John Within Judaism
Adele Reinhartz
The expression John Within Judaism is new to Johannine studies recently. So far I have found it in only two works. One is Jörg Frey’s essay entitled “John within Judaism?” Textual, Historical, and Hermeneutical Considerations, that appeared in a 2021 de Gruyter volume called Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE?. The other is Wally Cirafesi’s book, entitled John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel, forthcoming from Brill.
Nevertheless, the question of John and Judaism has been asked and answered dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times in modern scholarship. Although John is by no means unique among New Testament books in this regard, it raises the Jewish question in a particularly urgent way. On the one hand, the Fourth Gospel has numerous elements that are commonly recognized as Jewish. These include references to Jewish wisdom traditions, quotations and allusions to the Torah and prophets; midrashic exegetical techniques; and references to the pilgrimage festivals, Hanukkah, and ritual handwashing. John’s connection to Jewishness is strong, and positive.
At the same time, John’s Jesus, and John’s narrator, are often hostile to Jews, or, at least to the group it refers to as hoi ioudaioi, a term normally, and best, translated as “the Jews.” Whether these are real Jews or rhetorical ones, whether the entire Jewish people, or a subgroup, is beside the point. The fact is that the Gospel portrays the ioudaioi, in toto, as the enemies of Jesus, the ones who plot his death (11:49-52), the ones who expel Christ-confessors from the synagogue, and the ones whom Jesus describes as having the devil as their father. The question is often then asked: How can a Gospel that is so Jewish also be so anti-Jewish?[1]
It would be a gross over-simplification to say that it is always the fraught question of anti-Judaism that motivates scholars to seek John within Judaism. It is nevertheless the case that scholars often invoke John’s Jewishness when they are trying to make sense of this Jewish Gospel’s hostile comments about Jews. In my brief comments today I will address three related matters: What do scholars mean when they describe John as Jewish, or within Judaism? What questions does a John within Judaism framework allow them to answer? And what interests are being served when they (or we) attempt to do so?
In his book, Wally Cirafesi states that the primary criterion for determining whether a text is “within Judaism” is its “self-ascribed relationship to the Jewish ethnos and preferred vision of the social world.”.[2] This relationship, however, is to be seen neither as static nor exclusive. Cirafesi argues that according to this definition, the Fourth Gospel is certainly within Judaism. In his article, Jörg Frey does not offer a definition of “within Judaism,” but, like many others, he views the Gospel as Jewish because the God talk and christological prophecies are based entirely on biblical and early Jewish traditions.[3]
Most scholars infer the Gospel’s Jewishness from its many references to Jewish practices, holidays, and the prevalent use of Jewish motifs, and scriptures. By this they generally mean that the author was genealogically, ethnically, and, to use an anachronistic but helpful word, religiously Jewish. In this view, John’s author was born of a Jewish mother, affiliated with the Jewish people, and lived his life according to Jewish law, however that would have been understood in the first century CE.
In order to infer the Jewish identity of the author from such references, however, one must assume that only Jews would have known or known about these Jewish terms, references, customs, and rituals. This assumption, made by most Johannine scholars, is reasonable but not unassailable. In the ancient world, like today, there were non-Jews who were interested in and knowledgeable about Jewish matters and Jews who were not. My point here is not to argue against the author’s Jewishness, only to point out that this claim is based on an assumption rather than data as such.
Scholars use John’s presumed Jewish identity, along with other narrative and discursive elements, to reconstruct the identity of John’s audience, the historical context in which the Gospel was written, and its purpose. These reconstructions make another assumption: that only Jews would understand John’s references to the Gospel’s Jewish elements. On this basis, many scholars conclude that the Gospel’s audience, like its author, must have been genealogically, ethnically, and religiously Jewish. Coupling these insights with the Gospel’s three references to the expulsion of Christ-confessors from the synagogue allows for a backstory, associated most directly with J. L. Martyn, of blessed memory, according to which the Gospel was written within and for a Jewish Christ-confessing community, usually referred to as the Johannine community, that had been expelled from among their fellow Jews on account of their belief in Jesus as the messiah. From this backstory, scholars infer that the Gospel’s purpose was to strengthen the faith of this traumatized community.
What I have just described is the dominant hypothesis in Johannine studies, though it is not without its detractors. I have described this theory as a skyscraper built on toothpicks, and the toothpick at the very bottom, holding up the entire structure, is the one that situates John “within Judaism.” In what follows I do not rehearse yet again all my very good reasons for doubting the expulsion hypothesis and the very existence of a Johannine community prior to the Gospel’s composition. Rather, I turn to the interests that are often served by claiming John for Judaism.
My main argument is that situating John within Judaism provides a comfortable answer to the uncomfortable question of anti-Judaism. I pinpoint three basic strategies, which I identify as historiographical, logical, and evangelical. All three are examples of Christian apologetics, at least in my view, if not in the view of their proponents.
What I am calling the historical strategy is based on the expulsion theory that I have just outlined. This hypothesis implies that the Gospel’s vilification of the ioudaioi as the devil’s children (8:44) who are destined for eternal judgment (5:29) is an understandable response to the experience of expulsion. Those who hold to this explanation can therefore avoid the touchy issue of anti-Judaism altogether. Paradoxically, this line of argumentation blames the ioudaioi for the hostile comments the Gospel throws at them. Two other historical moves are prevalent in the scholarship. One is to downplay the significance of the hostile passages is to claim that they are nothing more than harmless name-calling. No harm meant and no harm done.[4] Another is to narrow the referent of hoi ioudaioi to one particular subgroup, say the Jewish authorities, which allows them to characterize the hostility as an inner-Jewish skirmish.
