1. Introduction
The year 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of J. Louis Martyn's ground-breaking study, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel.Footnote 1 However, the year 2019, when this paper was presented to the Society, marked the fortieth anniversary of the second, revised edition of 1979.Footnote 2 That year also saw the publication of a collection of three of Martyn's Johannine essays,Footnote 3 including ‘Glimpses into the History of the Johannine Community’.Footnote 4 The latter essay was incorporated into the third edition of History and Theology Footnote 5 as its concluding chapter.Footnote 6 In other respects, apart from minor changes and the omission of appendices, the third edition is a reprint of the second edition.Footnote 7
Martyn's influential monograph represents his ‘attempt … to honor the confluence of Johannine history and Johannine theology’.Footnote 8 It is well known that the reference to an expulsion from the synagogue of Jews confessing Jesus to be Messiah (John 9.22; cf. 12.42; 16.2a) plays a crucial role in his attempt. I want to take a fresh look at this issue in this paper.
In the presentation that follows, I will take as correct, first, Martyn's assumption that the Gospel can be profitably likened to an archaeological ‘tell’ (mound), which is to say that the Gospel consists of ‘numerous literary strata’ that ‘reflect communal interests, concerns, and experiences’.Footnote 9 This means that the Gospel's literary history provides useful clues to such communal interests, concerns and experiences over the course of time.Footnote 10Second, since the various strata exhibit ‘a remarkable degree of stylistic and conceptual homogeneity’, it can be concluded that ‘the literary history behind the Fourth Gospel reflects to a large degree the history of a single community which maintained over a period of time its particular and rather peculiar identity’.Footnote 11 The Gospel in other words originated in, and was written for, what Martyn called ‘the Johannine community’ (29).Footnote 12Third, the history of this community ‘forms to no small extent a chapter in the history of Jewish Christianity’.Footnote 13 That is to say, the Fourth Gospel is largely the legacy of a (particular, perhaps even peculiar) Jewish-Christian community.
2. Martyn on Expulsion from the Synagogue
2.1 John 9.22 as the Cornerstone
Of the three passages in which an expulsion from the synagogue is mentioned, the first – John 9.22 – plays the central role in Martyn's book. That is clear from Part i (35–66), which contains two chapters. The first (35–45) gives Martyn's well-known reading of John 9 as a two-level drama.Footnote 14 Chapter 2 (45–66) is devoted to exploring the significance of John 9.22 for achieving ‘a clear picture of the situation in which John wrote his Gospel’ (46). According to Martyn, it gives ‘a fairly coherent picture’ (49) of a formal agreement made by Jewish authorities (ἤδη γὰρ συνετέθειντο οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι) to expel Jewish confessors of Jesus as Messiah from the synagogue (ἳνα ἐάν τις αὐτὸν ὁμολογήσῃ Χριστόν, ἀποσυνάγωγος γένηται). Martyn then seeks to find ‘a recoverable historical reference apart from John's Gospel’ itself to substantiate and to confirm the plausibility of his reading of John 9.22 (49; cf. 78). As is well known, Martyn found historical corroboration in the Birkat ha-Minim (47–48, 56).Footnote 15 Having found historical corroboration, Martyn asserted that he could use John 9.22 as the fixed starting point for a reconstruction of the history of the Johannine community and its theology (cf. 69–71, 114).Footnote 16 The importance of John 9.22 for his project is reflected in the critique directed at Martyn's work, which generally focuses on John 9.22 and its relationship, or lack of relationship, to the Birkat ha-Minim.Footnote 17
In my view, Martyn should have taken the reference to expulsion in John 16.2a as the starting point of his analysis.Footnote 18 John 16.2a occurs in Jesus’ Farewell Discourse(s) to his disciples. In the immediately preceding verses, beginning with 15.18, Jesus makes predictions of persecution to come, in the time after his departure from the world. In 15.20, he says: ‘If they persecuted me [cf. 5.16], they will also persecute you’ (εἰ ἐμὲ ἐδίωξαν, καὶ ὑμᾶς διώξουσιν). That vague prediction becomes very specific in 16.2a: ‘They will put you out of the synagogue’ (ἀποσυναγώγους ποιήσουσιν ὑμᾶς, lit. they will make you people separated from the synagogue).Footnote 19 John 16.2a does not support the claim, used against Martyn, that ‘the aposynagōgos passages … would have been read primarily in their context in the story of Jesus and would have been seen as having extratextual referents in the life of the historical Jesus’.Footnote 20 That assertion could perhaps count for 9.22 and 12.42, but not, I think, for 16.2a, which is part of a discourse in which Jesus talks about events in the experience of his disciplesFootnote 21 in the time after his departure.Footnote 22
In short, if Martyn had started with John 16.2a, he could perhaps have forestalled two alternative explanations of the expulsion passages. The first of these explanations is that these passages are to be dismissed as concoctions or fabrications.Footnote 23 It is, I think, extremely unlikely that the prediction found in 16.2a would have been preserved or attributed to Jesus if it had not been fulfilled in the experience of the Johannine community after Easter. The specificity of the charge also makes the claim of fabrication an unlikely explanation.Footnote 24 Such a charge, if indeed false, could have been easily disconfirmed by the people right there on the ground at the time.Footnote 25 The second explanation comes from those who do not regard the expulsion passages as fabrications but, in contrast to Martyn, take them as reflecting historical events in the life and ministry of Jesus before Easter.Footnote 26 John 16.2a in my opinion also makes this explanation highly problematic and improbable.Footnote 27 So, if Martyn had started with 16.2a, instead of appealing to it later and somewhat incidentally to justify his two-level reading of John 9, I think he could have forestalled those alternative explanations and strengthened his argument for reading John 9 not only as a story about Jesus before Easter but also as a creative dramatisation of a traumatic event in the history the Johannine community after Easter.Footnote 28
