The publication date is June 11, 2013. The books will actually be shipped to bookstores across the nation in the last week of May. The rights to publish this in Italian and Korean have also been sold and these two translations will appear in their two respective countries later in the year. I live now in a quiet state of expectation, anxiety and emptiness; the emotions that always seem to grip me in the time between the book being finally finished, all its corrections entered, its index and bibliography done, its copy editing and fact checks completed and the moment the first reader opens this volume and begins to read. So to relieve my emotions let me introduce this book to you through this column. The title is The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic.

I think it is fair to say that I could not have written this book 25 years ago. For most of my career, I was almost repelled by the Fourth Gospel. It seemed to me to portray Jesus with his humanity no longer intact. In this gospel, he does not appear to suffer. There is no sense of the Jesus who was portrayed in the synoptic gospels as apprehensive in anticipation of his death. John’s Jesus never prays that “this cup might pass from me.” Indeed, he actually rejects that idea with the statement, “It was to drink this cup that I was born!” The Fourth Gospel relates to the cross of Jesus, not as a place of suffering, but as the place where Jesus is to be glorified. From John’s cross the cry of dereliction (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) has disappeared and has been replaced by the triumphant assertion, “It is finished!” Jesus is informing God that the work “Thou hast given me to do” has been successfully completed.

John’s Jesus appears to have no human limits. This gospel seems to claim for him a pre-existent status. “Before Abraham was, I am!” he is made to say and “Moses rejoiced to see my day.” This gospel has God designate Jesus as the son of God not at the resurrection, as Paul appears to do (Romans 1:1-4) or at the baptism by John the Baptist as Mark appears to do or even at the miracle of the virgin birth as both Matthew and Luke appear to do. John’s Jesus was, according to the prologue, the son of God from the dawn of creation. He was “the Word of God” that said “Let there be light” and thus called the world into being. That same “Word of God” simply became flesh in human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. One cannot, however, be fully human and at the same time be a part of who God is since the beginning of time. The Jesus of John’s gospel seemed to me to be related to God in the same way that Clark Kent was related to Superman. Clark Kent was not really a newspaper reporter, he was Superman in disguise. The Jesus of John’s gospel does not appear to be a real human being; he is God in disguise. In this gospel, Jesus was made to say such things as “The Father and I are one” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” To affirm this divine status the author of this book has taken the name of God, “I AM,” out of the story of Moses and the burning bush and has placed it into the mouth of the Jesus of history. So Jesus is made to identify himself with the God “I AM” over and over again in the Johannine text. “I AM the bread of life,” “I AM living water,” “I AM the door,” “I AM the way, the truth and the life,” “I Am the vine,” “I AM the good shepherd” and “I AM the resurrection.” Jesus is also made to claim that he alone is the only way to God and that only when he is lifted up (on the cross) will that “I AM” presence be revealed. Only in that picture of the dying Jesus on the cross will the world see God. Since I could find no way to relate to this non-human Jesus I tended to hope that portrait would go away.

The Fourth Gospel has also, in my opinion, served to feed the anti-Semitism that has stained Christian history through the ages. From the Fourth Gospel it appeared to spread through the church fathers (there were no mothers) culminating in the horrifying genocidal outburst in the 20th century that we know as “The Holocaust.” There are times when this gospel seems to spit the words “the Jews” out of its author’s mouth with contempt. This gospel is the only place in the Bible where Jesus is quoted as calling the Jews “the children of the devil.” Those were some of the reasons I was never drawn to this book and why attempting to study it deeply was not something I would have chosen to do at an earlier part of my life.

There was one other reason for this negativity that comes out of Christian history. The Fourth Gospel was installed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE as the ultimate and final arbiter of what came to be called “Christian orthodoxy.” In that council, the battle not only for the soul, but also for the future of Christianity, was fought out under the watchful eye of the Emperor Constantine, who wanted unified Christianity to be a unifying force in his empire. In that defining debate, the chief protagonists were a priest named Arius and a deacon, soon to be a priest and later a bishop, named Athanasius. The content of this battle was over the nature of Jesus, that is, was he of “like substance” or “identical substance” with God? Arius, using quotations from all four of the gospels, argued passionately that Jesus was of “like substance” with God. Athanasius, quoting only the Fourth Gospel as his authority, argued that Jesus was of “identical substance” with God. When the smoke of the battle cleared, Athanasius was declared the winner and the Nicene Creed was adopted, sealing Athanasius’ victory with these words describing Jesus: He was “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.” This creed closed every loophole used in the debate with Arius and magnified Jesus’ divinity to the exclusion of his humanity. It also opened the door to what became the defining doctrines that we call “Incarnation” and “Holy Trinity,” which were not fully developed until the 5th century. This Fourth Gospel-supported definition became the substance of Christian orthodoxy. In time this definition of Jesus led to religious wars, religious persecutions, heresy trials, the Inquisition and the condemnation of anyone who dared to think outside the box. Thus this gospel came to be associated with everything that repelled me about Christianity and so it had little appeal. That is why I did not have any interest in studying it much less trying to write about it earlier. Well, things change and my latest book on the Fourth Gospel will soon be in bookstores and a new debate of John, I hope, will ensue. How did that change occur? It took two steps.

