospels and in John’s gospel. Gospel writers always had to translate Jesus’ words and deeds from that of a village culture to a wider and more sophisticated Greekspeaking culture, and this goes further in John than in the synoptic gospels.
Levels of meaning
Just as in the other gospels, Jesus speaks in parables that are often misunderstood, so in John’s gospel, Jesus uses language that seems obvious on one level but always has a deeper, more significant meaning. A good example of this is to be found in the scene where Nicodemus visits Jesus. Jesus speaks of the necessity of being ‘born from above’. Nicodemus thinks he is speaking about entering the womb for a second time! This misunderstanding then allows Jesus to speak about what it means to be ‘born of the Spirit’.
In John’s gospel such misunderstandings of what Jesus means are frequent. The author uses these to provide Jesus with the occasion to explain what he means more fully and to engage his audience and us in the unfolding drama. John’s gospel uses this technique over and over again.
Drama
John’s gospel is rather like a full-length drama, with its own prologue and various well-developed scenes and characters. Jesus is centre stage as John tries to draw us into a relationship with Jesus. Are you a disciple? Do you love him? Do you have life from him? These are the important questions for John, as indeed they are for us.
This article first appeared in the Messenger (July 2004), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
