Canon John Redford, Reader in Biblical Hermeneutics at the Maryvale Institute, here presents an uncompromising defence of the traditional view that the Gospel of John is, historically speaking, precisely that: it was composed, more or less in its entirety and as it now stands, by John the son of Zebedee, brother of James, the ‘Beloved Disciple’ of its own narrative.
It would be fairer to say that this book is not so much a defence as an attack upon the historical scepticism of biblical critics since Kant, with Rudolf Bultmann being cast as the villain of the piece and Benedict XVI as the hero, championing a return to the belief in the possibility of revelation in and through history with his Jesus of Nazareth. Not that Redford rejects historical criticism as such: ‘the Pope … is not even going beyond the bounds of legitimate historical Jesus research, provided that we abandon the anti-incarnational and anti-miraculous presuppositions of so much historical Jesus research’ (p.49). The book begins with three brief chapters which set Pope Benedict's life of Jesus in the context of the shifting trends of biblical criticism, and while these are occasionally a little sycophantic in tone for a scholarly work, they offer a very clear and fair assessment of the difference in stance between himself and those for whom historical study begins with the bracketing out of the supernatural. Whether Redford will convince these latter that they should abandon their suppositions I very much doubt, and it is easy to imagine a great many biblical scholars getting no further than the first two dozen or so pages of this before throwing it aside as hopelessly uncritical or even fundamentalist.
But the tide is changing: more and more scripture scholars are showing themselves unwilling to pretend not to believe what they say in the creed, or to put those beliefs aside in an exercise in academic schizophrenia. Furthermore, quite apart from these hermeneutical starting points, it is no longer considered impossible that the Fourth Gospel contains substantial elements of tradition that go back to Christ himself – in particular, the ever-growing strength of the ‘early high Christology’ movement means it can no longer be taken for granted that the explicitly incarnational presentation of Jesus proves that this Gospel bears witness not to the historical Jesus but to the Christology of some hypothetical ‘Johannine Community’. Redford himself argued in a previous work (Bad, Mad or God?, 2004) that the ‘I AM’ sayings in John are historically authentic, comprehensible of Jesus in his particular place and time, and clearly demonstrating his claim to be identified with the God of Israel. Only if we cannot believe that Jesus was the incarnation of the God of Israel and knew himself to be so do we have reason to reject these sayings, and more broadly to reject the Fourth Gospel's presentation of Jesus as authentically historical rather than theological myth-making.
So what Benedict has done for the historical Jesus, Redford seeks to do, mutatis mutandis, for the author of John's Gospel. He begins by noting that chapter 20 of John makes it quite explicit that the Gospel purports, at least, to be substantially an eyewitness account, testimony to the life of Jesus but especially to the way in which he spoke of his mission and his relationship with the Father. One of the problems he must address – which has often led to rejection of the historicity of the Gospel – is its difference from the synoptics, but Redford argues that this is explicable simply in terms of different strategies for selecting material, because of different purposes. He does not quite address satisfactorily that, while we can understand John's Gospel as carefully selecting and ordering material without rejecting its substantial historicity, it is more difficult to explain why so much of this christological material was omitted by the other evangelists. He proposes briefly that ‘It is quite possible that the early Christians were embarrassed by the full divinity of Christ … In the process of the selection of the tradition, the Synoptics simply do not wish to overstate the incarnation’ (p.75, emphasis original). This is a bold suggestion, and needs a lot more justification if it is to hold the chain of argument together.
Since Redford is rightly critical of a common tendency in biblical scholarship to glide from ‘it is plausible’ to ‘it may be taken as established’ in forming arguments, it is surely fair to criticise him for the same mistake, and alas it is not infrequent. The next chapter is a typical example, in which he seeks to establish the early date of the Fourth Gospel. It is a sadly brief chapter, and does little more than summarise JAT Robinson's arguments; these, however, only show that arguments that John must be late do not hold water, not that it must be early enough to be written by an eyewitness.
After an interesting excursus on possible influences on John – Jewish, Greek, Persian, etc. – which again shows that the Gospel is plausibly the product of a writer situated within a solidly Jewish context, Redford moves on to look at patristic evidence for the authorship of the Gospel. Here he engages at last with Richard Bauckham's controversial Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), and he demonstrates that ‘it remains a genuine possibility’ that the author of John is who tradition claims him to be. Bauckham, though conservative, differs – he considers the author indeed to be identified with the Beloved Disciple, but this one is ‘John the Elder’ and not John the son of Zebedee. Redford is evidently somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that the Pope concurs with this, and I note that elsewhere Bauckham has accused Redford of mis-representing his argument (The Tablet, 31/1/09, p. 24).
What ought to be the last substantive chapter in the book goes on to argue from exegesis of the Gospel text for the identity of the author, the Beloved Disciple, and John son of Zebedee. Again, the argument is plausible, and if, as Redford claims, the tradition should be given the benefit of the doubt, then his case is made. The sceptical historical critic will not be convinced, but Redford makes a fascinating and a fairly strong case, and I think the sceptic will be forced to admit that his refusal to concur with the tradition results from his presuppositions rather than being the necessary outcome of an objective study.
The chapter that follows, one of the most enjoyable and convincing, is a fairly devastating critique of ‘theories of composition’ of the Gospel, such as the work of the much-revered Raymond Brown. The only flaw in this chapter is that it should be much earlier: it is surely one of the building blocks of Redford's argument to show that the text is properly to be read as a unity rather than seen as the result of multiple layers of redaction. On the other hand, there are those who would argue for reading it as a unity prescinding entirely from questions of history: ‘I don't care how the text emerged, it is canonical, it is as it is, and I shall read it so.’ But Redford, perhaps wisely, gives more or less the last word to the riposte to this offered by Markus Bockmuehl: ‘In dealing with the New Testament's inalienably theological subject matter there can be no neutral history nor a neutral historian’ (Bockmuehl: To Be Or Not To Be, 1998, cited p. 281). Redford has not tried to be a neutral historian, and his work is much the better for it.