I have called the second strategy the logical strategy, as it is based not on a historical inference but a logical one: because John’s Gospel is “within Judaism,” it cannot also be anti-Jewish.[5] One scholar describes John as “pro-Jewish” because: “nearly all persons and groups mentioned in John, except for the Romans, are either Jewish or Semitic, and Jesus is presented pervasively as the Jewish Messiah-Christ. Jesus is Jewish, and so are all of his disciples; those touched by his ministry—whom he heals, teaches, feeds, and challenges—are all Semitic or Jewish.”[6]
This line of argumentation presumes a) that the presence of Jewish characters in the Gospel means that the Gospel’s author(s) and audience(s) are Jewish; and b) that their presumed Jewishness means that they could not express hostility towards the ioudaioi. Logically, however, we must allow for the possibility a) that writing about Jewish characters does not necessarily mean that the author was Jewish, and b) that even if the author was ethnically Jewish, it would still be possible for them to express anti-Jewish views. Stranger things have happened.
Finally, and most puzzling, at least to me, is the theological evangelism that occasionally peaks out from behind the scholarly curtain. This motif can be seen in the claim made by some that the Gospel of John cannot possibly be anti-Jewish because its message of love is open to everyone, Jews included (or, perhaps, Jews above all). One scholar, for example, claims that “when read correctly, the Fourth Gospel…points the way forward for all seekers of truth to sojourn together, across the boundaries of religious movements, time, and space.”[7] I am only too aware that my readings of the Fourth Gospel can be challenging, and indeed unacceptable to those for whom the New Testament is a sacred expression of the divine will. But to argue that the Fourth Gospel cannot be anti-Jewish because it offers Jews salvation through Christ seems to miss the point entirely.
I believe that such comments are intended to be inclusive of Jews while solving a dilemma for Christians: this approach allows them to uphold the sacred nature of their scriptures without at the same time adopting a hostile stance towards Jews and Judaism. Yet I wish I could help some of my colleagues understand that despite their good intentions, such statements are both supersessionist and anti-Jewish. Implicit in these claims is the a priori conviction that human beings, including Jews and other non-Christians, can only relate to God through faith in Jesus as the messiah and divine son. To imply that Jewishness is incomplete without such faith barely conceals the similarity of this position to that of early twentieth-century New Testament scholars, such as Adolf von Harnack, who asserted that Judaism stagnated after Jesus’s arrival and became empty legalism.[8] Despite my best efforts, I fear that the message has not been getting through to everyone.
These three strategies do not explain so much explain as explain away John’s hostile statements about the ioudaioi, and in that sense they are apologetic rather than scholarly. But these brief reflections on John within Judaism by no means covers the entire range of scholarly approaches. Indeed, there is another conversation that I have not even touched upon: if John is within Judaism, which sort of Judaism, among the several or many options available in the first century, was he within? This dimension of the question is addressed, for example, by Gabriele Boccaccini, who argues that the Fourth Gospel reflects a radical Jewish sectarianism that advocated separation from other Jewish groups. Because he sees this radical sectarianism as squarely within the diverse Jewishness of the second temple period, Boccaccini argues that the very formulation of the question of whether John is Jewish or anti-Jewish is irrelevant. This perspective may be compatible with Wally Cirafesi’s approach, according to which John’s Gospel is engaging in a process of identity negotiation from a perspective within Judaism.[9]
I wonder whether these approaches, which seek to distance themselves from questions of anti-Judaism on the grounds that the Gospel must be read as completely within Judaism, change the playing field, as I believe their authors intend, or whether the move from talking about anti-Judaism to, say, a radical Jewish sectarianism, is actually a distinction without a difference when it comes to understanding what the Gospel is trying to achieve with respect to its readers.
I would agree, however, that the field of Jewish studies, and especially the study of ancient Jewish diversity, needs to open up to include and address the sources relevant to the development of the Jesus movement. We must also consider, as Daniel Boyarin has urged, what we actually mean by Judaism. Is this term, so convenient for our discourse, actually appropriate for the period and for the texts under discussion?
These and other questions are pertinent to the question of whether the phrase “within Judaism” is helpful when considering John and, for that matter, other New Testament texts. But the question of John’s anti-Judaism, and the apologetic recourse to John’s Jewishness or the Gospel’s situation within Judaism might require a rethink of exactly we hope to achieve when we attached Jewish labels to the texts that came to comprise the New Testament.
[1] The formulation is often traced back either to C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text (London: SPCK, 1965), 71 or to Wayne A. Meeks, “‘Am I a Jew?’—Johannine Christianity and Judaism,” in Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty, ed. Jacob Neusner (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 163.
[2] Wally V. Cirafesi, John within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity volume 112 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2021), 5, note 12.
[3] Jörg Frey, “‘John within Judaism?’ Textual, Historical, and Hermeneutical Considerations,” in Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE?, ed. Jens Schröter, Benjamin A. Edsall, and Joseph Verheyden (De Gruyter, 2021), 185, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110742213-008/html.
[4] Luke Timothy Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108.3 (1989): 419–41.
[5] Paul N. Anderson, “Anti-Semitism and Religious Violence as Flawed Interpretations of the Gospel of John,” Faculty Publications - College of Christian Studies.289 (2017): 2, https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ccs/289.
[6] Anderson, “Anti-Semitism and Religious Violence as Flawed Interpretations of the Gospel of John,” 7. The non-Jewish Semites are presumably the Samaritans of John 4.
[7] Anderson, “Anti-Semitism and Religious Violence as Flawed Interpretations of the Gospel of John,” 2.
[8] Adolf Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1915).
[9] Cirafesi, John within Judaism, 25.
Adele Reinhartz is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa, teaching in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. Adele is former General Editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature (2012-18) and former President of the Society of Biblical Literature (2020).