John’s two Easter chapters rank with Romans 8, not to mention the key passages in the Corinthian correspondence, as among the most glorious pieces of writing on the resurrection. John and Romans are of course utterly different in genre and style. Instead of the tight argument and dense phraseology of Paul, we have John’s deceptively simple account of the Easter events, warm with deep and dramatic human characterization, pregnant with new possibilities. Instead of the strong QED, or the bracing ‘Therefore …’ at the end of a long and gritty Pauline argument, we have John’s disturbingly open-ended final scene: ‘What is that to you? Follow me.’ The gospel ends with new-found faith all right, but it is faith that must now go out into a new world, a new day, and attempt new tasks without knowing in advance where it will all lead.1
The two final chapters of John’s gospel are well known as a problem text. John (I shall refer to him by that name without prejudice as to which of the possible ‘Johns’, if any, he actually was; likewise, without reaching any conclusion either on the identity of the beloved disciple or on his relation to the actual author of the book) gives every appearance of bringing the book to a close at the end of chapter 20. Verses 30–31 would indeed form a fitting conclusion not only to any story of Jesus but to John’s in particular:
There are many other signs that Jesus did in the presence of his disciples, which have not been written in this book. But these things have been written so that you may believe that the Messiah, the son of God, is Jesus; and that, believing, you may have life in his name.2
But then we have chapter 21; no manuscript gives any hint that there was ever a copy of the gospel circulating without it. Up until the final two verses of the chapter, it looks as though the author is the same as for the rest of the gospel. Indeed, verse 23 looks like a kind of personal signature, perhaps written (if the author of the gospel and the beloved disciple are really the same person) when the author was close to death, or, if the beloved disciple was not the author, by the author around the time of the beloved disciple’s death. Certainly this verse warns against supposing that Jesus intended to return before the beloved disciple had died, an idea which had somehow taken root in the church. But then, as though a codicil were added by an editor, the book ends with a kind of affidavit of authorship:
This [i.e. the beloved disciple, mentioned in the previous verse] is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who wrote these things, and we know that his witness is true.3
And the book closes with a final flourish, reminiscent of 20:30, which could have been added by the same editor who added verse 24, or might have been the final words left by the original author, allowed by the editor to stand at the end after his own inserted note:
There are many other things which Jesus did. If these things were to be written down one by one, I do not think the world would be able to contain the books that would be written.4
The question of authorship, never easy in the gospel tradition, is thus made all the more tantalizing: a footnote which tells us who the author is, but which we cannot decode! However, the claim is clear: not only is this witness to be trusted, but he was an eye-witness to it all. Claims like this have of course routinely been discounted by biblical scholarship; indeed, the very fact of such a claim being made has come to be regarded with suspicion, as a sign that someone is trying to smuggle something under our guard. Whether or not that is so in the present case is a topic for another time. The claim must take its place, along with a fresh reading of the passage, as part of our picture of what the author is trying to say.
The basic features of John’s Easter story are soon laid out. The initial story of the finding of the empty tomb (20:1–18) overlaps in content with that of the synoptics, but it is the differences that stand out: Mary Magdalene is mentioned alone among the women, and she meets Jesus (as the women do in Matthew). As in Luke 24:12, Peter runs to the tomb on hearing the news; but in this gospel he is accompanied by the beloved disciple, and in a dramatic scene they run together, with the beloved disciple getting to the tomb first.5 There is considerably more detail at every point in this narrative than in the synoptic semi-parallels; the description of the grave-clothes, for example, and the dialogue between Jesus and Mary.6
There then follow two stories set in the evening in the upper room, the first on the same day as the events in the garden, the second a week later. The first (20:19–23) seems to correspond, in content though not much in wording, with Luke 24:36–49: Jesus commissions his followers for a mission to the world, and bestows the Spirit on them to equip them for the task. The second presents a scene beloved of artists ancient and modern. Thomas, who was not present that first evening, acquires his now perpetual nickname by declaring his doubt that the Lord had truly risen, and is then confronted by the risen Jesus inviting him to touch and see for himself. Thomas refuses the invitation, coming out instead with the fullest confession of faith anywhere in the whole gospel: ‘My lord and my god’ (20:28). Jesus makes a wry comment, the scene is over, and so too is (what looks like) the book in its original form.
Chapter 21 is set in Galilee; John, like Matthew, has Jesus appear in both Jerusalem and Galilee, though the appearances are far fuller, and the Galilee appearance is by the lakeshore, not on the mountain. Peter and six others of the disciples (we assume, of the Twelve) go fishing and catch nothing; Jesus, unrecognized, directs operations from the shore, as once before in Luke’s gospel, resulting again in a spectacular catch. Coming ashore, they find Jesus already cooking breakfast and inviting them to share it. ‘None of them’, comments the author in a haunting aside, ‘dared ask him, “Who are you?”, because they knew that it was the Lord’ (21:12). Jesus then takes Simon Peter for a walk along the shore (we discover this later when they find that the beloved disciple is following them), and asks him three times if he loves him, corresponding to Peter’s triple denial in chapter 18. Receiving a triple ‘Yes’ for reply, he commissions him to be a kind of under-shepherd, which will require him, too, to face suffering.7 Then, seeing the beloved disciple following them, they have the brief exchange about him which leads to the open-ended challenge, ‘What is that to you? You must follow me!’ This leads straight into the ending, which we have already noted.
