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Meeting Nicodemus: A Case Study in Daring Theological Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2013

David F. Ford
David F. Ford*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS, [email protected]
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Abstract

The Nicodemus story can be read as a distillation of the Gospel of John and an example of many of its key features. John 3:1–21 poses a wide range of the problems raised by this most distinctive and mysterious of the four gospels. It shows characteristic practices of John as a reader, writer and teacher. In line with John's theology of the Spirit ‘leading into all the truth’, it also shows him as a daring theologian, opening up fresh interpretations and ways of doing theology beyond the Septuagint and the Synoptic Gospels and even beyond his own Prologue (itself a remarkably daring piece of theology). That same Spirit means that John also expects his readers to be led into further truth, and to improvise on his theology as he himself did on the Septuagint and on the Synoptic traditions. His ways of reading, writing and teaching encourage such a response in the Spirit by creating a work rich in intertextuality, imagery and conceptuality which has a ‘deep plain sense’, superabundant in meaning and always inviting the reader to reread, learn more and interpret afresh. So one challenge for readers now is whether they are open not only to thinking along with John but also to thinking beyond him, in ways appropriate to different people and contexts. But this transformation in thought and imagination is not all: it is inseparable from doing the truth ‘in God’. The mutual involvement of seeing, believing/trusting, knowing and living in love is above all communicated in the drama of John's Gospel, whose backbone is a series of meetings with Jesus and the injunction to follow Jesus. More embracing and fundamental than, for example, doctrinal theology or existential decision-making, is the dramatic reality of encountering other people and following Jesus in all the complexities of life in specific contexts. In John 3:1–21 the encounter of Jesus with Nicodemus is the dramatic heart of the passage, blending into a discourse which itself culminates in the ultimate drama of ‘deeds done in God’. But to stop interpretation there would be to refuse the Johannine invitation to enter into more truth with a view to ‘doing greater things’. So the article ends with two midrashic interpretations of Nicodemus for today.

Keywords

dramaintertextualityplain senseSpirittheological interpretationtheological reader
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , February 2013 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2013

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References

1 The trans. used is the New Revised Standard Version, but in some cases following clarifications or alternatives suggested by others, in particular McHugh, John F., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on John 1–4, ed. Stanton, Graham (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 217–18Google Scholar.

2 E.g. McHugh, Commentary on John 1–4, pp. 217–18; Bultmann, Rudolf, The Gospel of John (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971)Google Scholar, pp. 130ff.; Brodie, Thomas L., The Gospel According to John: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Oxford: OUP, 1993)Google Scholar, pp. 80ff. Many agree that it is a transitional passage which could go either with what precedes or follows it.

3 E.g. Schnackenburg, Rudolf, The Gospel According to St John, trans. Smyth, Kevin, et al., 3 vols (London: Burns & Oates, 1968, 1980, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 360ffGoogle Scholar.

4 The question of John's knowledge of the Synoptic Gospels or of the traditions they knew is highly disputed but important for my argument. I agree with those who see John constantly assuming and alluding to the Synoptics, or at least to the traditions the Synoptics drew upon. Cf. Hoskyns, Edwyn Clement and Davey, Francis Noel, The Fourth Gospel (London: Faber & Faber, 1947)Google Scholar; Barrett, C. K., The Gospel According to St John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1978)Google Scholar; Deneux, A. (ed.), John and the Synoptics (Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Lincoln, Andrew T., The Gospel According to Saint John, Black's New Testament Commentary (London: Continuum, 2005)Google Scholar, pp. 26–39. I find the latter the most convincing short summary of the debate, emphasising John's ‘creativity’ in drawing on his sources.

5 This is the one text we do know John read, and the most secure conclusions about John as reader are likely to be drawn from his uses of the Septuagint. On this see especially Barrett, Gospel According to St John, pp. 27ff.; Brown, Raymond E., The Gospel According to John, 2 vols (New York: Doubleday, 1966, 1970)Google Scholar, introduction to vol. 1, where the range of influences on John is well outlined; cf. also Menken, M. J. J., Old Testament Quotations in the Fourth Gospel (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1996)Google Scholar; Hylen, Susan, Allusion and Meaning in John 6 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Schnackenburg, E.g., Gospel According to St John, vol. 1, p. 395Google Scholar on 3:14: ‘it is probably derived from the evangelist's own theological reflection’.