2.2 The Significance of the Second Prediction in John 16.2
Jesus makes a second very specific prediction in John 16.2: ‘but an hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think that he is offering worship to God’ (ἀλλ’ ἔρχεται ὥρα ἳνα πᾶς ὁ ἀποκτείνας ὑμᾶς δόξῃ λατρείαν προσφέρειν τῷ θεῷ, 16.2b). On the basis of this text, Martyn sees an escalation of the conflict between the Johannine community of expelled disciples of Jesus (9.28; 19.38) and the authorities of the local synagogue. According to Martyn, Jewish authorities now needed to take a step ‘against those already excommunicated who insist on evangelizing among the Jewish populace’ (71; emphasis added), evidently with some success (Martyn appeals to John 12.11, 19).Footnote 29 A ‘step beyond excommunication was called for, and in light of 16.2[b]’, Martyn saw ‘no alternative but to conclude that this step was the imposition of the death penalty on at least some Jews who espoused the messianic faith’ (71).Footnote 30
Martyn saw further evidence for this step in John 5 and 7. He gives a two-level reading of those chapters in connection with this second step (69–89), arguing that the reasons indicated for seeking Jesus’ execution (namely, that he makes himself equal to God)Footnote 31 actually disclose the reasons for seeking the execution of Johannine preachers in the late first century: Johannine ‘Jewish-Christian evangelists [missionaries]’ were being regarded as ‘Mesithim (beguilers)’ who lead the people astray (πλανάω, 7.12, 47) into the worship of Jesus as a second god; ‘on the basis of that identification, it [the Gerousia in John's city] is able to institute legal proceedings against them’ (84).Footnote 32
Because in the presentation of his argument Martyn's focal concern was with the first trauma, the expulsion from the synagogue, and then particularly as attested in John 9.22 and corroborated (so he argued) by the Birkat ha-Minim, Martyn's thesis concerning the second trauma has received much less attention and scrutiny, even though he devotes two chapters to it. But, just as in the case of the first prediction of 16.2 (expulsion), it is extremely unlikely that the second prediction found in 16.2 (execution) would have been preserved or attributed to Jesus if it had not been fulfilled in the experience of the Johannine community after Easter.Footnote 33 It is even more unlikely if one takes 16.4a into account: ‘I have said these things to you’, Jesus reassures his disciples, ‘so that when their hour [i.e. time] comes you may remember that I told you of them’ (ταῦτα λελάληκα ὑμῖν ἳνα ὃταν ἔλθῃ ἡ ὥρα αὐτῶν μνημονεύητε αὐτῶν ὃτι ἐγὼ εἶπον ὑμῖν; cf. 48).Footnote 34 The specificity of the charge also, once again, pleads for historicity – historicity in the setting of the Johannine community after Easter.
In any event, consistent with Martyn's focus on 9.22 in the first part of his book, many Johannine scholars after him have tended to merge the second trauma with the first into something called ‘conflict with the synagogue’, or to see the second trauma as simply an aspect or an extension of the first.Footnote 35 The basic problem, so the argument goes, is the reliability of the claims about a formal expulsion from the synagogue in 9.22, and for that reason Martyn's whole proposal stands or falls with respect to this particular issue. Martyn himself, I think, contributed to this assessment of his argument not only through his focus on John 9 in the first part of his book but also by his placing the two traumas together in his follow-up ‘Glimpses’ articleFootnote 36 into what he called ‘the middle period’,Footnote 37 instead of, say, allowing each trauma to inaugurate and to define a distinct period in the history of Johannine Christianity (both communal and theological).Footnote 38
The collapsing of the two traumas into one, as just outlined, which Martyn himself seems to facilitate by his presentation in History and Theology, perhaps also partly explains why numerous Johannine scholars, such as Raymond E. Brown,Footnote 39 Andrew T. Lincoln,Footnote 40 D. Moody Smith,Footnote 41 John Ashton,Footnote 42 Jean ZumsteinFootnote 43 and Jörg Frey,Footnote 44 have maintained that the development of a ‘high’ Christology among Johannine believers in Christ provided the actual catalyst for the first trauma, the expulsion from the synagogue.Footnote 45 Brown (writing in 1979!) even attributes this view to Martyn himself, since he criticises Martyn for failing to ‘explain why the Christian Jews from the early period developed a Christology that led to their expulsion from the synagogue’.Footnote 46
Though Martyn was perhaps not as clear about the matter as he could have been, Smith rightly observes that when all is said and done ‘Martyn placed expulsion from the synagogue before, rather than after, the introduction of such a Christology’.Footnote 47 A high Christology does not play a role in Martyn's treatment of John 9.22 nor in his appeal to the Birkat ha-Minim as the historical background for 9.22. Rather, as we have seen, a high Christology provided the catalyst for the second trauma, that of execution for the seemingly blasphemous claim of Jesus’ equality with God. What then was the reason for the first trauma in Martyn's view, and is his argument cogent?
