Beyond Belief

by Elaine Pagels

  Two generations of scholars have devoted hundreds of articles and monographs to such questions, and have proposed various solutions. Some suggest that the author was a different John, “John the elder,” a follower of Jesus from Ephesus, whom Christians in later generations confused with John the apostle; others say that the disciple John was the witness whose authority stood behind the gospel but was not its actual author; still others believe that the author was an anonymous leader of a lesser-known circle of disciples, distinct from “the twelve.”

  Furthermore, while the author of this gospel accepts Peter’s authority and his teaching, he also claims that the “beloved disciple” surpasses Peter. So while John pictures Peter as one of Jesus’ first disciples, he does not repeat the story that Mark, Matthew, and Luke so prominently featured, in which Peter first recognized Jesus—the story that Mark, and many Christians to this day, take to mean that Peter was the disciples’ leader, and the church’s founder. Moreover, Matthew adds that Jesus promised Peter would succeed him as the founding “rock” upon which the future church would stand100—a statement many later took to mean that Peter stood first in the apostolic succession and was the spiritual ancestor of all subsequent popes. Matthew’s gospel, like Mark’s and Luke's, apparently reflects the view of the so-called Peter Christians—a group based in Rome. Yet all four gospels that eventually formed the New Testament either endorsed Peter’s leadership—as Matthew, Mark, and Luke did—or at least grudgingly accepted it—as John did. From the mid-second century, this group, which called themselves catholic (literally, “universal”), remain the founders with whom Roman Catholic and most Protestant Christians identify.

  But not all first-century Christians agreed that Jesus named Peter as his primary successor, or identified with that founding group. The gospel we call by John’s name insists, on the contrary, that no one—not even Peter—knew Jesus as well as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,”101 the mysterious, unnamed disciple who is usually assumed to be John himself. Though John acknowledges Peter’s importance by featuring him often in his narrative, he always places him second to this “disciple, whom Jesus loved,” who, he says, actually witnessed the events he records. For example, John tells how “the disciple whom Jesus loved” reclined next to Jesus at the last meal he shared with his disciples and dared ask him directly—as Peter did not—who would betray him.102 John adds that even after Judas, and then Peter, betrayed Jesus and fled, the “disciple whom Jesus loved” remained with his mother beside his cross as the dying Jesus entrusted to him his mother’s care. John also says that this disciple, who had seen Roman soldiers hasten the death of other crucified men by breaking their legs, saw a soldier pierce Jesus’ body with a spear. Later, when Mary Magdalene told him that Jesus’ body had disappeared from the grave, he and Peter ran to see what had happened. Luke says that Peter outran all the rest, and was the first to realize that Jesus had risen; but John says that Peter and the beloved disciple “both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first,” so that he was the first who “saw and believed.”103 When the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples by Lake Gennesaret, the “disciple whom Jesus loved” was the first to recognize him and “said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ ”104

  Although the author of this gospel may not have been one of “the twelve,” he does acknowledge Peter’s leadership—but with qualifications. John’s final chapter, perhaps added later, tells how Jesus himself ordered Peter to care for his flock (“Feed my sheep”).105 But John adds that Jesus reserved for his “beloved disciple” a special, mysterious role that he refused to explain to Peter. When Peter saw that disciple and asked, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus answered only, “If it is my will that he should remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!”106 Such stories may imply that John’s teaching, including the “farewell discourses” which Jesus addressed to the disciples, entrusting “the beloved disciple” to write them down, is superior to Peter's. Such stories suggest rivalry—but not necessarily opposition—between the Peter Christians and those whom John assumes to be his audience, the so-called Johannine Christians, who regard “the disciple whom Jesus loved” as their spiritual mentor.

  Such stories, and the differences they show among various leaders and groups, involve more than power struggles: they involve the substance of Christian faith. As the stories themselves show, at stake is the central question Who is Jesus, and what is the “gospel” (good news) about him? Not surprisingly, each group characterizes its own patron apostle as the one who best understands “the gospel.” So, for example, even the “gnostic” Gospel of Mary, like many other gospels, tells how its primary apostle—in this case, Mary Magdalene—received direct revelation from “the Lord,” and claims that Jesus authorized her to teach.107

  What John writes about Peter and “the beloved disciple” suggests that while John accepted the teaching associated with Peter, and even wrote his own gospel “so that you might believe that Jesus is the messiah, the son of God,”108 his own teaching went further. So, while he agrees with Peter—and Mark—that Jesus is God’s messiah, John goes further, and also insists that Jesus is actually “Lord and God.”109