As with much of the rest of the fourth gospel, the reader who comes fresh from the synoptic tradition is bound to be struck by one feature in particular, namely, the extended dialogues and the detailed characterization. We learn as much about Mary Magdalene, Thomas and the beloved disciple (whoever he is) in these two chapters as in the other three gospels put together. The picture of Peter we get from elsewhere is further substantiated. Explanations for this come in three basic kinds: those that see the detailed characterization as evidence of real historical knowledge of actual people, those that see it as a sign of clever novelistic fiction, and those that regard it as, at least in some cases, a political attempt to make a case for the leadership position of one of the apostles against one or more of the others. We do not need to decide this question here; but we must note that, whether through reliance on eye-witnesses or through highly skilled fiction, the writer is certainly attempting to present a coherent and credible portrait of the individuals concerned. They are anything but cardboard cut-outs producing stock responses and questions. The writer intends us to take the story seriously as a narrative which belongs in its own context, not as an obvious allegory of later church experience.
From this brief survey it should already be clear that one common perception of John is significantly flawed. Some have so emphasized John’s teaching about ‘eternal life’ as something available to people within the present life, and at the same time have rightly noted that John sees the crucifixion of Jesus as itself a key moment of glory, of ‘lifting up’, that they have found no room within his theology for any resurrection, either of Jesus or of his followers. This then, of course, leads not only to a downplaying of the resurrection narratives, but also to the attempt to marginalize the key passage 5:25–9, which we noted in chapter 9 above. It also leads to the suggestion that, for John, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension are all basically the same thing: Jesus is ‘going away’, and that is that. What matters is his ‘exaltation in glory into heaven, not his brief posthumous appearance on earth’.8
But the texts themselves are more subtle than this over-realized eschatology warrants. Of course John can see crucifixion, resurrection and ascension as a single event; that makes good sense at one level theologically. But he can also differentiate them carefully. The mere fact of writing resurrection narratives as substantial as these speaks for itself when it comes to the distinction between crucifixion and resurrection; and, as we shall see, the thematic structure of the gospel as a whole tells against collapsing the whole thing into simply a death which is also a moment of glory. (What would that say about Jesus’ raising of Lazarus? Would that not also have to be dismissed as a category mistake? But is it not one of the major focal points of the entire narrative?) Further, the key passage in Jesus’ exchange with Mary reveals that John is well aware of the distinction between resurrection and ascension, even though elsewhere he has not needed to highlight it:
Jesus said to Mary, ‘Do not touch me, because I have not yet gone up to the father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am going up to my father and your father, to my God and your God.” ’9
This famous exchange is worthy of comment in itself. Teresa Okure has plausibly suggested that the command not to touch is part of Mary’s commission to go and tell what she has seen rather than stay clinging to Jesus. In addition, if Jesus’ command is to be translated as ‘Do not cling on to me’ or ‘Do not grasp me’, as may well be the case, John may be intending to contrast the bodiliness of the risen Jesus with the kind of wraith or spirit we met in Homer, which turned out to be precisely the sort of thing one might try to grasp but could not.10 Putting these suggestions together, John may be saying both that Jesus was indeed, so to speak, graspable, and that Mary was to go and get on with her new task. Thus, though it is obviously true that John does not want to drive a wedge between the different events, it is equally true that he has not collapsed them into one another. It is illegitimate to appeal to John as a witness to a view of Jesus and the resurrection in which Easter stories are simply a dramatic, coded way of saying that his death was somehow victorious, that he was now alive in heaven, and that his followers now experience a new life through him. If that really was what John was trying to say, he went about it in as misleading a fashion as he could.11
In fact, the Easter story of chapter 20 in particular can be shown to be, not an addendum which threatens to pull the theology of the rest of the gospel out of shape, but the true completion of the story John has been telling all through, the story that reached its climax in the crucifixion. This can be seen by setting out the ways in which chapter 20 forms a ‘frame’ at the end of the gospel that corresponds in several ways to the prologue (1:1–18) at the beginning; and by tracing the themes which, important already in the body of the gospel, find their eventual destination in this chapter.
2. John 20 within the Gospel as a Whole
I have already commented on the ways in which John’s prologue anticipates the themes of chapter 20.12 The point can be summed up briefly.
John declares from the start, with the obvious allusion to Genesis 1:1, that his book is about the new creation in Jesus. In chapter 20 he makes the same point by stressing that Easter was ‘the first day of the week’ (20:1, 19; when John underlines things like this he clearly wants us to ponder the point). On the sixth day of the creation narrative, humankind was created in the divine image; on the sixth day of the last week of Jesus’ life, John has Pilate declare, ‘Behold the man!’ The seventh day is the day of rest for the creator; in John, it is the day when Jesus rests in the tomb. Easter is the start of the new creation.