2.3 The Reason for the Expulsion according to Martyn
On the basis of John 9.22, Martyn concludes that ‘excommunication is clearly said to follow upon confession of Jesus as Messiah’ (91; emphasis original), i.e. ‘the Messiah of Jewish expectation’ (98; cf. 57).Footnote 48 That judgement finds support, I think, in the course of the story of the man born blind in John 9. The man who has been healed of his blindness refers to his healer as ὁ ἄνθρωπος ὁ λεγόμενος Ἰησοῦς (9.11), and he regards the ἄνθρωπος who performs τοιαῦτα σημεῖα (9.16) as a προφήτης (9.17). John 9.22 subsequently implies that the healed man has come to accept his healer as Χριστός (cf. 7.31; 20.30), who as such is παρὰ θεοῦ, ‘from God’ (9.16, 33) – παρὰ θεοῦ arguably in the same ‘low’ sense that John the Baptist is said to be an ἄνθρωπος ἀπεσταλμένος παρὰ θεοῦ in 1.6.Footnote 49 It is only after the man has been expelled (9.34) that he is led by Jesus himself to a much deeper understanding of who Jesus is, here ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, whom the healed man then proceeds to worship (προσεκύνησεν) (9.35–8; cf. Martyn 44–5). In short, the man has ostensibly been expelled from the synagogue for what amounts to a ‘low’ Christology, something Martyn also seems to assume concerning the Birkat ha-Minim when he writes that it represented ‘a newly formulated means for detecting those Jews who want to hold a dual allegiance to Moses and to Jesus as Messiah’ (66; emphasis added; similarly 70).
With respect to the decree to expel Christian Jews from the synagogue, then, it is specifically ‘the issue of Jesus’ messiahship’ that ‘stands at the center of the synagogue-church discussion’ (91).Footnote 50 While the Messiah title is the primary one in this discussion, Jesus is also identified as a προφήτης, as he is by the man born blind (9.17; cf. 4.19; 7.52), or as ὁ προφήτης (6.14; 7.40; 7.52 in P66),Footnote 51 an identification which is dependent on the promise of a prophet like Moses in Deut 18.15, 18 (cf. 1QS 9.10f.; 4QTestimonia = 4Q175). Martyn refers to this expected figure as ‘the Mosaic prophet’, and he argues that expectations related to the latter coalesced with those related to the (royal or Davidic) Messiah (97, 105–6), producing what Martyn dubs the expectation of ‘the Mosaic Prophet-Messiah’ (108). While ‘the Davidic Messiah was not expected to perform signs, that is precisely what was expected of the Mosaic Prophet-Messiah’ (108).Footnote 52
Martyn posits that at some early stage, prior to the edict to expel, ‘one of the preachers’ of the ‘inner-synagogue messianic group’ composed ‘a Signs Gospel’.Footnote 53 According to Martyn, this document sought in ‘an uncritical, unsophisticated way’ to demonstrate that Jesus fulfils Jewish messianic hopes and expectations of the Mosaic Prophet-Messiah (114–15). In the Signs Gospel, which was eventually incorporated into what became the Fourth Gospel, ‘a number of Jesus’ miracles were narrated as messianic signs … for use’ in evangelism among Jews in the synagogue (69). It was ‘expected that most Jews’, when they heard the message of Johannine evangelists, ‘would come rather uncritically to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah’.Footnote 54 ‘Far from abandoning Moses’, then, someone convinced by the stories of Jesus’ miracles as signs attesting his identity as the expected Messiah ‘would simply have attached himself to the one of whom Moses wrote’.Footnote 55
According to Martyn's analysis, and I am largely convinced by his argument, it is the confession of Jesus as the (Mosaic Prophet-)Messiah and not some blasphemously high Christology that lies behind the edict to expel.Footnote 56 When the formerly blind man considers that the one who opened his eyes may be a προφήτης (9.17),Footnote 57 he is evidently entertaining the possibility that Jesus is the Χριστός (9.22), which is to say, the Messiah who performs ‘such signs’ (τοιαῦτα σημεῖα) (9.16; cf. 7.31; 20.30).Footnote 58 In short, the reason for the expulsion was simply the embrace of Jesus as the Messiah of Jewish expectation, nothing more and nothing less.
This conclusion raises an obvious question, however: why would the synagogue authorities in John's setting have found the embrace of Jesus as Messiah so offensive that they formulated an edict formally to expel those Jews making this confession?
Martyn himself gives only passing attention to this question. He points to the dire situation of Jews and Judaism after the Romans conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in 70 ce.Footnote 59 With the Temple gone, ‘the major threat to Judaism was that of disintegration’, he writes (57). In this new situation, ‘the Christian movement’ came to be seen ‘as an essential and more or less clearly distinguishable rival’ (47). According to Martyn, the introduction of the reformulated Birkat ha-Minim into the synagogue service, effectively bringing about the expulsion of Jews confessing Jesus as Messiah, testifies to this need for ‘stability and cohesiveness in the postwar period’.Footnote 60 This is not an implausible assessment of the post-70 situation (even aside from the validity of the claims being made about the Birkat ha-Minim), but instead of referring to ‘the Christian movement’ in general, Martyn should perhaps have asked about the Johannine movement in particular and why it came to be seen as ‘an essential and more or less clearly distinguishable rival’ in John's own setting.Footnote 61
So, to repeat the question in slightly different terms: why would the local synagogue authorities, who are evidently represented in John's narrative by οἱ Φαρισαῖοι in particular (cf. 1.24; 3.1; 4.1; 7.32a, 32b, 45, 47, 48; 8.13; 9.13, 15, 16, 40; 11.46, 47, 57; 12.19, 42; 18.3),Footnote 62 have found the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah so offensive that they formulated a decree to expel those Jews espousing this messianic faith?
