FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Epiphany II 2012   

John 1: 43-51       

Harry T. Cook

Skipping over the renaming of Simon bar-Jona as Cephas (1:35-42) we are brought in this reading to Jesus' calling of Philip and his decisive colloquy with Nathanael. The narrative is important for the geographical information it provides: "The next day (after the naming of Cephas) Jesus decided to go to Galilee" (v. 43). Now all four synoptic gospels locate the beginnings of Jesus' public exposure in the Galilee. John will even go on in v. 45 to put on Philip's lips the declaration that Jesus is "of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." There is debate over whether John picked up this piece of legend from Matthew and Luke or received it from a separate tradition. Either way, it is of more than passing interest that John names "Galilee," "Nazareth" and "Joseph." That's as close as he comes to the narratives of his messiah's earthly origin (Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-2:20).

It is in Galilee that Jesus "finds" Philip. The verb is εύρίσκει, meaning here "found without previous search" or in Homeric usage "happened upon." John was not one to use words carelessly. In fact there was subtlety in his diction. If I am right about the sense of the verb here, does it suggest that Jesus' call of Philip was like that of a squad leader turning to his troops and saying, "You, you and you: come with me"??? When John comes to the part about Jesus dealing with Nathanael, he suggests that Jesus is clairvoyant, viz. able to see upon a first meeting of what he was capable.

And speaking of finding, Philip is made to say that he has done some finding himself, i.e. that Jesus turns out to be the self-same one "of whom Moses and the prophets wrote": Torah and Haftarah, the two poles of the Jewish literary tradition and important to the authentication of Jesus as "the one." How exactly Philip made that finding is not explained, but by 1:43-51, 1:1-18 has been neither forgotten nor abandoned.

Whoever Nathanael was (some say he is the Bartholomew of the synoptics), he is remembered for his slur upon what is said to have been the early childhood home of Jesus: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" (A more pertinent question might have been, "Where" or "What is Nazareth?" Nazareth is mentioned nowhere in the Hebrew scriptures, including the Talmud , neither by Josephus. The first mention of it known to us today came from the late second or the early third century.) In any event, the evangelist has Philip respond to that rather snooty rhetorical question with a simple, "Come and see."

What follows in the passage is at best clumsy staging and not very credible dialogue. John depicts Jesus observing Nathanael coming toward him and has Jesus blurt out: "Here is an Israelite indeed in whom no guile is to be found." One would think Nathanael would have demurred, saying something like, "Hardly, sir." But instead John makes him say, "How'd you know me?" Sounds like there was plenty of guile in him. Maybe John imagined Jesus having his tongue deep in a cheek. Withal, Nathanael is made to say that now he believes Jesus is the one for whom they had all been waiting. Now it is Jesus' turn to demur. He seems to poke fun at Nathanael, saying, "Just because I said I saw you the other day standing under a fig tree, you believe all this?" On the basis of that Nathanael is promised yet greater things to believe.

Taken together, 1: 35-42 and 43-51 seem to be John's rather convoluted and overwritten account of how Jesus began to assemble an entourage, viz. one odd-ball at a time. Having done that, John is ready to move on to the actual public events of Jesus' life as he (John) elected to depict them.

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Of course, you can make up the kind of thing that follows here by reading into a text what may not be there. On the other hand, one can take what may be hints at humor, even sardonic humor, in the text and experiment with it. This I dare to do with the text at hand.

I will suggest that Nathanael (נְתַנְאֵל from the Hebrew "God has given") was, far from being guileless, an elitist who thought more highly of himself than he ought to have thought and more than was probably warranted. John gave him the perfect opportunity at least to strike a pose of modesty when Jesus was depicted as saying, in effect, "You are the most genuine Israelite ever!" Nathanael must have known that wasn't true of himself -- that is, if he possessed even the slightest soup�on of self-awareness.