7 Ibid., p. 396.

8 As McHugh, Commentary on John 1–4, notes, the verb ὑψóω ‘occurs around 260 times, mostly in religious contexts, meaning to exalt, to glorify, to save and even to redeem’ (p. 235).

9 E.g. δóξα, ἔθνη, πιστεύω, μαρτία, εἰρήνη, πρóβατoν, κύριoς, ἀμνóς, κρίσις, ζωή, ἀνoμία, φῶς (LXX Isaiah 52:13–53:12). It is repeatedly the case that if one follows John's references and allusions back to the Septuagint, by reading them in context yet further implications of his meaning can be surmised. E.g. in Numbers 21:8–9 the key Johannine term ‘sign’ (σημεῖoν) is used twice – on this see Keener, Craig S., The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), vol. 1, p. 565.Google Scholar

10 On Jesus as Son of Man in John, see McHugh, Commentary on John 1–4, p. 236.

11 Ibid., p. 236.

12 Cf. especially Matt 19:16.

13 I have only mentioned the most obvious of their many intertextual resonances – other key terms such as Moses, serpent, wilderness, Son of Man and believing could yield many more within the Septuagint, the Synoptics and the Johannine literature, let alone echoes in non-scriptural literature. Keener, Gospel of John, is especially thorough in tracing such resonances throughout relevant ancient literature – on 3:14–15, see vol. 1, pp. 563ff. The intertextuality of the whole of 3:1–21 could occupy several books (cf. below on the resonance between 3:9 and Luke 1:34).

14 I call it ‘deep plain sense’ to distinguish it from e.g. the sort of midrashic interpretations with which this article concludes – they may be deep and may relate variously to the plain sense of varying depths, but they do not claim to be plain or literal. For a theological discussion of ‘plain sense’ see Greene-McCreight, K. E., Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the ‘Plain Sense’ of Genesis 1–3 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).Google Scholar

15 E.g. 5:26, 6:57 and 10:14–15 give scope for endless meditation, together with epistemological and theological reflection and argument.

16 As suggested by 16:13–14: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth . . . he will take what is mine and declare it to you’.

17 The giving by God is equated to sending in the next verse, 3:17.

18 The ‘I am’ statements with a predicate, such as ‘I am the good shepherd’ in 10:11, 14, might be seen as another form of the ‘as . . . so . . .’ pattern, e.g. in: ‘As a good shepherd takes care of sheep so I take care of you’. Those without a predicate, e.g. 8:48 ‘Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am”’, might be seen as the limit case of the ontological claim of the Johannine Jesus: ‘As God is, so am I’. For illuminating reflections on ‘as’ in relation to metaphor and the verb ‘to be’ see Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977)Google Scholar, last chapter and, for its working out in exegesis of Exodus 3:14 and the philosophical and theological interpretation of that verse down the centuries, see Ricoeur, Paul and LaCocque, André, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 305–64.Google Scholar

19 John as writer also includes John as reader, only available through his writing.

20 The indeterminacy of language is, of course, a feature of all literature: John intensifies it in the ways described.

21 See e.g. Brodie, Gospel According to John; Culpepper, R. Alan, The Gospel and Letters of John (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Frey, J., van der Watt, J. and Zimmermann, R., Imagery in the Gospel of John: Terms, Forms, Themes and Theology of Johannine Figurative Language (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006)Google Scholar; Moloney, Francis J., The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina Series, 4 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Stibbe, Mark W. G., John as Storyteller: Narrative Criticism and the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: CUP, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nissen, Johannes and Pedersen, Sigfred (eds), New Readings in John: Literary and Theological Perspectives (London: T&T Clark, 2004)Google Scholar; Segovia, Fernando F., ‘What is John?’, vol. 2, Literary and Social Readings of the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Van Belle, G., Labahn, M. and Maritz, P., Repetitions in the Fourth Gospel: Style, Text, Interpretation (Leuven: Peeters, 2009).Google Scholar

22 Trond Dokka, ‘Irony and Sectarianism in the Gospel of John’, in Nissen and Pedersen (eds), New Readings, p. 103. Dokka's remarkable article makes some provocative suggestions, including his ‘guess . . . that the price to be paid for the openness of the text, for its ability to initiate outsiders, has been to destabilize and confuse every inner circle as soon as established’ (p. 106). He concludes with a tantalising reference to the ‘as . . . so . . .’ pattern (p. 107).