3. Expulsion from the Synagogue Reconsidered
3.1 Belief and Behaviour
As we have seen, according to Martyn, Jews confessing Jesus as Messiah in the Johannine setting were expelled from a local synagogue for their messianic faith. In all other respects, Martyn notes, they were evidently ‘Torah-observant Jews’. ‘One does not have the impression of a group which even dreamed of being free from Torah observance’, Martyn continues. Moreover, in Martyn's considered judgement, ‘the Birkath ha-Minim seems to have been directed against the confession of Jesus as the Messiah, not against discrete breach of Torah’.Footnote 63 These claims made Martyn's analysis vulnerable to a critique put into words by Adele Reinhartz. It was, she writes, ‘unlikely … that a confession of faith would have occasioned … an expulsion rather than, for example, the abandonment of key Jewish practices such as circumcision and dietary laws, for which [she adds] we have no Johannine evidence’.Footnote 64 Along similar lines, Shaye J. D. Cohen declares: ‘At no point did they [the early rabbis] expel anyone from the rabbinic order or from rabbinic synagogues because of doctrinal error or because of membership in some heretical group.’Footnote 65 If such observations carry weight, then the following question arises: did the confession of Jesus as Messiah become problematic precisely because Pharisees in John's setting believed that Johannine believers had indeed breached Torah? Put otherwise: did the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah lead Johannine believers to behaviour with respect to Torah that was unacceptable to the Pharisees in John's setting?
In 2011, John Kloppenborg published an article on the Johannine expulsion texts.Footnote 66 While it is true, he notes, that the Fourth Gospel presents the expulsion as a matter of Christology, as a matter of confession or belief (9.22),Footnote 67 that does not necessarily mean, Kloppenborg points out, that the synagogue in John's locale did so.Footnote 68 ‘The practice of exclusionary discipline’, he argues, ‘is well attested in a variety of contemporary Judaean and pagan associations, and in virtually all instances disruptive or deviant behaviour was the grounds for exclusion, rather than holding to certain beliefs.’Footnote 69 Kloppenborg applies this insight to Johannine disciples in the Johannine setting. It is likely that ‘behavioural practices … precipitated their exclusion and eventual expulsion’.Footnote 70 This does not mean, Kloppenborg adds, that the Johannine disciples ‘held no distinctive beliefs. It is to suggest that it was not until these beliefs were manifest in deviant behaviour that temporary exclusion or expulsion would have occurred.’Footnote 71 From the synagogue's point of view, however, it was the behaviour and not the beliefs that provided the actual grounds for ‘exclusion and expulsion’.Footnote 72
Sabbath observance is one of the ‘behavioural practices’ considered by Kloppenborg in this connection. Though Kloppenborg himself rejects this possibility,Footnote 73 it is striking that Sabbath observance is explicitly indicated as an issue only in the three chapters that were crucial for Martyn's two-level reading of John: John 5, 7 and 9. This may be merely a coincidence, but it does lead me to hypothesise that Sabbath observance was initially the main (if not the only) problem for the Pharisees of the synagogue in the Johannine setting and that this issue has some bearing on the edict to expel in John 9.22.
According to Martyn, ‘form-critical analysis clearly shows that references to breach of the Sabbath in 5:9, 10, 16, 18, and in 9:14, 16 belong to later strata, and the same is to be said of the discussion of circumcision and of breach of the Sabbath in 7:22ff.’Footnote 74 With respect to John 9, Martyn attributes the dramatic expansion in 9.8–41 of the original miracle story preserved in 9.1–7 to the person he calls ‘the evangelist’ (37–8).Footnote 75 The belated references to a breach of the Sabbath in 9.14, 16 are part of this expansion. Martyn pursues a similar argument with respect to John 5 (73–4).Footnote 76 It is certainly understandable that, as Martyn writes, ‘feelings of suspicion, fear, or hostility toward the messianic group on the part of the Jewish authorities’Footnote 77 were absent from the earlier versions of the miracle stories. If the initial aim of recounting the miracles of Jesus as signs of his messianic stature and legitimacy (perhaps, as Martyn thinks, in a Signs Gospel) was to convince fellow Jews that the expected Messiah was indeed Jesus of Nazareth, then it would have been rhetorically counterproductive to focus on matters that would encourage resistance to this message, such as Jesus’ offensive breach of the Sabbath. Problematic in my view is that Martyn nevertheless regards the conflict about the observance of the Sabbath as an issue that pertains only to what he calls the ‘einmalig’ level of the two-level drama that he discerns in both John 5 and John 9. That is, according to Martyn, the Sabbath issue pertains to the story of Jesus in the past (‘back then’)Footnote 78 and not to the situation of the Johannine church after 70 (42 n. 31 (John 9), 74 (John 5)). But why would ‘the evangelist’ have added this element of controversy unless it was indeed relevant to, or reflective of, his own community's situation?
