Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  Pilate had Jesus brought out, and seated himself on the Chair of Judgment at a place called Lithostroton, in Hebrew Gabbatha [High Place]. It was the Day of Preparation [when the Supper of the Pashcal Lamb was prepared], about noon [by which time all leavened bread and yeast had to be removed from Jewish homes, to be replaced by the unleavened bread of Passover]. “Here’s your king,” Pilate taunted the Jews; at which they shouted, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!”

  “What?” exclaimed Pilate. “Shall I crucify your king?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar!” At that, Pilate handed him over to be crucified.

  The pleasures of John’s Gospel tend to be more veiled than those of the other evangelists. In John, the delightful parables of the Synoptics are nowhere to be found, replaced by dignified but boring speeches that sometimes run to several pages. The author, determined not to let us forget who Jesus is, can overwhelm us with airless solemnity that leaves us begging for the sinewy, down-to-earth Jesus of the Synoptics. John’s Jesus is always in control. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus dies on the cross in unspeakable pain, inarticulately, with “a loud cry,” almost a terrifying shriek. In Luke, having forgiven everyone and promised Paradise to the Good Thief, he speaks his last, elegant words to his Father, quoting Psalm 31: “Father, into your hands do I commit my spirit.” Luke is already halfway toward the Johannine theology of the God-Messiah. But in John, Jesus at the point of death remains in control of everything. “All is fulfilled,” says the Johannine Jesus. “And bowing his head,” writes John, “he gave up his spirit”—which henceforth belongs to the whole world.

  JOHN’S JESUS is the gravitas-encrusted Christ of the ancient creeds, of tasteless religious art, of German passion plays and Hollywood movies. He is the immobile icon loved by ecclesiasts and theologians. It is as if John’s symbolic reverence has made an icon too awesome to be touched by the soiled and unconsecrated hands of ordinary humans—even though it is in John’s Gospel that Thomas the Doubter is invited by Christ, crucified, lanced, and now risen, to “put your finger here and feel my hands. Give me your hand; put it into my side.” The weight of the human and fleshly, the sweaty and smudged is finally overcome in John by the weightless illumination of the divine. This is the same process of iconization that will in later centuries lift Mary of Nazareth out of the Galilean hills and enthrone her amid the celestial constellations as theotokos, god-bearer, Mother of God, fresh incarnation of the Great Mother of Eurasia, replacement for the dethroned Diana of the Ephesians.

  Like all religious innovations, John’s theology grew out of a culture and must be seen as part of a developing cultural process if it is to be understood. This culture was one of Hellenized, even Asiatic pomp and rhetorical exaggeration that began in Alexander’s appreciation of Eastern ceremony. The cynical Roman senators, forever declaring one Caesar or another to be god, didn’t take their own decrees literally; but they approved of the awe-inspiring marble statues and the overpowering clouds of incense, the shining vessels and the smartly togaed devotees, all bowing in unison: these were standard methods for creating political stability, based in part on popular gullibility. In the centuries following John’s presentation of his high Christology, poetic and liturgical hyperbole will sometimes calcify into rigid dogma till everything the Church possesses—from consecrated priests to consecrated bread, from sacred books and vessels to Paschal candle, lauded in extravagant, ecstatic song on Easter night—will seem to glow in the light of its own divinization.

  Many who are comfortable with the Synoptic tradition and even with Paul feel that here at the threshold of John’s Gospel they must part company with the New Testament. They may be believers or half-believers, Jews, humanitarians, agnostics—all of whom may cheer the insights and advances of Paul and the Synoptic evangelists but find themselves abashed and compassless once they come into the field of John’s unearthly glow. Nor is it only the exaggerated God-Man that renders them uneasy. For it is in John that we can locate not only the sure source of the exalted doctrines of later Christianity (not all of which even every Christian can assent to) but also a spirit of touchy exclusivity that will surface repeatedly and with increasingly devastating results throughout the course of Western history.

  In John, “the Jews” are enemies, often (though not always) designated with contempt, the lost people who “have no king but Caesar.” This attitude cannot have stemmed from the time of Jesus, when he and all his followers were Jewish. Nor can it be located in the mid-century controversies of the early Jesus Movement, when all the leaders—men like James, Peter, and Paul (that self-described “Jew of Jews”)—were deeply aware of their Jewish roots and thought of themselves only as preachers of a fulfilled Judaism. The anti-Judaism of John is traceable rather to the last decades of the first century, when the tug-of-war between rabbis and Messianists had heated to the boiling point, and Messianists were being forcibly ejected from Eurasian synagogues and formally cursed in Jewish liturgies. The sense of loss that resulted from this hateful ostracism should not be minimized—though we cannot but be mindful of it, for it still throbs in the hurt feelings of the Fourth Gospel, retrojected into its account of the life of Jesus by a mixed community of Jews and gentiles of the 90s, probably now removed from Palestine to Ephesus but still smarting over the wounds of their final rejection. Unlike, for instance, Paul’s gentile churches, the Johannine community had retained—through the presence of the Beloved Disciple and, after his death, through its reverence for his very Palestinian, very Jewish memories—a keen appreciation of its Jewish identity, so the final breakdown of koinonia between Jews and Christians may have been far more painful for the Johannine than for many other Christian churches.