This is reinforced by the themes of light and life. ‘In him was life, and the light was the light of human beings,’ shining unquenchably in the darkness (1:4–5). Now Mary comes to the tomb while it is still dark, and discovers the new light and life which has defeated the darkness. The prologue continues with the places where there is still darkness: the Word ‘came to his own, and his own did not receive him’, but those who did receive him were given the right to become children of the creator god. Now, in chapter 20, we find the doors locked for fear of the hostile Judaeans, but the little company of those who ‘received him’ are told, for the first time, that the creator god is their father, their god (20:17; up to now Jesus has spoken of ‘the father’ or ‘my father’). They are now children of the father in their own right. Reading chapter 20 in the light of the prologue, we are thus to understand that Jesus’ death and resurrection have together effected for the disciples the new birth which was spoken of in 1:13 and 3:1–13. We should not be surprised when Jesus then breathes his own Spirit into them, as YHWH breathed his own Spirit into human nostrils in Genesis 2:7. What happens to Jesus’ people is a further indication of who Jesus is: the Word made flesh (1:14). That verse, the climax of the prologue, is hugely important for John: the Word who was with the one god, who was identified with this god, is now also and for ever flesh. There can be no sense that the flesh has been turned back simply into word and spirit. The resurrection matters for John because he is, at his very heart, a theologian of creation. The Word, who was always to be the point at which creator and creation came together in one, is now, in the resurrection, the point at which creator and new creation are likewise one.
This highlights the way in which Thomas’ confession of faith looks back to 1:18. The explicitly high Christology of the prologue reaches its culmination here: nobody has ever seen the one true god, but ‘the only-begotten god’ has unveiled and expounded this god, has shown the world who he is.13 We watch in vain, throughout the rest of the gospel, for characters in the story to wake up to what is going on. Jesus ‘reveals his glory’ to the disciples in various ways, but nobody responds with anything that matches what is said in 1:18.
Until Easter. Rowan Williams has suggested, following Westcott, that the angels at either end of the grave slab function like the cherubim at either end of the mercy-seat of the ark; the true god, John may be suggesting, is to be found in the gap.14 Whether this is ultimately plausible, by the end of the chapter there is no question what has now been revealed. The so-called ‘Doubting Thomas’ takes one small verbal step and a giant leap of faith and theology: ‘My lord and my god’ (20:28). This at last is faith indeed. The disciples, with Thomas (of all people!) as their spokesman, have confessed that the ‘flesh’ they had known, and now know again in a new way, was also in truth the ‘Word’ who was one with the father.
All of this underlines the point that it matters for John that Easter actually happened. Precisely because he is an incarnational theologian, committed to recognizing, and helping others to recognize, the living god in the human flesh of Jesus, it is vital and non-negotiable for him that when Thomas makes this confession he should be looking at the living god in human form, not simply with the eye of faith (others will come by that road hereafter, as John quickly makes clear), but with ordinary human sight, which could be backed up by ordinary human touch—though Thomas, it seems, remains content with sight. There is, in other words, nothing about John 20, seen in the context of the gospel as a whole and particularly of the prologue which it balances so well, to suggest that these stories originated as, or would have been heard by their first hearers as, an allegory or metaphor of spiritual experience. Of course, like virtually everything in John’s gospel, they function at multiple levels of meaning simultaneously; but the meaning which grounds everything else is the Word becoming flesh. To deny that in respect of John 20 is to leave the symphony without its closing coda, its final crashing chords.15
In fact, there are several different threads that stitch the resurrection narratives tightly to the rest of the gospel, preventing any possibility that it might be pulled away clean and leave the previous nineteen chapters whole and entire. I here mention seven (curiously enough), each of which deserves fuller treatment.
First, there is the sequence of ‘signs’ which runs throughout the gospel. John tells us that there were many other signs that could have been mentioned, but that he has arranged these ones so as to bring people to faith in Jesus as Messiah and thus to the life which is found in his name.16 Since he has just described Thomas confessing this faith when confronted with the palpably resurrected Jesus, we should clearly take the resurrection itself as the last ‘sign’ in the sequence. The numbering of the ‘signs’ in the gospel is endlessly debated, as indeed is the relationship between the hypothetical ‘signs source’ from which they were taken.17 But in my judgment the best way of understanding the sequence, which John clearly intends us to follow, is to see them thus:
1. Water into wine (2:1–11)
2. The official’s son (4:46–54)
3. The paralysed man at the pool (5:2–9)
4. Multiplication of loaves (6:1–14)
5. The man born blind (9:1–7)
6. The raising of Lazarus (11:1–44)
7. The crucifixion (19:1–37)
8. The resurrection (20:1–29)
The crucifixion is the climax and culmination of the ‘signs’ which Jesus has given, following the sevenfold sequence of the old creation. (From one point of view, of course, the crucifixion itself, and then the resurrection, are the truths to which the other signs all point; from another, however, they themselves now function as signs to the world, pointers to the divine life and love incarnate in Jesus.18) Now, on the eighth day, comes the eighth sign; the sequence was always about the new creation bursting in on the old. The ‘signs’ performed during the ministry led the disciples to the beginning of faith (2:11), but they made no impact upon most of the onlookers (12:37). Now, with the resurrection itself, the ultimate ‘sign’ which will explain what Jesus has been doing (2:18–22, on which see below), the new day has opened. People of all sorts are hereby summoned to believe (20:30–31).