A possible response to this question is that ‘the evangelist’, in incorporating received tradition (or, as Martyn believes, a written Signs Gospel) containing miracle stories presented as ‘signs’, has come to have access to one or more of the Synoptic Gospels, Mark in particular. Sabbath controversies play a significant role in the Synoptic presentations, especially Mark (see Mark 2.23–8; 3.1–6). In fact, according to Mark 3.1–6, after Jesus had healed a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath, ‘the Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians, how to destroy him’ (cf. Matt 12.9–14; Luke 6.1–11; 13.10–17; 14.1–6). In other words, Jesus’ breach of the Sabbath is connected to a plot on his life, as it is in John 5 (5.18). ‘In the Synoptic tradition’, however, ‘Jesus [himself] is never explicitly accused of violating the Sabbath’,Footnote 79 as he is in John 9.16 where ‘some of the Pharisees’ (ἐκ τῶν Φαρισαίων τινές) say ‘he does not keep the Sabbath’ (τὸ σάββατον οὐ τηρεῖ; cf. 5.16, 18). If the Fourth Gospel is indebted to Synoptic influence on this issue, it has done something with it that goes beyond the Synoptics, making the relevance of the question posed above all the more urgent.Footnote 80
3.2 The Sabbath Controversy and Expulsion from the Synagogue: Another Look
3.2.1 John 9
Martyn writes that ‘John 9 impresses upon us its immediacy in such a way as strongly to suggest that some of its elements reflect actual experiences of the Johannine community’ (46). That is, the text is a witness not only ‘to an einmalig event’; it is ‘also a witness to Jesus’ powerful presence in actual events experienced by the Johannine church’ (40). As we have seen, Martyn does not apply that insight to the controversy over the Sabbath, which he notes more or less simply in passing (42). I wish here to apply it to the Sabbath controversy – without however committing the mortal sin of proposing that the text can be read simply as a mirror-image of historical events in the Johannine community,Footnote 81 or perhaps worse, as ‘an allegory’ of that Johannine community and its situation, a charge frequently directed at Martyn's two-level reading of the text.Footnote 82 My question is simply: does John 9 indicate that the Sabbath issue played a role, perhaps even a decisive one, in the decision to expel Jews confessing Jesus to be Messiah from their local synagogue in the post-70 period?
In the dramatic expansion of the miracle story in 9.8–34, the healer, Jesus, disappears from the stage, not returning until v. 35. Zumstein rightly calls this ‘ein wichtiges Detail, da es sich dabei wahrscheinlich um eine Anspielung auf die nachösterliche Zeit handelt, die vom Konflikt zwischen den joh[anneischen] Gemeinden und der Synagoge gekennzeichnet ist’.Footnote 83 That must then also apply to the matter concerning the breach of the Sabbath, which is introduced as an issue during Jesus’ absence (9.14). The man whose blindness was healed is the central figure, even if the discussion focuses on the identity and, even more so, on the behaviour of Jesus. In the opening scene (9.8–12) of the expansion, the healed man testifies to his neighbours and those who had known him as a blind beggar that it was indeed Jesus who had healed him (9.11). In the next scene (9.13–17), upon hearing the explanation of how the man had received his sight, ‘some of the Pharisees’ (ἐκ τῶν Φαρισαίων τινές) declare that ‘this ἄνθρωπος [Jesus] is not from God (οὐκ ἔστιν οὗτος παρὰ θεοῦ ὁ ἄνθρωπος), because he does not keep the Sabbath (ὃτι τὸ σάββατον οὐ τηρεῖ)’ (9.16a). The present tense of the verb τηρεῖ implies a practice or an ongoing activity. The charge is that Jesus does not keep the Sabbath habitually. The healing of the man born blind exemplifies for these Pharisees a wider problem. Others, however, ask: ‘How can someone (ἄνθρωπος) who is a sinner (ἁμαρτωλός) perform such signs?’ (πῶς δύναται ἄνθρωπος ἁμαρτωλὸς τοιαῦτα σημεῖα ποιεῖν; 9.16b).Footnote 84 This question shows that the charge that Jesus is a regular rather than an incidental or inadvertent violator of the Sabbath means that he is being regarded by some of the Pharisees (9.16a) as a ἁμαρτωλός, i.e. as someone ‘scornful of the Law’.Footnote 85 For this reason, he is in their view ‘not from God’, οὐ παρὰ θεοῦ (9.16a), that is, not sent, authorised or commissioned by God.
The accusation that Jesus is a ἁμαρτωλός recurs in the second interrogation of the healed man (9.24–34). The Pharisees, who ‘know [i.e. are sure] that God has spoken to Moses’ (ἡμεῖς οἴδαμεν ὃτι Μωϋσεῖ λελάληκεν ὁ θεός, 9.29; cf. Ex 33.11), now say to the formerly blind man with some emphasis: ‘we (ἡμεῖς) know that this ἄνθρωπος is a ἁμαρτωλός’ (9.24); they know this for sure because he is, in their view, a habitual violator of the Sabbath (9.16). The healed man pleads ignorance on this point: ‘Whether he is a ἁμαρτωλός, I do not know’ (9.25a). The one thing the healed man does know is that he was once blind and now sees (ἓν οἶδα ὃτι τυφλὸς ὢν ἄρτι βλέπω, 9.25b), thereby calling to mind the searching question of the ἄλλοι in 9.16b who had asked: ‘How can an ἄνθρωπος who is a ἁμαρτωλός do such signs?’ The man says later to his interrogators: ‘We know that God does not listen to sinners’ (οἴδαμεν ὃτι ἁμαρτωλῶν ὁ θεὸς οὐκ ἀκούει, 9.31), a view shared of course by his interlocutors, and he concludes, ‘If this person were not from God’ (εἰ μὴ ἦν οὗτος παρὰ θεοῦ), as ‘some’ (τινές) of the Pharisees have claimed in the first interrogation (9.16a), ‘he could do nothing’ (οὐκ ἠδύνατο ποιεῖν οὐδέν, 9.33; cf. 3.2). It is precisely then that they cast him out (9.34).
