The Historicity of John’s Gospel in Question

As Professor James Barr says somewhere, conservative Christians typically adopt a maximally conservative position on the Bible – and look for a scholar who most closely approximates to their views. So FF Bruce is inevitably a favourite. But he is often quoted not because a conservative apologist has considered the exegetical issues objectively for himself, but because the scholar by critical means comes closest to the conservatives position – which was arrived at dogmatically.

The Revd Dr Richard A. Burridge is Dean of King’s College, London and a leading expert on the canonical gospels. He has written probably the standard work on the gospel genres What Are the Gospels? (Cambridge University Press). In another book written as an introductory work for Kings College students entitled Jesus now and then (SPCK 2004), he says this about the gospels:

“Some modern studies assume that if there is ‘fiction’ in the gospels, then they are inauthentic or unreliable. However, closer attention to literary criticism shows that no one wrote a classical biography to provide a documented historical text as we might capture something with a tape recorder, but rather in an attempt to get ‘inside’ the person. Thus, John’s stress on ‘truth’ is not about documented fact but the higher truth of who Jesus is, which is why he writes in a biographical format. For him, Jesus is ’the way, the truth and the life’, so his Jesus says these words (John 14.16). To ask whether Jesus actually ever spoke these words is to miss the point completely. This is neither a lie nor a fiction; it is simply a way of bringing out the truth about the subject which the author wishes to tell the audience.”

So says Dr. Burridge. I strongly disagree with his stricture: ‘To ask whether Jesus actually ever spoke these words is to miss the point completely’. If we wish to do responsible Jesus research then this is precisely the kind of question we must ask. I emailed him about this a year ago but he never replied.

FF Bruce on the Gospel of John
Here is an extract from his commentary. I chose to copy a section from his discussion of the historicity of John’s portrait of Jesus. Bruce’s argument is rather convoluted and overly subtle in parts. I have added some of my own thoughts at the end.

The Gospel of John by FF Bruce, published in 1983 by Eerdmans

Taken from the Introduction, pp. 15-17

The Evangelist records words which were really spoken, actions which were really performed. His record of these words and actions includes their interpretation, in which their inward significance is disclosed and faith is quickened in Jesus as the Revealer of the Father and the Saviour of the world.

The source of the Evangelist’s interpretation of Jesus’ words and actions is clearly indicated in his record. He reports Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, would come to guide his disciples into all truth, especially by bringing to their remembrance all that Jesus had taught them and making it plain to them. In reporting this promise, the Evangelist implies that he himself experienced a rich fulfillment of it, as he pondered the significance of what Jesus had done and said during his ministry, as he shared with others what he and his companions had seen and heard, and as he finally caused the contents of this gospel to be set down in writing. If in this Gospel the words and deeds of Jesus appear to have undergone ‘transposition into a higher key’ than that with which we are familiar in the Synoptic Gospels, this is the effect of the Spirit’s enabling the Evangelist to adapt the story of Jesus to a different public from that for which the earlier Gospels were designed. The Spirit was, among other things, to serve as a trustworthy interpreter; his interpretive ministry is clearly to be discerned in the Gospel according to John.

Interpretation (which in the Gospels involved, at an early stage, translation from the Aramaic which Jesus normally spoke into Greek) may take a variety of forms. A word-for-word transcription or translation is scarcely an interpretation in the usual sense of the word. Today one would ‘interpret’ the words of Jesus by transposing them from the Hellenistic Greek in which they have been preserved into a late twentieth-century idiom (whether English or any other language). Interpretation may result in an abridgement or a summary (it is widely believed, for example, that the speeches in Acts are literary summaries of what was originally spoken at much greater length). It may, on the other hand, result in an expanded version of what was said; if so, it will probably include a good deal of paraphrase. If the effect of such an expanded paraphrase is to bring out the sense more fully, then the use of this form is amply justified.

Plutarch, in his Life of Brutus, describes what happened in Rome on the morrow of Julius Caesar’s assassination:

Anthony and his supports demanded that Caesar’s will should be read in public, and that Caesar’s body should not be buried in private but with customary honors.…Brutus agreed to these demands….

The first consequence of this was that, when it became known that according to the terms of his will the dictator had presented seventy five drachmas to each Roman citizen and had bequeathed to the citizens the use of his gardens beyond the Tiber,… a great wave of affection for Caesar and a powerful sense of his loss swept over the people. The second consequence was that, after the dead man had been brought to the forum, Anthony delivered the customary funeral oration over his body. As soon as he saw that the people were deeply stirred by his speech, he changed his tone and struck a note of compassion, and picking up Caesar’s toga, stiff with blood as it was, he unfolded it for all to see, pointing out each gash where the daggers had stabbed through and the number of Caesar’s wounds. At this his hearers lost all control of their emotions. Some called out for the assassins to be killed; others…dragged out benches and tables from the neighboring shops and piled them on top of one another to make an enormous pyre. On this they laid Caesar’s corpse and cremated it….As the flames began to mount, people rushed up from all sides, seized burning brands, and ran through the city to the assassin’s houses to set fire to them.

A vivid enough account, to be sure. But how was Caesar’s will read, and what exactly did Mark Anthony say in his eulogy? A satisfying answer to these two questions is provided in a well-known English interpretation of Plutarch’s narrative – not a word-for-word translation but an expanded paraphrase in which it is Anthony who reads Caesar’s will aloud after he has excited the indignation of the crowd by exhibiting Caesar’s torn and blood-stained robe and exposing his wounded corpse. Anthony’s whole speech, from its low-key exordium:

Friends, Romans, countryman, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him –

To its ringing peroration:

Here was a Caesar! When comes such an other?

Is a translation of the freest kind, a transposition into another key; but Shakespeare’s genius enables him to put the right words into Anthony’s mouth, ‘endeavoring as nearly as possible’ (in Thucydidean fashion), ‘to give the general purport of what was actually said’.

What Shakespeare does by dramatic insight (and, it may be added, what many a preacher does by homiletical skill), all this and much more the Spirit of God accomplished in our Evangelist. It does not take divine inspiration to provide a verbatim transcript; but to reproduce the words which were spirit and life to their first believing hearers in such a way that they continue to communicate their saving message and prove themselves to be spirit and life to men and women today, nineteen centuries after John wrote – that is the word of the Spirit of God. It is through the Spirit’s operation that, in William Temple’s words, ‘the mind of Jesus himself was what the Fourth Gospel disclosed’; and it is through the illumination granted by the same Spirit that one may still recognise in this Gospel the authentic voice of Jesus.

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So there you have it. To the simple question, did the historical Jesus actually speak the words attributed to him in the Gospel of John? FF Bruce would answer, No.

Bruce’s discussion is completely in the mainstream of scholarly views on John. But he is a favorite of fundamentalist Christians who think his analysis supports the straightforward historicity of John’s Jesus, when it clearly doesn’t.

Paul