Belief, or faith, is the second theme which stitches chapter 20 to the rest of the gospel. Though the noun ‘faith’ itself (pistis) never occurs in John, the cognate verb ‘believe’ (pisteuein) occurs more in this gospel than in Matthew, Mark and Luke put together; and, perhaps even more surprising, more than in all of Paul’s letters put together. The concordance lists ninety-nine occurrences, spread over every chapter in the book except 15, 18 and (oddly) 21. This theme comes to fulfilment, not principally with the crucifixion,19 but in chapter 20. The beloved disciple goes into the tomb, and sees and believes (verse 8). Thomas declares that without sight and touch he will not believe (verse 25); Jesus challenges him to be ‘not unbelieving, but believing’ (verse 27);20 Thomas declares that Jesus is his lord and god, and Jesus responds, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ (verse 29).21 The author then moves straight to the conclusion: these things are written so that you may believe, and, in believing, have life (verse 31). There can be no doubt that this theme, which has dominated the entire book, was designed to attain completion in chapter 20.
The third theme running through the gospel, powerfully though less evenly, and also coming to fulfilment in chapter 20, is that of the Spirit. John the Baptist saw the Spirit descend like a dove and remain on Jesus; this was the promised sign that Jesus was the one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit—in other words, that he was the true son of the true god (1:32–4). The Spirit is needed for the promised new birth to take place (1:13; 3:5–8). Jesus is equipped to speak the words the father gives him to speak, by the father’s lavish gift of the Spirit (3:34). On the last great day of the feast of Tabernacles, using the water-imagery employed at that festival, Jesus invites anyone who is thirsty to come to him and drink, and thus to have ‘rivers of living water’ flowing out of them (7:37–8).22 John’s comment is powerful and revealing:
He said this about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive. For the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified.23
This, of course, prepares us for what is to come, and, like the theme of ‘believing’ itself with which it is intimately joined, it comes, not immediately at the crucifixion, but on the evening of Easter day (20:21–3). Jesus, in other words, is now ‘glorified’—by both cross and resurrection together. The Farewell Discourses contribute substantially to this theme as well: Jesus is going away (with the hindsight of chapter 20, we see that this refers to the combined event of death/resurrection/ascension), and will send the Spirit upon his followers, enabling them to bear witness to him, and so bringing divine healing and judgment on the world.24 When, therefore, we find Jesus in the upper room with the disciples, we have again a sense of a great tune reaching its full and final statement:
‘Peace be with you,’ said Jesus to them once more. ‘As the father sent me, so I am sending you.’
With these words, he breathed on them.
‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ he said to them. ‘Anyone whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; anyone whose sins you retain, they are retained.’25
Like the water flowing from the heart in John 7, this awakens echoes of new creation and new Temple. Jesus breathes on the disciples, as the creator breathed into human nostrils at the beginning; they are equipped to be people through whom forgiveness of sins becomes a reality in the world.26 They are thereby sent into the world, as the father had sent Jesus to Israel, to implement there, by their witness to him, the unique and decisive events of his ministry, his death, his resurrection.
The fourth theme, which again belongs closely with the others, is that of the restored Temple. John’s gospel has Jesus going to and fro to Jerusalem and the Temple for various festivals, framed in chapters 2 and 12 by the opening and closing Passovers. On the first of these occasions, John describes the incident in the Temple which the other gospels place a few days before Jesus’ arrest, trial and death.27 Not surprisingly, Jesus is challenged to explain his actions in overturning tables and driving traders and animals out of the Temple; can he give ‘a sign’ for doing these things? His response helps us to understand why John has placed this incident here: he intends that we understand the rest of the Temple-scenes in the gospel within the framework provided by this action on the one hand and the resurrection on the other:
‘Destroy this Temple,’ Jesus replied, ‘and I will raise it up in three days.’
‘It’s taken forty-six years to build this Temple,’ replied the Judaeans, ‘and are you going to raise it up in three days?’
But he was speaking about the ‘temple’ of his body. When, therefore, he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.28
The sign, the believing, the resurrection, the Temple. Take away chapter 20, and this whole incident, and its explanation, lose their point. Put it back, and the reader will understand that, with Jesus’ resurrection, judgment has been passed on the Temple, and that Jesus himself is now the place where, and the means by which, the father’s presence and forgiving love are to be known. This is the meaning, too, of Jesus’ comment to the woman of Samaria, that the hour is coming when true worshippers will not need a particular geographical location, because they will worship the father in spirit and truth (4:20–24).
With this, we arrive at the fifth theme which runs through the gospel to a climax in chapter 20: John’s understanding of Jesus himself. ‘I know that Messiah is coming,’ says the woman of Samaria; and Jesus replies, ‘That’s me.’29 This theme, even more than the others, deserves a monograph where space permits only a paragraph or two.
The category of ‘Messiahship’ is central for John, as I have argued it is for Paul; here, more obviously than in Paul, there is an easy fluidity between this Jewish category, still retaining ‘royal’ and national overtones, and the title ‘son of god’ in a fully ‘divine’ sense. This much is clear from the combination of the obviously high Christology of the prologue (1:1–2, 14, 18) with the words of John the Baptist (‘I have seen and testified that this is God’s son’, 1:34) and the ‘discovery of the Messiah’ theme in 1:41, 45, and the extraordinary 1:49 (‘Rabbi,’ exclaims Nathanael, ‘you are the son of god! You are the king of Israel!’). The speakers seem to be using ‘son of god’ in a strictly ‘messianic’ sense, but John intends his readers to hear it as an incipient confession of the hidden truth he has revealed in the prologue.