The two scenes in which Jesus is being talked about as a ἁμαρτωλός because of his violation of the Sabbath (9.13–17; 9.24–34) sandwich the tense interview with the man's parents (9.18–23) in which the decree to expel Jews confessing Jesus to be Messiah is explicitly mentioned.Footnote 86 The conclusion becomes apparent that the reason for the expulsion is that Jesus is being regarded as a ἁμαρτωλός because of his failure to observe the Sabbath in the way that the Pharisees of the narrative (9.13, 15, 16, 40) think it ought to be observed. In John 9, the Pharisees have difficulty with Jesus not because he makes himself equal to God (for which reason there is nothing here about a plot to kill him, as there is in John 5) but because he is (in their view) a habitual violator of the Sabbath, which means that he is a ἁμαρτωλός, who as such cannot be παρὰ θεοῦ, nor then the Messiah, as his disciples are claiming. It is for this reason that ‘anyone confessing Jesus to be Messiah’ is to be expelled from the synagogue.Footnote 87
If we experimentally attempt to give a two-level reading à la Martyn of the story, ‘Jesus’ in John 9 can be read as playing not only himself ‘back then’, healing a man born blind of a physical ailment, but also a later Johannine preacherFootnote 88 who on a Sabbath has healed a fellow Jew not only of physical blindness but also of spiritual blindness so that he now sees the light that is Christ himself (φῶς εἰμι τοῦ κόσμου, 9.5).Footnote 89 It is this Johannine preacher who, speaking and acting in the name of the glorified Christ, is being charged with violation of the Sabbath in the Johannine setting and who is being regarded as a ἁμαρτωλός, just like Jesus in the story. In the narrative itself (Martyn's ‘einmalig’ level), the man who was healed of his blindness on the Sabbath ‘went and washed’ (ἀπῆλθεν καὶ ἐνίψατο) his eyes on the same day (9.7; cf. 9.11, 15), whereby he becomes complicit in Jesus’ action of healing on the Sabbath. He then becomes Jesus’ μαθητής (9.28), thereby indicating that he embraces as acceptable behaviour what the Pharisees, who call themselves ‘disciples of Moses’ (τοῦ Μωϋσέως ἐσμὲν μαθηταί, 9.28),Footnote 90 regard as unacceptable behaviour on the Sabbath. On the contemporary level, that of the Johannine community, the new Johannine disciple (9.28), who appears to speak not only for himself (cf. ‘we’ in 9.31), considers the activity on the Sabbath by the Johannine preacher (whom he may regard as a προφήτης who speaks for the glorified Jesus) as acceptable, indeed as tantamount to a σημεῖον legitimating the preacher's claims about Jesus as Messiah, and not sinful at all.Footnote 91 The Pharisees in John's setting clearly do not agree (cf. 9.34a), and the expulsion of Johannine disciples is the result.
If this interpretation of John 9 has some merit, then it follows that the observance of the Sabbath by Johannine disciples was not a contentious issue in the early period of Johannine history when Johannine disciples were still a group within the fellowship of the synagogue in John's locale. In the early period of Johannine history, the way in which Johannine disciples observed the Sabbath – whatever that may or may not have involved – was evidently tolerated as one of the ways Jews could legitimately observe the Sabbath, at least in one particular synagogue community. That changed after 70 ce, when Pharisees, who were known for their zealotry and strictness or precision (ἀκρίβεια) with respect to the interpretation of the Law (Josephus, J.W. 2.162; Life 191; Acts 22.3; 26.5),Footnote 92 became an increasingly prominent, influential and insistent voice in the synagogue of the Johannine setting (9.13, 15, 16, 40).Footnote 93 They evidently found the Johannine position on Sabbath observance to be deeply problematic, i.e. inconsistent with their own understanding of ‘Moses’ (5.45–6; 6.32; 7.19, 22–3; 9.28–9; cf. Matt 23.2; m. Aboth 1.1), and (given successful Johannine missionary efforts, as exemplified by the man born blind) a significant obstacle to their own role in determining authoritatively what was acceptable behaviour on the Sabbath and what was not.Footnote 94 And they decided to do something about it: they successfully agitated for the expulsion of Johannine disciples.Footnote 95
In John 9.16c, there is a ‘division’ (σχίσμα) reported among the Pharisees about Jesus’ action on the Sabbath. That could be a rhetorical device to show not only that some Pharisees were open to the Johannine proclamation (modelled by Nicodemus in 3.1–2; 7.50; 19.39), but also that they were themselves divided about what precisely constituted ‘work’ on the Sabbath. The Scripture is not that clear about the matter.Footnote 96 According to the Mishnaic tractate Hag. 1.8, ‘the rules about the Sabbath … are as mountains hanging by a hair, for [teaching of] scripture [thereon] is scanty and the rules are many’.Footnote 97 The many rules, as well as the differences of opinion concerning them, are given in the lengthy Mishnaic tractate Shabbat.Footnote 98 The Mishnah shows that among Pharisaic/rabbinic scholars the issue of what exactly constituted ‘work’ on the Sabbath was a contentious issue and had been in the century or more that preceded the publication of the Mishnah.Footnote 99 Interesting for our purposes is that Jesus’ kneading of mud or clay to make a mixture for healing the man's eyes in John 9.1–7 (cf. 9.11, 14, 15) appears to be an example of the ‘kneading’ which is one of the thirty-nine works which evidently all agreed were forbidden on the Sabbath (m. Shabb. 7.2).