First, I discovered that the Fourth Gospel had been misread for centuries; that it is a deeply and passionately Jewish book. That insight was initiated when I discovered only a dozen or so years ago, a book written in the 1960′s by an English scholar named Eileen Guilding, herself the academic child of two gigantic New Testament scholars, F.F. Bruce and Austin Farrer. It was as if I had just found a long lost key. Guilding’s book was entitled The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship. I realized then that the Johannine community, which had produced this gospel, was itself a profoundly Jewish community so that when they battled those they called “the Jews,” it was an intra-synagogue conflict between Jews and Jews, one group called “Revisionist Jews” and the other “Orthodox Jews.” Then I searched this gospel for its Jewish base and only when I discovered this could I feel the Jewish pain of their being excommunicated from the synagogue by the Orthodox party, an event that occurred around the year 88 CE. The words expressing this pain were later used in the text of this gospel to castigate all Jews, for these texts were quoted throughout the centuries with no sense of their historical context.

The second step came when I realized that only when the members of the Johannine community found themselves outside the synagogue did they begin to place their Christ experience into a more universal language than the one they had known while still a part of the synagogue. This was when they turned to a form of first century Jewish mysticism to find a new vocabulary inside which they could express their faith.

Jewish mysticism, like mysticism everywhere, understands the limits that words possess. To talk about their transcendent understanding of Christ, they stretched the words they used to the breaking point to make them big enough to capture the Jesus they had experienced as the mystery and the presence of the Ultimate, which they called God. So they painted Jesus in mystical language, not designed to be literalized. Literal words can never carry mystical meaning without being distorted. They then turned what had once been called “miracles” into what this gospel would call “signs.” “Signs” pointed to a reality they could never capture. Thus I discovered that the language of the Fourth Gospel is not the language of the orthodox understanding of reincarnation. It is the language of Jewish mysticism. It does not lend itself to creedal formulas or doctrinal debates, but to the processing of mystical experiences. Armed with this gospel’s original Jewishness, recognizing the pain of separation that the Johannine community felt when Orthodox Judaism could not stretch to include them and finally recognizing that what they did was to turn to the inclusive, unlimited vocabulary of Jewish mysticism in order to record their experience of Jesus, I then went back to the Fourth Gospel to read it anew. It was not the same book that once repelled me. Indeed, it captured me as no other book has done before and I devoured it until I was transformed by it. Only then could I write the words that appear in this book’s preface: “Part of my task in this book is to pull anti-Semitism out of Christian history and to pull creedal orthodoxy out of Christianity. I now find this gospel not to be about religion or sin and salvation, but to be about life, expanded life and expanded consciousness. I believe that the Fourth Gospel, properly understood, will lead Christianity into an entirely different direction from the one traditional Christian teaching has followed from Nicaea to this day.” It is now for me a blueprint for a new Christianity for a new world.

~JSS

Read the essay online here.

Steven Holmes via the Internet, writes:
 

I recall your writing that there is a major disconnect between what is being taught in the religious educational academies and the message delivered to the average pew occupier. The point seeming to be that pastors do not want to pass on the more "sensitive" aspects of their training due to the potential upset sensibilities and possible loss of weekly donations from their parishioners - even though these church leaders may very well agree with their formal instruction in these areas. Can you direct me to additional information as to exactly what is taught and believed by these higher learning institutions that is not being conveyed to the normal churchgoer - either somewhere in your writings or possibly those of someone else?

Thanks upon thanks for all you have done and continue to do.
 

Dear Steven,

Thanks for your letter. I know of nowhere that someone has written out what is taught in the academies of Christian learning. Of necessity, it is never codified because it is always growing, evolving or changing. I have just completed a five-year study of the Gospel of John, for example, and I can now tell you the differences between 19th century Johannine scholarship, 20th century Johannine scholarship and 21st century Johannine scholarship. It is always being transformed as we learn more about ancient sources. None of these scholars, however, would have related to John’s gospel as if it were a literal report of an eye witness.

In my last book Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World I sought to present current biblical scholarship on each book of the Bible. There are many others who work in the field that I am plowing. I list them in the bibliography of my book.

Studying one of these books in a church group would help to create the conversation that builds a new community within the church. My guess is that most clergy would welcome that initiative and if they did not, perhaps you should look for another church.

Theological seminaries are also not created equal. Some are great centers of academic excellence. I think immediately in this category of Harvard Divinity School and Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Some are denominational schools that have tied themselves into ecumenical consortiums. In this category I think of the theological schools in the Berkeley, California, center and the seminaries that revolve around Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some are denominational schools that are connected to a university. I think of the Drew Theological School on the campus of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

Some denominational schools, however, are little more than propaganda institutions in the service of denominational comfort. These institutions engage the world and its thought very little, tolerate their critics very uneasily and tend to bless the status quo. The fact is that most of the biblical scholarship that informs my ministry and my writing has been around for about 200 years and yet I did not learn about it in my denominational training school in the 1950’s. That illustrates the problem.

Thank you for your good words.

John Shelby Spong