The theme then keeps emerging in one story or discourse after another. Jesus is the bridegroom, the one from above, the one the father has sent, and one’s eternal fate depends upon one’s reaction to him (3:29, 31, 35–6). He is the Messiah, the world’s saviour (4:25, 29, 42). He enjoys a unique relationship with the father, who has given him the right to be judge of all, which is of course a messianic role (5:18, 19–47). The crowds recognize him as the prophet who was to come, and they want to go one step further and make him king (6:14–15). The disciples recognize him as ‘the holy one of God’ (6:69). The crowds and the authorities in Jerusalem are divided as to whether or not he can be the Messiah, or even a prophet (7:25–31, 40–52; 9:22; 12:34). He is the one who has come from Israel’s god, the father (8:42–59). He is the shepherd of the sheep—an image which, in the Old Testament, was used mainly of kings but also, on occasion, of YHWH himself (10:11–30). Martha, asked whether she believes that Jesus is ‘the resurrection and the life’, declares that he is ‘the Messiah, the son of god, the one who is coming into the world’ (11:27). Those who see Jesus see the father (14:7–11). He is the true vine (15:1–11). The disciples believe that he has come from Israel’s god (16:30). The hearing before Pilate turns on whether Jesus is claiming to be Israel’s king, and if so what he means by that (18:33–9, 19:12–16, 19–22). Throughout this entire sequence (here abbreviated in breathless fashion) the royal and Davidic meaning of ‘Messiah’ and hence also of ‘son of god’ remains active, with the deeper dimension of meaning (as in 1:18) mostly just beneath the surface.
But it is in the resurrection narrative, and once again with Thomas’ declaration, that all the threads come together. The disciples’ declaration in 6:69, and Martha’s in 11:27, point in this direction, but Thomas’ words are the most explicit since 1:18: ‘My lord and my god!’ And John’s comment, about the faith he hopes to evoke and sustain through his writing of the gospel, shows that he has seen all along what many characters in his story have not: that ‘Messiah, son of god’ is to carry both the meaning ‘Israel’s true anointed king’ and the meaning ‘the Word incarnate, the kyrios, the human being of whom the word theos, God, may be predicated by faithful Jewish monotheists’. Once more, without the resurrection story, this faith has not reached full expression, not least because until Easter the grounds for it are not fully secure.
The last two themes belong closely with Christology. The sixth is the motif, which runs through much of the gospel, of Jesus being ‘glorified’ and/or ‘lifted up’, an event through which he will ‘return to the father’. These seem to be mutually defining in various passages.30 The Farewell Discourses are set within the context of the meal in the upper room, which begins with a long and careful statement of the theme:
Jesus knew that his moment had come to go away out of the world to the father … he knew that the father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God …31
The prayer which comes at the end of the Discourses points in the same direction:
Father, the hour has come. Glorify the son, that the son may glorify you … now, father, glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world was made … I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you … Now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy fulfilled in them.32
This sometimes becomes bewildering, and commentators have duly been bewildered. If the ‘glorification’ happens when Jesus is ‘lifted up’, this clearly refers to the cross. And Jesus’ death seems equally clearly to be his ‘going away’. Maybe, the reader wonders, the crucifixion is after all the point at which a major theme reaches its goal.
But nothing in the crucifixion narrative itself supports this conclusion. Rather, it is the resurrection narrative that returns to the theme of Jesus going away, going to the father (20:17). Only in the light of Easter does the full meaning appear. Just as Jesus had said to Martha that if she believed she would see ‘the glory of God’ (11:40), so now those who believe, like the beloved disciple in 20:8 and Thomas in 20:28, are seeing ‘the glory of God’, not by looking simply at the crucifixion, but by looking (whether by faith, as in the first case, or by sight, as in the second) at the resurrection of the crucified one. Like the other accounts, John does not have Jesus shining with visible ‘glory’; the fact of being raised from the dead is quite sufficient. Easter is where the theme of ‘glory’, too, finds its proper home. And this shows that for John the events of crucifixion, resurrection and ascension all alike reveal the true cosmology in which ‘the world’ and ‘the father’s house’ (14:2) are not separated by a great gulf, but are the twin spheres of created reality between which Jesus can and does now pass.
The final theme is one for which John is famous: agape, love.33 ‘God so loved the world that he sent his son …’ (3:16) is one of the most celebrated and often-quoted verses in the whole Bible. But the theme as John presents it is focused not so much on the divine love for the world in general as on Jesus’ love for his followers, and on the father’s love for the son which sustains him in his own loving work.34
The occurrences of the main word-group are only the tip of the iceberg. What we find throughout John’s gospel is scene after scene in which Jesus displays this love, in his lengthy conversations with one character after another, and finally in his actions in the upper room and on the cross. In particular, the ‘good shepherd’ discourse in chapter 10 only mentions the word once (’this is why the father loves me’, 10:17), but the entire passage is about ‘love’, about the self-giving shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. Thus, though of course this self-giving love reaches fullest expression in the crucifixion, matchlessly symbolized in advance by the foot-washing scene in 13:1–20, it is in the renewal of the relationships between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Jesus and the disciples in general (‘my brothers’, 20:17), Jesus and Thomas, and finally Jesus and Peter (21:15–22) that this theme comes to its final expression. The love which has given itself in death is now renewed with the new life of the resurrection.
Two important conclusions emerge from this brief survey. First, not only does chapter 20 belong firmly as part of the intended ‘frame’ of the gospel; it is tightly integrated with the entire book, several of whose main themes can only be understood when they are seen to lead the eye not just towards Jesus’ crucifixion but also towards his resurrection. John has had the resurrection in mind all along. It has not been added simply in order to conform to tradition, or as a theologically unjustified afterthought.