In short, the Pharisees’ conviction that Johannine disciples of Jesus habitually breached the Sabbath commandment as understood and interpreted by them (the Pharisees) evidently became the reason for them to play an influential and ultimately successful role in bringing about the expulsion of Jesus’ Jewish disciples from their local synagogue (cf. 12.42).
3.2.2 John 7
The issue in John 9, just discussed, is not whether the commandment to observe the Sabbath is still valid for Johannine disciples but how to interpret and apply it in specific situations. We receive an interesting glimpse of Johannine reasoning on this matter in 7.22–4, where there is a reference back to the healing Jesus performed in John 5. Jesus responds to objections about his healing of a lame man on the Sabbath by pointing out that circumcision occurs on the Sabbath (7.22), even though such an action seems to violate it. But the commandment to circumcise a newborn son on the eighth day overrides the commandment to observe the Sabbath. According to the Mishnah: ‘They may perform on the Sabbath all things that are needful for circumcision’ (m. Shabb. 19:2).Footnote 100 The Johannine Jesus presupposes this view in his own defence: ‘If on the Sabbath someone receives circumcision, so that the Law of Moses may not be broken [Lev 12.3], why are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made someone completely well?’ (εἰ περιτομὴν λαμβάνει ἄνθρωπος ἐν σαββάτῳ ἳνα μὴ λυθῇ ὁ νόμος Μωϋσέως, ἐμοὶ χολᾶτε ὃτι ὃλον ἄνθρωπον ὑγιῆ ἐποίησα ἐν σαββάτῳ; 7.23; cf. ὑγιής in 5.6, 9, 11, 14, 15). The argument of the Johannine Jesus is consistent with Pharisaic/rabbinic modes of argumentation (a minor ad maius / qal wachomer) and thus meets them on their own turf, as it were. One may compare b. Yoma 85b: ‘If circumcision, which concerns one of the 248 members of a man, can displace the Sabbath, how much more must the whole body (if his life be in danger) displace the Sabbath.’Footnote 101 This passage, however, also illustrates why the Johannine argument would not have convinced Jesus’ Pharisaic interlocutors: the life of the lame man in John 5 was not in danger, nor was that of the man born blind in John 9. Jesus could have performed both healings on a weekday (which may well have been the case in the original versions of the stories). It is also important to note, as numerous commentators have, that the argument for acting on the Sabbath in 7.23 involves ‘humanitarian’ considerations, not Jesus’ authority to ‘work’ on the Sabbath because he is the (heavenly) Son of God, as is the case in John 5.17–18. As Kloppenborg observes, ‘John 7.22–24 suggests that the Johannine partisans of Jesus might have developed a halakhic argument to justify their deviant Sabbath practice, long before they developed the highly Christological argument’ found in John 5.Footnote 102
3.2.3 John 5
In John 5.9c–16, which follows the account of Jesus healing a lame man in 5.1–9ab, Jesus is initially absent, as he is from 9.8–34.Footnote 103 The focus falls on the person whom Jesus has healed and he is charged by οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι (5.10, 15, 16)Footnote 104 with violating the Sabbath: the man ‘took up his pallet and walked’ (ἦρεν τὸν κράβαττον αὐτοῦ καὶ περιεπάτει, 5.9b) and that, they say, is ‘not lawful’ (οὐκ ἔξεστίν) to do on the Sabbath (5.10).Footnote 105 But when the man has explained that the one who had healed him had told him to take up his pallet and walk, his interrogators want to know who this ἄνθρωπος (5.12) is, which the healed man initially and surprisingly does not know (5.11–13). After Jesus finds him in the temple, the healed man divulges Jesus’ identity to οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι (5.14–15).Footnote 106 It is only then that a voice from offstage – akin to the voice from offstage in 9.22–3 – informs readers that ‘because of this οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι were persecuting Jesus’ (διὰ τοῦτο ἐδίωκον οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι τὸν Ἰησοῦν), i.e. ‘because he was doing these things on the Sabbath’ (ὃτι ταῦτα ἐποίει ἐν σαββάτῳ) (5.16). The imperfects as well as the word ταῦτα indicate that both the doing (ἐποίει) of such things on the Sabbath and the persecution (ἐδίωκον) that such activities elicited happened repeatedly.Footnote 107 As in the case of the healing of the man born blind, the case of the healing of the lame man is but an illustration of a recurrent issue, that of the proper observance of the Sabbath by Jesus – and by his disciples.
In 5.16, the closing verse of the literary subunit beginning at 9c, οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι are not said to be persecuting Jesus because he was propounding a ‘high’ Christology for himself. That only emerges as an accusation after he has claimed, in 5.17, that just as his Father continues ‘working’ (ἐργάζεται) on the Sabbath so does he. That this claim is not halakhic but christological is indicated by the reaction attributed to οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι of the narrative: they understand the claim to involve Jesus’ making blasphemous assertions about himself and his relationship to God (5.18b). It is ‘because of this’ (διὰ τοῦτο), the writer announces, that ‘οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι were all the more seeking to kill him’, namely, ‘because he was not only abrogating the Sabbath (ὃτι οὐ μόνον ἔλυεν τὸ σάββατον) but was also calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God (ἀλλὰ καὶ πατέρα ἴδιον ἔλεγεν τὸν θεὸν ἴσον ἑαυτὸν ποιῶν τῷ θεῷ)’. In short, as Craig Keener argues,Footnote 108 the conflict escalates from ‘persecution’ for doing certain things on the Sabbath (5.16) to a plot on Jesus’ life for his seemingly blasphemous claim of equality with God (5.17–18), whereby, so οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι believed, the Sabbath was effectively being nullified completely (ἔλυεν; cf. 7.23; Philo, Migr. 91).Footnote 109 Jesus’ long apologetic discourse in 5.19–47 is a response to the issue of Jesus’ seemingly ‘making himself equal to God’, raised in 5.17–18. The issue of Sabbath observance as such is entirely left behind and the focus falls wholly on Jesus’ person and identity as functionally God's equal, especially in 5.19–30 (he judges and gives life to the dead, as God does).