  But if it may be said that the rabbinical Jews won this first-century tug-of-war and continued to hold the upper hand for the next two centuries, the tide will turn in the early fourth century with the emperor Constantine’s induction as a Christian catechumen, after which Christians will spend the next sixteen and a half centuries rounding up Jews, hunting them down, depriving them of civil rights, torturing, massacring, and ridiculing to their heart’s content. This centuries-long pogrom is the lasting shame of Christianity, even more of a blot than its centuries of crusades against the Muslim “infidels.” If John, writing in the heat of controversy, can no more be blamed for the subsequent history of European anti-Semitism than can the Birkat ha-minim, the Jewish ritual curse on the heretical Christians, his gospel is still capable of leaving Jewish readers purple with rage and Christians red with embarrassment.

  It may even be the rejection by Judaism that lit the furnace of the Johannine community’s high Christology. As has so often been the case in religious history, the very thing that one is rejected for becomes the treasure one must never give up—a treasure that is emphasized, exaggerated, and made into one’s badge of honor. It is just such a psychological process that creates obsessive positions that can bear no compromise—and that finally makes dialogue (between Jews and Christians, as well as among varieties of Christians) impossible.

  BY THE TIME the First Letter of John was written, however, in the first decade of the second century, the Jewish-Christian schism that has left its traces in John’s Gospel was already fading into history, and the Johannine community had found new enemies. Gnostics were giving John’s Gospel an interpretive spin that horrified more “orthodox” believers, for the Gnostics completely ignored Jesus’s human dimension and reveled excessively in John’s repeated emphasis on his divinity. The Gnostics preferred to believe that Jesus had never been human anyway, just a spirit who appeared to be human (like a Greek god temporarily assuming a fleshly body). Though John’s was much more to their taste than were the other gospels, John the Elder was appalled by their attachment.

  His response to this theological challenge, however, was brittle, captious, and unforgiving: the Gnostics and other opponents are all “antichrists” and “children of the devil,” and none of the good people are to have
anything to do with them. C. H. Dodd, one of the greatest modern exegetes of the Johannine literature, once asked thoughtfully: “Does truth prevail more if we are not on speaking terms with those whose view of truth differs from ours?” It is a question that people like John the Elder seem never to consider.

  The church of the Beloved Disciple had become like a species on an island that geological changes have cut off from the mainland. For many years, it developed separately—from Jews, from “heretics,” even from other “orthodox” Christians. Without permanent offices of administration and authority, like the bishops and deacons of other Christian communities, it was wholly dependent on individual, prophetic inspiration—from “the Spirit”—and it rejected the notion that anyone but Jesus could be pastor, that is, their shepherd. Jesus was, as he had said, “the Good Shepherd,” and we were all his sheep without distinction. Like John’s Gospel itself, this church possessed intellectual and social treasures unknown in the other Christian communities, which were growing together slowly into the Great Church of succeeding centuries. For all its problems, the high Christology of the Johannine community gave its theology a profundity and piercing clarity that other churches lacked; and its Spirit-based social ambience encouraged equal participation by all, especially women, in its common enterprises of charity and prayer.

  The Johannine church, indeed, sheltered unusual seedlings that would flower in succeeding centuries. If its individualist orientation and its insistence on personal encounter with the Lord remind us of the spirit of the modern Reformation churches, its unique reverence for the holiness of the physical (Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus curing the blind man with a mixture of mud and his own spit) can only recall the later sacramentalism of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. But its insistence on there being but one way of thinking makes uneasy anyone who has ever had an unorthodox thought. It comes as no surprise that John is often the favorite evangelist of the uptight and unrelenting; and his rigidity can call to mind contemporary churchpeople of several unfortunate varieties. The difficulties of John’s Gospel are extreme enough that to this day Christian churches use its passages sparingly in their lectionaries, whereas the other gospels are proclaimed in full.

  For all this, the most characteristic passages of the Johannine literature bid fair to be the most beautiful of the New Testament:

  “For God so loved the world

  that he gave away his only Son.”

  “I give you a new commandment:

  love one another.”

  “I am—the Vine,

  you are the branches.

  Whoever abides in me, and I in him,

  bears fruit a-plenty.…

  As the Father has loved me,

  I have loved you.

  Abide in my love.”

  God is love,

  and he who abides in love

  abides in God,

  and God in him.