  John must have known that this conviction branded him a radical among his fellow Jews—and even, apparently, among many of Jesus’ followers. The scholar Louis Martyn suggests that John himself, along with those in his circle who shared his belief, had been accused of blasphemy for “making [Jesus] God” and forcibly expelled from their home synagogue.110 In his gospel, John dramatizes this situation by turning a miracle story of Jesus healing a blind man into a parable for their own situation.111 Speaking for himself and his fellow believers, John protested that their only crime was that God had opened their eyes to the truth, while the rest of the congregation remained blind. Thus in John’s version, when Jesus met a man born blind, he “spat on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread it on the man’s eyes, and said to him, ‘Go, and wash in the pool of Siloam.’ Then he went and washed and came back able to see.”112 But what the man had come to “see” was Jesus’ divine power, which others denied; so, John says, “the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.”113 Although the man’s parents—and thus, John implies, an older generation—did not dare to acknowledge Jesus’ power because, he says, they were afraid that “the Jews” would expel them, the man whose eyes were opened defied the synagogue leaders by confessing faith in Jesus (“Lord, I believe”) and worshiping him.114

  Thus John’s account implicitly places Jesus—and his power to heal and change lives—into his own time. By showing the man born blind facing expulsion from the synagogue, this story echoes John’s own experience and that of his fellow believers. They, too, having been “born blind,” now, thanks to Jesus, are able to “see”—but at the cost of rejection by their own people. So John’s followers are relieved and grateful to hear Jesus’ harsh, ironic words at the end of the story: “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see; and so that those who do see may become blind.”115 Jesus says that he alone offers salvation: “All who came before me are thieves and robbers. . . . I am the door; whoever enters through me shall be saved.”116 Thus John’s Jesus consoles his circle of disciples that, although hated “by the world,” they alone belong to God.

  Spurred by rejection but determined to make converts, John challenges his fellow Jews, including many who, like himself, follow Jesus. For John believes that those who regard Jesus merely as a prophet, or a rabbi, or even the future king of Israel, while not wrong, nevertheless are blind to his full “glory.” John himself proclaims a more radical vision—one that finally alienates him from other Jews, and even from other Jewish followers of Jesus. Not only is Jesus Israel’s future king, and so messiah and son of God, but, John declares, he is “greater than Moses” and older than Abraham. When he pictures Jesus declaring to a hostile crowd that “before Abraham was, I am
,”117 John expects his readers to hear Jesus claiming for himself the divine name that God revealed to Moses (“tell them that I am has sent you”);118 thus Jesus is nothing less than God himself, manifest in human form.

  John warns those who doubt him that Jesus, acting as divine judge, will condemn those who reject this “good news,” even if they constitute the main body of the Jewish people, rather than the handful of the faithful who alone see the truth and proclaim it to a hostile and unbelieving world. According to John, “the Jews” regard Jesus himself (and thus his followers) as insane or demon-possessed. John warns that, just as they wanted to kill Jesus for “making himself God,” they will hate and want to kill his followers for believing such blasphemy: “Whoever kills you will think he is doing service to God.”119 But John assures Jesus’ followers that God judges very differently: “Whoever believes in him [Jesus] is not condemned; but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”120 For John, Jesus has become more than the messenger of the kingdom—and even more than its future king: Jesus himself has become the message.

  How could anyone who heard John’s message—or that of Mark, Thomas, or any of the others, for that matter—decide what to believe? Various Christian groups validated their teaching by declaring allegiance to a specific apostle or disciple and claiming him (and sometimes her, for some claim Mary as a disciple) as their spiritual founder. As early as 50 to 60 C.E., Paul had complained that members of different groups would say, for example, “I am from Paul,” or “I am from Apollos,”121 for those who wrote stories about various apostles—including John, as well as Peter, Matthew, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene—would often promote their groups’ teachings by claiming that Jesus favored their patron apostle, so that, while John acknowledges Peter as a leader, he insists that “the beloved disciple” surpassed Peter in spiritual understanding. He is aware that other groups make similar claims for other disciples. He seems to know, for example, of Thomas Christians, who claim that their patron apostle, Thomas, understood more than Peter. Though John’s gospel begins by seeming to agree with Thomas about God’s presence in Jesus, by the end John tells three anecdotes about Thomas to show how wrong these Thomas Christians are.

  John’s gospel begins by recalling, as Thomas does, the opening of the first chapter of Genesis—saying that, since the beginning of time, divine light, “the light of all people,” has shone forth:

  In the beginning [Gen. 1:1] was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God . . . what came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”122

  But John’s next lines suggest that he intends not to complement but to reject Thomas’s claim that we have direct access to God through the divine image within us, for John immediately adds—three times!—that the divine light did not penetrate the deep darkness into which the world has plunged. Though he agrees that, since the beginning of time, the divine light “shines into the darkness,” he also declares that “the darkness has not grasped it.”123 (Here the Greek verb katalambanein, which means “to seize,” has a double meaning, as does the English verb “to grasp”). Moreover, he says that, although the divine light had come into the world, “and the world was made through it, the world did not recognize it.”124 John then adds that even when that light “came unto its own, its own—God’s people, Israel—did not receive it.”125 Thus, because that divine light was not available to those “in the world,” finally “the word became flesh and dwelt among us”126 in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, so that some people now may declare triumphantly, as John does, “we saw his glory [the Greek term translates the Hebrew kabod, which means “shining,” or “radiance”], the glory as of the only begotten son of the Father.”127 Thus the invisible God became visible and tangible in a unique moment of revelation. A letter later attributed to John declares that “we have seen [him] with our eyes, and we have touched [him] with our hands!”128