In 5.16, however, the issue is still what Jesus ‘was doing on the Sabbath’. In this particular case, what Jesus did on the Sabbath was to heal someone who could just as easily have been healed on the day after (cf. Luke 13.14). The man had already been ill for thirty-eight years; another day would not have made much difference. The issue in 5.16 is still halakhic, as it is in the verses that precede it, and as it is in 7.22–4, which (as we have seen) refers to the same miracle. If we take John 9 into account (or at least my foregoing argument concerning John 9!), John 5.9c–16 reflects the Sabbath issue that played a role in the expulsion of Johannine disciples. Moreover, as we have seen previously, in 15.20 Jesus tells his disciples that ‘if they persecuted me’ (εἰ ἐμὲ ἐδίωξαν) – referring directly back to 5.16 (ἐδίωκον οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι τὸν Ἰησοῦν), which contains the only prior instance of this verb – ‘they will also persecute you’ (καὶ ὑμᾶς διώξουσιν). The persecution being predicted is probably in the first instance the expulsion from the synagogue (16.2a) of those who were confessing as Messiah (9.22) someone who ‘was doing these things on the Sabbath’ (ταῦτα ἐποίει ἐν σαββάτῳ, 5.16), thereby causing those who benefited from his healing activity also to breach the Sabbath (5.10; 9.7). John 5.17ff. in turn reflects the issue of the supposed ditheism being propagated by Johannine disciples, an accusation that led on the contemporary level (that of the Johannine community) to the potential execution of Johannine preachers proclaiming such a ‘high’ Christology (16.2b).
John 5.1–18 (with 19–47) provides, I think, a window on three distinct phases of Johannine history. First, the miracle story underlying John 5.1–9b once served (in the early period, when Johannine disciples were a group within the synagogue) as a sign of Jesus’ messianic stature and legitimacy. It was designed to convince fellow Jews that the expected Messiah is Jesus of Nazareth. Second, the account underlying the current form of John 5.9c–16 concerned the conflict that ensued when authorities in John's synagogue began to have problems with the way Johannine disciples of Jesus observed the Sabbath. This was the issue that, as John 9 shows, provided the catalyst to the decision to expel Jews confessing Jesus as Messiah from the synagogue. Third, the conflict underlying John 5.17–18 (and the extended discourse that follows) revolved around the claim that Jesus is the heavenly Son of God. The Johannine position on the Sabbath has now become radicalised. For Johannine disciples, Jesus could breach the Sabbath commandment because he was more than Messiah. He was the Son who works when his Father works. Different rules apply to him – and thus also to those who preach and act in his name. The Ἰουδαῖοι interpret that claim to mean, not unjustly, that the Sabbath is actually being abrogated. Johannine disciples believed that it was being christologically transformed.Footnote 110
4. Conclusion
My primary question was: why would the Pharisees in John's setting have found the confession of Jesus as Messiah so offensive that they felt it necessary to effect the formulation of an edict to expel those Jews espousing this messianic faith? My answer has been that they found this confession offensive because of Johannine behaviour on the Sabbath, which deviated from developing Pharisaic views on the matter.
A question which this solution raises is: why was the focus on the Sabbath instead of other parts of the Law? Sanders notes that the Sabbath was one of ‘three principal points of contention over the law within the early church and between it and the Jewish synagogue’, the other two being food and circumcision (cf. e.g. Galatians 5–6; Acts 10–11, 15). However, food and circumcision were almost never at issue ‘within a Jewish community’, since in ‘a village occupied almost entirely by Jews, … the question of eating pork would simply not arise. There were not any pigs. Similarly, sons would be circumcised as a matter of routine.’Footnote 111 But because the Scripture is not so ‘clear and specific about what counts as work’ on the Sabbath,Footnote 112 ‘it was possible to disagree [about Sabbath observance] even in places where there were no Gentiles’. While there was of course ‘no disagreement about whether or not one should keep the Sabbath’, there could be disagreement ‘about the details, such as how far one could walk from one's property’. That meant that there was ‘some variation in Sabbath practice within nearly any Jewish community’.Footnote 113
The expulsion passages indicate that Johannine disciples of Jesus were once part of a Jewish community and thus Jews themselves. When they still constituted a group within their local synagogue, there was tacit agreement with other members of that community about such matters as circumcision and food laws, and these are in fact nowhere at issue in the Fourth Gospel.Footnote 114 At the same time, given the unclarity of the Torah about what constitutes ‘work’ on the Sabbath and what does not, there was probably some (tolerable and tolerated) variation in Sabbath practice. Sometime after 70 ce, the Johannine variation in Sabbath practice evidently became a focal point of contention between Johannine disciples and Pharisees, causing the latter to bring about the expulsion of the former from their local synagogue. This issue as it played out in the late first century was effectively retrojected into the Johannine story of Jesus.
