It is striking that virtually none of these stories that form the skeleton of the narratives of the Synoptics can be found in John. There is no reference to Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and no mention of his mother being a virgin. He is not explicitly said to be baptized and does not undergo his temptations in the wilderness. Jesus does not preach the coming kingdom of God, and he never tells a parable. He never casts out a demon. There is no account of the Transfiguration. He does not cleanse the Temple when coming to Jerusalem (he did that already in John 2). He does not institute the Lord’s supper (instead he washes the disciples feet), and he does not have any kind of official trial before the Jewish council.
If John doesn’t have any of these accounts that seem fairly essential to the story of Jesus, what does it contain? It has a lot of stories not found in the Synoptics. John starts with a prologue that mysteriously describes the Word of God that was in the very beginning with God, that was itself God, and through which God created the universe. This Word, we are told, became a human being, and that’s who Jesus Christ is: the Word of God made flesh. There is nothing like that in the Synoptics.
John does tell of Jesus performing miracles during his public ministry, but the miracles are never called miracles, which literally means “works of power.” Instead, they are called signs. Signs of what? Signs of who Jesus is, the one who has come down from heaven to provide eternal life to all who believe in him. Seven signs are narrated in the Gospel of John, most of them not found among the miracles of the Synoptics (two exceptions are walking on the water and feeding the multitudes). The signs narrated in John include some of the favorite miracles known to Bible readers over the ages: turning the water into wine, healing the man born blind, and raising Lazarus from the dead. Jesus also preaches in this Gospel, not about the coming kingdom of God but about himself: who he is, where he has come from, where he is going, and how he can bring eternal life. Unique to John are the various “I am” sayings, in which Jesus identifies himself and what he can provide for people. These “I am” sayings are usually backed up by a sign, to show that what Jesus says about himself is true. And so he says “I am the bread of life” and proves it by multiplying the loaves to feed the multitudes; he says “I am the light of the world” and proves it by healing the man born blind; he says “I am the resurrection and the life” and proves it by raising Lazarus from the dead.
In John, Jesus usually speaks in long discourses rather than in memorable aphoristic sayings as in the other Gospels. There is the long speech to Nicodemus in chapter 3, the speech to the Samaritan woman in chapter 4, and the very long speech to his disciples that covers four entire chapters (13–16), before he launches into a prayer that takes the entire next chapter. None of these discourses or any of the “I am” sayings can be found in the Synoptics.
Differences in Emphasis
Much more could be said about the unique features of John; my point is not simply that there are discrepancies between John and the Synoptics but that the portrayals of Jesus are very different. Certainly the three Synoptics are not identical, but the differences between any one of the Synoptics and John are especially striking, as can be seen by considering some of their various thematic emphases.
The Virgin Birth and the Incarnation
The orthodox Christian doctrine about Christ’s coming into the world that has been accepted for centuries is that he was a preexistent divine being, equal with but not identical to God the Father, and that he became “incarnate,” became a human being, through the Virgin Mary. But this doctrine is not set forth in any of the Gospels of the New Testament. The idea that Jesus preexisted his birth and that he was a divine being who became human is found only in the Gospel of John; the idea that he was born of a virgin is found only in Matthew and Luke. It is only by conflating the two views that one could come up with the view that became the traditional, orthodox doctrine. For the writers of the Gospels, the idea of a virgin birth and the idea of an incarnation were very different indeed.
Mark’s Gospel doesn’t say anything about either. The story starts with Jesus as an adult, and Mark gives no indication of the circumstances of his birth. If your only Gospel was Mark—and in the early church, for some Christians it was the only Gospel—you would have no idea that Jesus’ birth was unusual in any way, that his mother was a virgin, or that he existed before appearing on earth.
Matthew’s Gospel is quite explicit that Jesus’ mother was a virgin, but is also quite restrained in any kind of speculation about what that means theologically. We have seen that Matthew is particularly keen to show that everything in Jesus birth, life, and death was a fulfillment of Scriptural prophecy. So why was he born of a virgin? It was because the Hebrew prophet Isaiah indicated that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel” (Matthew 1:23, quoting Isaiah 7:14). Actually, that’s not exactly what Isaiah said. In the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah indicates that a “young woman” will conceive and bear a son, a prediction not of a future Messiah but of an event that was soon to take place in Isaiah’s own day.3 When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, however, Isaiah’s “young woman” (Hebrew alma; there is a different Hebrew word for “virgin”) came to be rendered by the Greek word for “virgin” (parthenos), and that is the form of the Bible that Matthew read. And so he thought that Isaiah was predicting something not about his own day but about the future Messiah (though the term “Messiah” does not occur in Isaiah 7). So Matthew wrote that Jesus was born of a virgin because that’s what he thought Scripture predicted.