Second, the underlying ‘new creation’ theology of the whole book, and of these themes within it, indicate that John intends the narratives to be understood realistically and literally. Of course, he also intends that all kinds of echoes and resonances be heard within them; he always does; but these remain echoes and resonances set off by a literal description of a concrete set of events. This is not to say, of course, that we as historians can yet pronounce on the likelihood or otherwise of such events having taken place. It is simply to insist that, precisely as historians, in this case readers of ancient texts, we are bound to conclude that this is how John intends us to understand them. Here, as with the synoptic gospels, the ruling hypothesis in much New Testament study, according to which the resurrection narratives were generated and developed as allegories of Christian experience, and then mistakenly read by subsequent generations as literal descriptions of concrete events, fails at the levels of literature, history and theology. The multiple meanings the stories have are multiplications of the basic point, and as with all multiplication you cannot start with zero. The writer believes that these things happened. The indications are that any sources he may have used believed it too.
3. The Contribution of John 21
The material set out in the previous section indicates that chapter 20 was indeed the intended climax of the book as a whole. It forms the outer frame which matches the prologue, and all the major themes we have traced reach their own culmination in it. Strikingly, none of them, except for the last, reappear in chapter 21. It remains, quite clearly, an afterthought.
But an important one. It was not written simply to provide one more resurrection scene, however fascinating. The original writer had already imposed a self-denying ordinance on extra material (20:30), and if he was going to include this there are no doubt many other things he could have added as well. The reason for its inclusion, around the time when the ‘beloved disciple’ was either facing death or had just died, must have to do with the need within the community to address questions of two sorts, first about the roles of Peter and the beloved disciple, and second about the question of whether the beloved disciple would still be alive at the time when the Lord returned. We may suppose that the story of the fishing trip in 21:1–14 was told primarily to act as a setting for these more pressing concerns, not that it is itself lacking in interest.35
Of the two main emphases of the chapter, the first is the rehabilitation and commissioning of Peter. This has its own roots earlier in the gospel, though the mention of Peter’s blustering declaration of loyalty in 13:38 and then his denial in 18:15–27 would not in themselves have needed a further detailed scene. (As is often noted, the charcoal fire in 21:9 reminds us of the charcoal fire in the high priest’s hall in 18:18.) The triple question and response mirror the triple denial with the affirmation of love, the love of disciple for master that was such a major theme in chapter 14.36 Peter is back on the map of genuine discipleship. This leads to a new commissioning, seen in terms of the shepherd image which dominated chapter 10. The mission of Jesus to Israel has already, in principle, been transformed by the Spirit into the mission of the church to the world (20:21); now, as a sharply focused point within that, Jesus’ work as the Good Shepherd is to be carried on by Peter as an under-shepherd, conscious both of his responsibility towards the sheep and of his answerability to the chief Shepherd himself.37 In all of this, Peter does not move away from the basic call to follow Jesus (21:19), the call which can now be repeated in terms of the need to keep his eyes on the Lord whom he is following, not on those to whom other roles and responsibilities may—or may not—have been assigned (21:22).
The second point is the imminent, or actual, death of the beloved disciple. This is interesting to us for a wholly different reason. The writer assumes that everybody, including readers of his gospel, knows that Jesus is to ‘return’ at some time in the future, even though there has been no mention of this in the book thus far. Not only must resurrection and ascension be factored in to John’s view of Jesus; the second coming needs to be there too. The problem then posed by the death, imminent or actual, of the beloved disciple is that some in the church have believed that Jesus had predicted that he would not die, but would still be alive at the second coming. This, the writer is careful to insist, was not the case. What Jesus had said to Peter was simply, ‘What I want for him (even if it should be to wait until I come) is no concern of yours.’ The message for the church is then twofold. First, the beloved disciple’s death does not constitute a problem; it does not mean that a key saying of Jesus has failed to come true. The writer does not deny or downplay the ‘second coming’; he merely insists that the beloved disciple’s death does not mean that something has gone wrong with the providential timetable. Second, Christians must learn, like Peter, to regard other people’s destiny as of no importance. They must attend to their own discipleship and its responsibilities.
Once again, as with chapter 20, the point of these stories, at the level of apparent authorial intention, is that they intend to refer to incidents that actually took place. If there had not been a firm tradition in the early church about such things having been said, the problem of misunderstanding would never have occurred. This again does not settle the historical question, but sets the literary context within which it may be addressed.
In particular, though, these passages raise the question, about both chapter 21 and chapter 20, as to whether they have been written with at least one eye on questions of comparative authority within the church. Is this story really about ‘the primacy of Peter’, as the small church at Tabgha (the supposed scene of John 21) has now been renamed by zealous Franciscans? Are there attempts going on in these two chapters to play off Peter and the beloved disciple (and their respective followers) against one another? Is there an attempt to do something similar either with Mary Magdalene in 20:1–18 or with Thomas in 20:24–9?