  But to anyone who claims, as Thomas does, that we are (or may become) like Jesus, John emphatically says no: Jesus is unique or, as John loves to call him, monogenes—“only begotten” or “one of a kind”129—for he insists that God has only one son, and he is different from you and me. Though John goes further than the other three New Testament evangelists in saying that Jesus is not only a man raised to exalted status (“messiah,” “son of God,” or “son of man”) but God himself in human form, and though he presumably agrees that human beings are made in God’s image, as Genesis 1:26 teaches, he argues that humankind has no innate capacity to know God. What John’s gospel does—and has succeeded ever after in persuading the majority of Christians to do—is claim that only by believing in Jesus can we find divine truth.

  Because this claim is John’s primary concern, his Jesus does not offer ethical and apocalyptic teachings as he does in Mark, Matthew, and Luke; he delivers no “sermon on the mount,” no parables teaching how to act, no predictions of the end of time. Instead, in John’s gospel—and only in this gospel—Jesus continually proclaims his divine identity, speaking in what New Testament scholars call the “I am” sayings: “I am the way; I am the truth; I am the light; I am the vine; I am the water of life”—all metaphors for the divine source that alone fulfills our deepest needs. What John’s Jesus does require of his disciples is that they believe: “You believe in God; believe also in me.”130 Then, speaking intimately to those who believe, he urges them to “love one another as I have loved you.”131 Jesus tells them that this strong sense of mutual support will sustain believers as together they face hatred and persecution from outsiders.132

  Now we can see how John’s message contrasts with that of Thomas. Thomas’s Jesus directs each disciple to discover the light within (“within a person of light there is light”);133 but John’s Jesus declares instead that “I am the light of the world” and that “whoever does not come to me walks in darkness.”134 In Thomas, Jesus reveals to the disciples that “you are from the kingdom, and to it you shall return” and teaches them to say for themselves that “we come from the light”; but John’s Jesus speaks as the only one who comes “from above” and so has rightful priority over everyone else: “You are from below; I am from above. . . . The one who comes from above is above all.”135 Only Jesus is from God, and he alone offers access to God. John never tires of repeating that one must believe in Jesus, follow Jesus, obey Jesus, and confess him alone as God’s only son. We are not his “twin,” much less (even potentially) his equal; we must follow him, believe in him, and revere him as God in person: thus John’s Jesus declares that “you will die in your sins, unless you believe that I am he.”136

  We are so different from Jesus, John says, that he is our only hope of salvation. Were Jesus like ourselves, he could not save and deliver a human race that is “dying in sin.” What gives John hope is his conviction that Jesus descended into the world as an atonement sacrifice to save us from sin and from eternal damnation, and then rose—bodily—from the dead. As John tells it, the story of Jesus’ baptism reaches its climax not, as in Mark, when Jesus announces the coming of God’s kingdom, but when John the Baptist announces that Jesus has come: “Behold—the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”137

  To draw near to God we must be “born again, of water and the spirit”138—reborn through faith in Jesus. The spiritual life received in baptism requires supernatural nourishment; so, John’s Jesus declares, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day, for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.139

  Jesus offers access to eternal life, shared when those who believe join together to participate in the sacred meal of bread and wine that celebrates Jesus’ death and resurrection.

  Mark, Matthew, and Luke mention Thomas only as one of “the twelve.” John singles him out as “the doubter”—the one who failed to
understand who Jesus is, or what he is saying, and rejected the testimony of the other disciples. John then tells how the risen Jesus personally appeared to Thomas in order to rebuke him, and brought him to his knees. From this we might conclude, as most Christians have for nearly two millennia, that Thomas was a particularly obtuse and faithless disciple—though many of John’s Christian contemporaries revered Thomas as an extraordinary apostle, entrusted with Jesus’ ”secret words.” The scholar Gregory Riley suggests that John portrays Thomas this way for the practical—and polemical—purpose of deprecating Thomas Christians and their teaching.140 According to John, Jesus praises those “who have not seen, and yet believed” without demanding proof, and rebukes Thomas as “faithless” because he seeks to verify the truth from his own experience.

  John offers three anecdotes that impose upon Thomas the image—Doubting Thomas!—he will have ever afterward in the minds of most Christians. In the first, Thomas, hearing Jesus say that he is going toward Judaea to raise Lazarus from the dead, does not believe him, and “speaks the desperate words, ‘Let us go, so that we may die with him.’ ”141 Thus John pictures Thomas as one who listens to Jesus in disbelief, imagining that he is merely human, like everyone else.