Luke has a different view. He, too, thinks Jesus was born of a virgin, but he does not cite a prophecy of Scripture to explain it. Instead, he has a more direct explanation: Jesus was literally the Son of God. God caused Mary to conceive, so that her son was also God’s son. As Mary learns from the angel Gabriel (recounted only in Luke): “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Impregnated not by her espoused or any other human, but by God, Mary gives birth to a being who is in some sense divine.
So Matthew and Luke appear to have different interpretations of why Jesus was born of a virgin, but, more important, in neither Matthew nor Luke is there any sense that this one born to the virgin existed prior to his birth. For these authors, Jesus came into existence when he was born. There is not a word in either Gospel about the preexistence of Jesus. That idea comes from John, and only from John.
John does not make any reference to Jesus’ mother being a virgin, instead explaining his coming into the world as an incarnation of a preexistent divine being. The prologue to John’s Gospel (1:1–18) is one of the most elevated and powerful passages of the entire Bible. It is also one of the most discussed, controverted, and differently interpreted. John begins (1:1–3) with an elevated view of the “Word of God,” a being that is independent of God (he was “with God”) but that is in some sense equal with God (he “was God”). This being existed in the beginning with God and is the one through whom the entire universe was created (“all things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing came into being”).
Scholars have wrangled over details of this passage for centuries.4 My personal view is that the author is harking back to the story of creation in Genesis 1, where God spoke and creation resulted: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” It was by speaking a word that God created all that there was. The author of the Fourth Gospel, like some others in the Jewish tradition, imagined that the word that God spoke was some kind of independent entity in and of itself. It was “with” God, because once spoken, it was apart from God; and it “was” God in the sense that what God spoke was a part of his being. His speaking only made external what was already internal, within his mind. The Word of God, then, was the outward manifestation of the internal divine reality. It both was with God, and was God, and was the means by which all things came i
nto being.
In John’s Gospel, this preexistent divine Word of God became a human being: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” (1:14). It comes as no surprise who this human being was: Jesus Christ. Jesus, here, is not simply a Jewish prophet who suddenly bursts onto the scene, as in Mark; and he is not a divine-human who has come into existence at the point of his conception (or birth) by a woman who was impregnated by God. He is God’s very word, who was with God in the beginning, who has temporarily come to dwell on earth, bringing the possibility of eternal life.
John does not say how this Word came into the world. He does not have a birth narrative and says nothing about Joseph and Mary, about Bethlehem, or about a virginal conception. And he varies from Luke on this very key point: whereas Luke portrays Jesus as having come into being at some historical point (conception or birth), John portrays him as the human manifestation of a divine being who transcends history.
What happens when the two views are combined? The distinctive emphases of both are lost. The message of each author is swallowed up into the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation through the virgin Mary. Readers of the New Testament who conflate the two texts have created their own story, one that bypasses the teaching of both Luke and John and proffers a teaching that is found in neither one.
Differences in the Teachings of Jesus
The Gospel of John also presents a different view of what Jesus talked about in his public ministry. Here I will use as a point of contrast our earliest Synoptic Gospel, Mark.
Jesus’ Teaching in Mark
In many ways the teaching of Jesus in Mark is summarized in the first words he speaks: “The time has been fulfilled; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). Anyone familiar with ancient Judaism can recognize the apocalyptic nature of this message. Jewish apocalypticism was a worldview that came into existence about a century and a half before Jesus’ birth and was widely held among Jews in his day. The Greek word apocalypsis means a “revealing” or an “unveiling.” Scholars have called this view apocalyptic because its proponents believed that God had revealed or unveiled to them the heavenly secrets that could make sense of the realities they were experiencing—many of them nasty and ugly—here on earth. One of the questions apocalypticists were intent on answering was why there was so much pain and suffering in the world, especially among the people of God. It might make sense that wicked people suffer: they are simply getting their due. But why do the righteous suffer? In fact, why do the righteous suffer more than the wicked, at the hands of the wicked? Why does God allow that?
Jewish apocalypticists believed that God had revealed to them the secrets that made sense of it all. There are cosmic forces in the world aligned against God and his people, powers like the Devil and his demons. These forces are in control of the world and the political powers that run it. For some mysterious reason God has allowed these forces to thrive in the present evil age. But a new age is coming in which God would overthrow the forces of evil and bring in a good kingdom, a kingdom of God, in which there will be no more pain, misery, or suffering. God will rule supreme, and the Devil and his demons, along with all the other nasty powers causing such suffering (hurricanes, earthquakes, famine, disease, war), will be done away with.