Arguments like this have often been advanced, but they remain in my judgment unconvincing.38 Anyone who wanted to use resurrection stories as a way of promoting the primacy of one of Jesus’ followers in particular could have done a better job than this. Mary Magdalene is clearly the first one at the tomb and the first one to see the risen Jesus, but we have no reason to suppose either that anyone was hereby making out a case for her primacy or that, facing such a claim, this chapter was written to refute it. Peter and the beloved disciple run together to the tomb; the beloved disciple gets there first, Peter goes inside first and looks around, and the beloved disciple then ‘sees and believes’—though still without understanding the scriptures which say he must rise again. If there is a hidden agenda in this breathless description, an attempt to make Peter and the beloved disciple stand for different types of Christianity, it has passed most readers by from that day to this, and in my view rightly so.39
What then about Thomas? We could perhaps see his stubborn doubt as a picture of ‘Thomas Christians’, seen from the point of view of Johannine, Petrine or other Christians—a way of dismissing or sneering at a different movement within the early church.40 But if that was what the writer had in mind, what would be the point of putting in Thomas’ mouth the greatest declaration of Christian faith in the whole gospel (20:28), the one clearly designed to remain in the reader’s mind as the paradigm for all subsequent believing? It will hardly do to suggest that in the Gospel of Thomas all Christians are equal with Jesus himself, so that by making Thomas confess Jesus as ‘lord and god’ John is bringing him into line with orthodoxy.41 This is a spectacular statement of faith, and when we hear it both as the structural end-marker of the book (see above) and as a direct challenge to the rising imperial cult (Domitian at least had himself called ‘lord and god’) we can hardly imagine it being simultaneously heard by Johannine Christians as saying, ‘So that’s all right—Thomas did agree with us after all, and those strange Thomas Christians are in the wrong.’42 Jesus’ gentle rebuke in verse 29, implying that Thomas should have believed without seeing, can hardly be read as lessening the force of the declaration. Its real target, we may suppose, is not so much a hypothetical group of Thomas Christians who want to base their faith on the evidence of their senses, but any future reader who might respond by saying, ‘It was all very well for Thomas; you can’t expect me to imitate that kind of faith unless I have the same evidence.’43
Similar points can be made about chapter 21. The wonderfully comic fishing scene has been interpreted—and probably over-interpreted—in numerous ways, but attempts to make it a vehicle for a pro-Peter party surely fail. The conversation between Jesus and Peter is basically about penitence, not primacy; its aim is not to establish or reinforce a particular status, but to effect reconciliation. Giving Peter a fresh task signals the re-establishment of trust, following Peter’s own profession of love. Peter must not worry about Jesus’ plans for the beloved disciple; but neither he nor anyone else is told that he, Peter, will now hold a position of special honour. Likewise, if the story was told so as to place fresh emphasis on the beloved disciple over against Peter, this too has remained opaque to most readers, and for good reason.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of chapter 21 for our present purposes is the portrait of the risen Jesus that emerges from it. As in the other gospel stories, the Jesus of this one is real, palpable, a physical person capable of performing physical acts including cooking breakfast. Nothing is said about his disappearance at the end of the story; but there is another telltale hint that the writer is aware of an oddness, a difference, about him which can hardly be put into words, but only hinted at:
‘Come and have breakfast,’ said Jesus to them.
But none of the disciples dared to press him with the question, ‘Who are you?’, since they knew it was the Lord.44
The verb I have translated ‘to press him with the question’ is the rare word exetazo.45 It means more than just ‘ask’: rather, we should hear something like ‘scrutinize, examine, enquire’.46 They knew it really was him, says John; but at the same time they wanted to ask, to press him with their question. This makes us want to press a question: Why did they want to do that? And, John continues, they were afraid to do so. Again, why? The only possible answer to both questions seems to be that they were aware of Jesus being somehow different, as well as certainly the same. The brief account is heavy with the strangeness of new creation. There is (again) no suggestion that they perceived Jesus as having a body which could neither die nor decay, which is the main point of difference highlighted from Paul onwards between the present body and the risen body. This story does not seem to have been generated, in other words, out of a desire to clothe a developed theology with cunningly devised ‘realistic’ fiction. It seems to reflect a primal moment of simultaneous recognition and puzzlement, an awareness of something they could hardly put into words except as a question, and a question they dared not ask.
There is, in other words, a sense of discontinuity as well as continuity. But this is not expressed in the language or theology that we find in Paul and beyond. It fits very well with the picture we have discovered across the board in the gospel narratives: something in all the stories which might well generate the kind of developed theology and exegesis we find in Paul and later writers, but which shows no signs of having been projected back as a clever, seemingly ‘naively realist’ fiction. In terms of a central Johannine image, John’s resurrection stories appear more like the root of a vine than its newly grown fruit.
4. The Gospel Easter Stories: Conclusion
The general points common to all four gospel accounts have already been set out in chapter 13. All we need to do at this point is to summarize what we have seen in this more detailed study.
There can be no doubt that each evangelist has told the story in his own way. Even where there is good reason to suppose that one used the other as a source—which I assume for at least Luke with Mark, with Matthew’s use of Mark remaining probable and Mark’s use of Matthew an outside chance—there is remarkably little verbal overlap. Instead, we find in each of the stories not so much a sign of steady development from a primitive tradition to a form in which the evangelist simply wrote down what the tradition at that point had grown into, but rather a retelling of primitive stories by the evangelist himself in such a way as to form a fitting climax to his particular book. You could not take Luke’s ending and substitute it for John’s, or John’s for Matthew’s, without creating an absurdity, like the picture books for children in which heads, bodies and legs are swapped around between characters with ludicrous results. The evangelists have exercised considerable freedom in retelling and reshaping the narratives so as to bring out themes and emphases that were important to them throughout their work.