  The first three quotations are words of Jesus from John’s Gospel; the last are the words of John the Elder from his First Letter. Cut off from its Jewish roots, confronting theological controversy, and finally overwhelmed by disunity within its own ranks, the church of the Beloved Disciple, which placed such high value on love but could not resolve the arguments that continued to tear it apart, opted at last to reconnect itself to the mainland, to join in communion with the then-emerging Great Church. We know this from the coda that the final editor appended to John’s Gospel after the death of John the Elder. In this epilogue, the risen Jesus appears on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, as if in a dream, and asks Peter three times: “Do you love me?” To each question Peter responds with an increasingly emotional affirmation; and to each answer of Peter’s Jesus gives a pointed instruction: “Feed my lambs.” “Care for my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”

  The church of the Beloved Disciple had finally admitted that it could no longer go it alone, defending itself from attack only by means of its own informal intuitions and pentecostal resources, but had to accept some mechanism of human authority. It needed more than the teaching of Jesus and the example of its Beloved Disciple. It needed the protection of the Great Church and its shepherds, the nurturing pastores of whom Peter was representative.

  There was a trade-off here. The Johannine church, in accepting the protection of the Great Church, accepted its structures of authority and lost much of its freewheeling, Spirit-based pentecostalism. The Great Church, never so interested in theory as in practice, accepted the elaborate Christology and, after much debate, accepted alongside its own growing library of apostolic writings the peculiar literature of the church of the Beloved Disciple.

  OF THE MANY ENIGMAS of John’s Gospel nothing is more mysterious than the story that does not belong there. It interrupts the flow of John’s tightly stitched scheme of narration, and though, like many Johannine episodes, it gives a starring role to a woman, its supple Greek has all the characteristics of Luke’s pen:

  At daybreak, Jesus appeared again in the Temple precincts; and when all the people came to him, he sat down and began to teach them. Then did the scribes and Pharisees drag a woman forward who had been discovered in adultery and force her to stand there in the midst of everyone.

  “Teacher,” said they to him, “this woman has been caught in the very act of adultery. Now, in the Torah Moses ordered us to stone such women. But you—what have you to say about it?” (They posed this question to trap him, so that they might have something to use against him.)

  But Jesus just bent down and started doodling in the dust with his finger. When they persisted in their questioning, he straightened up and said, “He among you who is sinless—let him cast the first stone at her.” And he bent down again and continued sketching in the sand.

  When they heard this, they went away one by one, starting with the oldest, until the last one was gone; and he was left alone with the woman, who still stood where they had made her stand. So Jesus straightened up and said, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

  “No one, sir,” answered she.

  “Nor do I condemn you,” said Jesus. “You are free to go. But from now on, avoid this sin.”

  This entire passage sounds like the Synoptics and could easily be slipped into Luke’s Gospel at 21:38, where it would make a perfect fit. It was, in fact, excised from Luke, after which it floated around the Christian churches without a proper home, till some scribe squeezed it into a manuscript of John, where he thought it might best belong. But why was it excised in the first place? Because the early Church did not forgive adultery (and other major sins) and did not wish to propagate the contradictory impression that the Lord forgave what the Church refused to forgive. The Great Church quickly became far more interested in discipline and order than Jesus had ever shown himself to be. This excision is our first recorded instance of ecclesiastical censorship—only for the best reasons, of course (which is how censors always justify themselves). The anarchic Johannine church had had good reason for its reluctance to attach itself to the Great Church, which it knew would clip its wings; and for all we know, it was a Johannine scribe who crammed the story of the aborted stoning into a copy of John’s Gospel, thus saving it for posterity.

  The passage itself shows up the tyrannical mindlessness that tradition, custom, and authority can exercise within a society. The text of the Torah that the scribes and Pharisees cite to Jesus is Leviticus 20:10, which reads, “The man who commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife will be put to death, he and the woman.” Jesus, doodler in the dust and reader of hearts, knows the hard, unjust, and self-deceiving hearts he is dealing with. He does not bother to dispute the text with them, by which he could have asked the obvious question “How can you catch a woman in the act without managing to catch her male partner?” He goes straight to the heart of the matter: the bad conscience of each individual, the ultimate reason no one has the right to judge anyone else.

  How marvelous that in the midst of John’s sometimes oppressive solemniti
es, the wry and smiling Jesus of the Synoptic gospels, the Jesus the apostles knew, the holy fool, still plays his holy game, winning his laughing victory over the stunned and stupid forces of evil. This is the same Jesus who tells us that hell is filled with those who turned their backs on the poor and needy—the very people they were meant to help—but that, no matter what the Church may have taught in the many periods of its long, eventful history, no matter what a given society may deem “sexual transgression,” hell is not filled with those who, for whatever reason, awoke in the wrong bed.

  Nor does he condemn us.

  The Bread of the Poor

  As we look back over Christianity’s first hundred years—from the birth of Jesus in the reign of Caesar Augustus to the final editing of John’s Gospel (and the last of the New Testament letters) about the year 100—we see what seems an abnormally rapid-fire development. Jesus the Jewish prophet, who accepted the judgment of others that he was their Messiah (and may even have promoted this identification), was executed by the Romans in a manner so hideous that his followers could never forget it. Their subsequent claim that “he is risen” did not fall upon deaf ears but convinced many; and their small Palestinian sect grew into a movement that spread like scattered seeds through the Roman world, taking root especially in urban centers with substantial Jewish populations.