Jesus’ teaching in Mark is apocalyptic: “The time has been fulfilled” implies that this current evil age, seen on a time line, is almost over. The end is almost within sight. “The Kingdom of God is near” means that God will soon intervene in this age and overthrow its wicked powers and the kingdoms they support, such as Rome, and establish his own kingdom, a kingdom of truth, peace, and justice. “Repent and believe the good news” means that people need to prepare for this coming kingdom by changing their lives, beginning to align themselves with the forces of good instead of the forces of evil, and by accepting Jesus’ teaching that it was soon to happen.
For Mark’s Jesus, this kingdom is soon to come. As he tells his disciples at one point, “Truly I tell you, some of those standing here will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God having come in power” (Mark 9:1); later he tells them, after describing the cosmic upheavals that would transpire at the end of the age, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mark 13:30).
How will that kingdom arrive? For Mark it will be brought about by “the Son of Man,” a cosmic judge of the earth who will judge people according to whether they accept the teachings of Jesus: “For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of that one will the Son of Man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). And who is this Son of Man? For Mark it is Jesus himself, who must be rejected by his people and their leaders, executed, and then raised from the dead (Mark 8:31). Jesus will die, he will be raised, and then he will return in judgment, bringing with him the kingdom of God.
But since Jesus is the one who will bring the kingdom, for Mark the kingdom is already being manifest in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus in an anticipatory way. In the kingdom there will be no demons, and so Jesus casts out demons; in the kingdom there will be no disease, and so Jesus heals the sick; in the kingdom there will be no more death, and so Jesus raises the dead. The kingdom of God could already be seen in Jesus’ own ministry and that of his followers (6:7–13). That is the point of many of Jesus’ parables in Mark: the kingdom has a small, even hidden, appearance in the activities of Jesus, but it will appear in a big way at the end. It is like a small mustard seed that when put in the ground becomes an enormous shrub (4:30–32). Most of Jesus’ listeners rejected his message, but a judgment day was coming, and God’s kingdom would arrive in power, and then this world will be remade (Mark 13).
Jesus does not actually teach much about himself in the Gospel of Mark. He talks mainly about God and the coming kingdom, and how people need to prepare for it. When he does refer to himself as the Son of Man, it is always obliquely: he never says, “I am the Son of Man.” And he does not state that he is the Messiah, the anointed ruler of the future kingdom, until the very end, when he is placed under oath by the high priest (Mark 14:61–62).
Although Jesus is acknowledged as the Son of God in this Gospel (see 1:11; 9:7; 15:39), that is not his preferred title for himself, and he only acknowledges it reluctantly (14:62). It is important to know that for ancient Jews the term “son of God” could mean a wide range of things. In the Hebrew Bible the “son of God” could refer to the nation of Israel (Hosea 11:1), or to the king of Israel (1 Samuel 7:14). In these cases the son of God was someone specially chosen by God to perform his work and mediate his will on earth. And for Mark, Jesus was certainly all that—he was the one who performed the ultimate will of God, going to his death on the cross. It is striking, though, in the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus never refers to himself as a divine being, as someone who preexisted, as someone who was in any sense equal with God. In Mark, he is not God and he does not claim to be.
Jesus’ Teaching in John
Things are quite different in the Gospel of John. In Mark, Jesus teaches principally about God and the coming kingdom, hardly ever talking directly about himself, except to say that he must go to Jerusalem to be executed, whereas in John, that is practically all that Jesus talks about: who he is, where he has come from, where he is going, and how he is the one who can provide eternal life.
Jesus does not preach about the future kingdom of God in John. The emphasis is on his own identity, as seen in the “I am” sayings. He is the one who can bring life-giving sustenance (“I am the bread of life” 6:35); he is the one who brings enlightenment (“I am the light of the world” 9:5); he is the only way to God (“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me” 14:6). Belief in Jesus is the way to have eternal salvation: “whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (3:36). He in fact is equal with God: “I and the Father are one” (10:30). His Jewi
sh listeners appear to have known full well what he was saying: they immediately pick up stones to execute him for blasphemy.
In one place in John, Jesus claims the name of God for himself, saying to his Jewish interlocutors, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). Abraham, who lived 1,800 years earlier, was the father of the Jews, and Jesus is claiming to have existed before him. But he is claiming more than that. He is referring to a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures where God appears to Moses at the burning bush and commissions him to go to Pharaoh and seek the release of his people. Moses asks God what God’s name is, so that he can inform his fellow Israelites which divinity has sent him. God replies, “I Am Who I Am…say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you’ (Exodus 3:14). So when Jesus says “I Am,” in John 8:58, he is claiming the divine name for himself. Here again his Jewish hearers had no trouble understanding his meaning. Once more, out come the stones.
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) Page 9