23 See Dokka, ‘Irony and Sectarianism’, on this. Transposed into the ‘as . . . so . . .’ pattern, key imagery can be expressed in the form, e.g.: ‘As birth . . . so seeing/entering the Kingdom of God . . .’, or ‘As wind . . . so the one born of the Spirit . . .’.

24 That was just a taste of what can be discovered in 3:1–21 – the commentators offer dozens more examples, with fresh suggestions continually being made. One of my favourites, suggested by Lucy Gardener while we were studying the text together, is the resonance between 3:9 and Luke 1:34. Like the Nicodemus passage, the annunciation to Mary includes perplexity, birth from above, the Holy Spirit, knowing (the same verb, γινώσκω) and questioning how this can be possible.

25 E.g. signs, know, water, Spirit, God, flesh, earthly, heavenly, testify, believe, Son of Man, love, world, only Son, send, condemn, save, Son of God, judgement, light, darkness, evil, doing the truth.

26 For John's use of dramatic narrative and characterisation, see below.

27 Just as the remarks about John as reader are also part of John as writer, so both sets of remarks can be taken up into what follows on John as teacher.

28 I owe this reading to Lucy Gardner, in joint study.

29 For more on the Prologue see Ford, David F., Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, 16 (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 53ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Another aspect of John's superabundant meaning is the number of ‘key’ concepts, themes or passages which can be plausibly proposed.

31 On John's use of the Greek word πoιέω, meaning ‘do, make or create’, and its relation to some of the themes of the present article, see Ford, David F., ‘Beginning, Ending and Abundance: Genesis 1:1 and the Gospel of John’, in Baer, David A. and Gordon, Robert P. (eds), Leshon Limmudim: Essays on the Language and Literature of the Hebrew Bible in Honour of A. A. Macintosh (London: T&T Clark, forthcoming)Google Scholar. The essay also supplements the discussion above about intertextuality.

32 For a fuller discussion of this see Ford, David F., The Future of Christian Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 2. In terms of twentieth-century theology, one might see Barth majoring on the doctrinal (though in fact he also does justice to narrative) and Bultmann majoring on the existential. On John and classical drama, see the ground-breaking work of Parsenios, George L., Departure and Consolation: The Johannine Farewell Discourses in Light of Greco-Roman Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Rhetoric and Drama in the Johannine Lawsuit Motif (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).

33 In addition to commentaries already referenced, for a forthcoming discussion see Koester, Craig, ‘Theological Complexity and the Characterization of Nicodemus in John's Gospel’, in Skinner, Christopher W. (ed.), Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John, LNTS (London: T&T Clark, forthcoming).Google Scholar Cf. Bassler, Jouette M., ‘Mixed Signals: Nicodemus in the Fourth Gospel’, Journal of Biblical Literature 108:4 (Winter 1989), pp. 635–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conway, Colleen M., ‘Speaking through Ambiguity: Minor Characters in the Fourth Gospel’, Biblical Interpretation 10:3 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 324–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gunderson, Steven, ‘The Use of Discourse Analysis in Character Studies: Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman (John 3–4)’, in Porter, Stanley E. and O'Donnell, Matthew Brook (eds), The Linguist as Pedagogue: Trends in the Teaching and Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), pp. 113–26Google Scholar; Hakola, Raimo, ‘The Burden of Ambiguity: Nicodemus and the Social Identity of Johannine Christians’, New Testament Studies 55:4 (October 2009), pp. 438–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; de Jonge, Marinus, ‘Nicodemus and Jesus: Some Observations on Misunderstanding and Understanding in the Fourth Gospel’, in Steeley, John E. (ed. and trans.), Jesus: Stranger from Heaven and Son of God – Jesus Christ and the Christians in Johannine Perspective (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977)Google Scholar, ch. 2; Moloney, Francis J., ‘Adventure with Nicodemus: An Exercise in Hermeneutics’, in ‘A Hard Saying’: The Gospel and Culture (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), pp. 259–79Google Scholar; Sevrin, Jean-Marie, ‘The Nicodemus Enigma: The Characterization and Function of an Ambiguous Actor of the Fourth Gospel’, in Bieringer, R., Pollefeyt, D. and Vandecasteele-Vanneuville, F. (eds), Anti-Judaism and the Fourth Gospel: Papers of the Leuven Colloquium, 2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 357–69Google Scholar.

34 On the religious and secular character of our world and a theological response to it, see Ford, David F., Shaping Theology: Engagements in a Religious and Secular World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).Google Scholar