Maybe, though, in John's imagination, Nathanael was full of himself and thought he had somehow gulled Jesus. Not likely, though, as John has only 35 verses earlier linked Jesus with the λόγος, the creative wisdom of the universe, thus we are to think that in that Johannine imagination Jesus was on to Nathanael well before the fig tree incident.

The upshot? Nathanael was included in the group as one of the "yous" in the "you, you and you" summons. And that may be a clue to understanding the makeup of the original Jesus Judaism and to the strange universality of the movements that succeeded it. The Book of Common Prayer 1928 (p. 18) picked up on that hint quite lyrically as it beseeched the blessings of the Anglican God for "all sorts and conditions of men; that thou wouldst be pleased to make thy ways known unto them."

As much as cults of the so-called One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church put on airs like the clueless Nathanael, as much as its bishops and priests and other assorted ecclesiastical satraps array themselves with the sword and scepter of canon law and ritual privilege, not one of them, nor yet anyone among their flocks could be said to be a model of human rectitude. Taking one with another, they're all just folks who happened to have stood under the right fig tree at the right time on the right day and got momentarily wowed by that wandering sage from Nazareth.

Left-brained rational crank that I am, I cannot shake him. I haven't spoken to the one who is said to have been his heavenly father in quite some time because I doubt his existence. It's the one said to be his son who confounds me every time I consider those few, pithy and terribly challenging sayings full of ethical wisdom attributed to him, viz. "turn the other cheek." Was he kidding, or what? Either way, he drives me crazy, and I wouldn't chance going within 50 yards of a fig tree if I could help it.

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The Gospel according to John (which is exactly how it is entitled in the Greek New Testament) is an outlier, not only among its three companions in the New Testament, but also the other 16 or 17 documents known as "gospels."[1] According to John (hereinafter known as "John") differs in many respects from Thomas[2], Mark, Matthew and Luke. Like Thomas and Mark, it has no birth narrative. The sayings John credits to Jesus are very much different from those credited to Him by Thomas, Mark, Matthew and Luke. Much is made in John of loaded Greek terms like "life," "world"(cosmos),"light," "darkness," truth"[3] and "Word."[4] 

John is considered by most of the New Testament scholarship community to be an attempt to engage the Greek-speaking and Hellenistic world in the myths and history of the desert religion of the Jewish tradition. Hence, its resemblance here and there to a philosophical discourse.

I have said that John has no Jesus birth narrative, but in one of the more sublime passages of the Bible the writer of John lays out his understanding of Jesus' true identity, and that without ever mentioning his name.[5] The Jesus of whom John will go on to tell his story is in many ways a different Jesus than we encounter, say, in Mark or Thomas. Noted New Testament scholar Elaine Pagels has suggested that John was written in part to "correct" the image of Jesus as it emanates from the Thomas sayings.[6] Read John 20: 24-29 to see how John puts Thomas in his place.

John depicts Jesus often using the first person "I" -- as in "I am the door," "I am the good shepherd," "I am the way, the truth and the life." No such language appears in the other gospels, suggesting that the writer and/or editors of John stylized their portrayal of Jesus as a Greek orator.

John's passion and resurrection narratives are thickly detailed, giving them a verisimilitude the gospel does not otherwise deserve.

As to the idea of creation as accounted for in John: it occurs in the first three verses of the first chapter, viz. Before time was the divine word, its wisdom and its power. This word, wisdom and power were what God was. It was God from the beginning. Everything came into being through its will. Nothing that exists came to be without it [7] It shortly becomes clear that John is beginning to connect these qualities and characteristics with Jesus. The clarity comes in ch. 1 verses 9-11: Light that illumines for everyone was coming into the world. Although it was in the world deliberately and the world came into being because of it, the world did not recognize it. It came to its very own place, but the people to whom it came in particular were not receptive to its coming. Was there ever such a sublime understatement?

The more or less universal understanding among contemporary New Testament scholars is that John was composed around the turn of the century (from the first to the second CE). The gospel is often, but for little good reason, associated with the Pauline communities in Ephesus. What's more, there is no evidence that any disciple of Jesus named John had anything to do with the gospel's composition.