It is therefore all the more remarkable that the basic outline remains so constant, and, in the ways explored in chapter 13, so undeveloped. In particular, though each evangelist has told the story in such a way as to ground a particular understanding of Christian life and particularly Christian mission to the world (Mark of course excepted, though even there the projected journey to Galilee may be seen as a pointer in that direction), the basic stories themselves, of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus, show no signs of having been generated at a later stage. There is no reason to imagine that they were generated either by a newly invented apologetic for the fact that the word ‘resurrection’ was being used of Jesus, or out of a desire to provide legitimation for particular leaders or particular practices. It will of course always remain possible for scholars to think of clever ways in which this might after all have been so, in which the idea of the stories as late apologetic fiction might be rehabilitated; but the main barriers against such a reconstruction are strong and high. If you were a follower of a dead Jesus, in the middle of the first century, wanting to explain why you still thought he was important, and why some of your number had (inexplicably) begun to say that he had been raised from the dead, you would not have told stories like this. You would have done a better job.
We are left with the conclusion that both the evangelists themselves, and the sources to which they had access, whether oral or written, which they have shaped to their own purposes but without destroying the underlying subject-matter, really did intend to refer to actual events which took place on the third day after Jesus’ execution. The main conclusion that emerges from these four studies of the canonical evangelists is that each of them, in their very different ways, believed that they were writing about events that actually took place. Their stories can be used to refer metaphorically or allegorically to all sorts of other things, and they probably (certainly in the case of Luke and John) intended it to be so. But the stories they told, and the way they crafted them (each so differently, yet in this respect the same) as the deliberate and climactic rounding-off of their whole accounts, indicates that for reasons of narrative grammar as well as theology they must have intended to convey to their readers the sense that the Easter events were real, not fantasy; historical as well as historic. They believed, of course, that these events were foundational for the very existence of the church, and they naturally told the stories in such a way as to bring this out. But in the worldview to which they all subscribed, the fresh modification-from-within of the Jewish worldview which we can trace throughout earliest Christianity, the whole point was that the renewed people of Israel’s god, the creator, had been called into being precisely by events that happened in the world of creation, of space, time and matter. The evangelists, and any sources we may hypothesize behind them, tell a story which offers itself as the explanation for the entire development of ‘resurrection’ belief, and the other features of early Christianity we have studied in Parts II and III of this book, but which stubbornly resists attempts to turn it into a mere back-projection of those developments and features. Those who told this story, and those who wrote it down, were very interested in the overtones they could hear in it. But you only get overtones when you strike a fundamental.
We have now surveyed the entire corpus of writing about Jesus and his resurrection in the first two centuries, setting it within the framework of beliefs about life after death in the ancient worlds of paganism and Judaism. We have charted the extraordinary range, from Paul to Tertullian and Origen, of Christian writing about the resurrection both of Jesus himself and of his followers (and in some cases of all humankind). We have seen that early Christian resurrection-belief has a remarkable consistency despite varieties of expression, and that this consistency includes both the location of Christianity at one point on the spectrum of Jewish belief (bodily resurrection) and four key modifications from within that point: (1) resurrection has moved from the circumference of belief to the centre; (2) ‘the resurrection’ is no longer a single event, but has split chronologically into two, the first part of which has already happened; (3) resurrection involves transformation, not mere resuscitation; and (4) when ‘resurrection’ language is used metaphorically, it no longer refers to the national restoration of Israel, but to baptism and holiness. The exceptions prove the rule: the position ascribed to Hymenaeus and Philetus in 2 Timothy 2, together with the Letter to Rheginos and similar texts, were mere innovation, not a natural growth or development. They used the language of resurrection to denote something to which that word-group had never before referred. The only explanation for such usage is that the writers in question were trying to use current Christian language to describe, and perhaps to legitimate, alternative theologies and worldviews. They thereby highlighted, paradoxically, the strength of the position from which they dissented, whose language they found themselves compelled to adopt.
Throughout it all we have seen the obvious but important point, that those who held the complex but remarkably consistent early Christian view gave as their reason that Jesus of Nazareth had himself been raised from the dead. And we have now seen what they meant by this: that on the third day after his execution by the Romans, his tomb was empty, and he was found to be alive, appearing on various occasions and in various places both to his followers and to some who, up to that point, had not been his followers or had not believed, convincing them that he was neither a ghost nor a hallucination but that he was truly and bodily raised from the dead. This belief about Jesus provides a historically complete, thorough and satisfying reason for the rise and development of the belief that he was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true lord. It explains the early Christian conviction that the long-awaited new age had been inaugurated, opening new tasks and possibilities. Above all, it explains the belief that the hope for the world in general and for Jesus’ followers in particular consisted not in going on and on for ever, not in an endless cycle of death and rebirth as in Stoicism, not in a blessed disembodied immortal existence, but in a newly embodied life, a transformed physicality. And we have now seen that the central stories upon which this belief was based, though they have been skillfully shaped and edited by the four evangelists, retain simple and very early features, features which resist the idea that they were made up decades later, but which serve very well to explain the developments from Paul onwards. We are now in a position to face the question: what historical reasons can be given for the rise of this belief?