Book review: “The Gospel of John: A Biography” by Kim Haines-Eitzen

The Gospel of John, the last written of the four canonic gospels, was composed by a poet who might easily be called a mystic.

Was the poet also an anti-Semite?

For centuries, the Fourth Gospel has inspired anti-Semitic attacks and attitudes because of its animus toward “the Jews,” according to Kim Haines-Eitzen, author a the new book, The Gospel of John: A Biography (Princeton University Press). At the end of a chapter titled, “Fear of the Jews,” she writes:

In my view, reckoning with the anti-Jewish perspective is absolutely fundamental to understanding the Fourth Gospel and its legacy. Although we may wish it away, the fact is that John 8:44, John’s story of Jesus’s “whip of cords” in the Temple, and, above all, the Gospel’s repeated use of “the Jews” for those who question Jesus, are hostile to him, and demand his crucifixion have reverberated throughout history and have been used to vilify Jews to genocidal ends.

Indeed, throughout the 21 chapters of John’s Gospel, she points out, there is an “insistent use of the phrase ‘the Jews’…nearly seventy times,” compared to only six times in the other three gospels combined.

The story of Jesus cleansing the Temple with a “whip of cords” was often employed, she writes, “to justify violence against those deemed heretics, against Jews, and against Muslims—the mobilization of holy war [in the Crusades] rendered all opponents, including even fellow Christians, ripe for whipping, for domination, for execution.”

 

“Luther’s bias”

Later, during the Reformation, Martin Luther was relentless in his anti-Semitism, much worse than the norm in his already anti-Jewish culture, as Thomas Kaufmann showed in his revelatory 2014 book Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism.

Haines-Eitzen, an expert in early Christianity and early Judaism at Cornell University, writes:

Luther’s bias against the Jews is not merely an intellectual position, for he suggests that violence is appropriate against Jews who do not convert to Christianity: “Burn their places of worship (Luther actually goes so far as to claim that the Hebrew Scriptures support this), destroy their homes, seize their prayer books and Talmudic writings, and, since they refuse to change their ways (i.e., convert) expel them.”

 

Ecstatic, mystical

The anti-Jewish words and attitudes of the Fourth Gospel are embedded in a book of scripture that helped shaped Christianity — and humankind — in myriad ways.

Consider its opening, long viewed “as a poetic prologue, possibly a poem or hymn,” echoing the start of Genesis:

 

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

 

He was in the beginning with God.

 

All things came into being through him,

and without him not one thing came into being.

What has come into being in him was life,

and the life was the light of all people.

 

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness did not overtake it.

 

That’s the translation from the New Revised Standard Version which I broke into poetic lines.  I’m not the first to do that. There is an ecstatic, mystical element to the opening which has fueled Christian mysticism for two thousand years.

 

Fourth Gospel

Although the Fourth Gospel has long been attributed to the apostle John, Haines-Eitzen makes clear that, according to experts, the tradition is almost certainly not accurate:

Even if the Gospel of John had its origins in the oral stories of Jesus’s [original] followers, the final writing and editing of the Gospel took place in the very late first century, long after Jesus’s followers would have died, and it is written in Greek, not the language that Jesus and his first followers spoke, which was Aramaic.

For this reason, she often refers to the book as the Fourth Gospel. And she makes clear that it’s very different from the three earlier gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke.

 

The maverick

Those three are called Synoptic Gospels because they “share similar structures and stories and have many passages in common.” While each has its own emphasis, the three basically give the same account of Jesus. In contrast, New Testament scholar Robert Kysar writes:

“The Fourth Gospel is a maverick among the Gospels. It runs free of the perspective presented in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is the nonconformist Gospel of the bunch. No wonder that many of the heretical movements in the history of the Christian church have used the Gospel of John as their authority in the New Testament.”

Haines-Eitzen offers this Kysar quotation as an important lens through which she has looked at the Fourth Gospel.

 

Unique stories and sayings

One maverick aspect of the Gospel of John is its recounting of many stories and sayings of Jesus that aren’t mentioned in the first three gospels. These stories and sayings include some of the most theologically rich and most beloved anecdotes about the man from Nazareth:

• Jesus as the “Lamb of God” — “The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29)
• The marriage feast at Cana where Jesus changes water into wine — Haines-Eitzen writes, “In his imaginative A Life of Jesus, the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo described the story as “coming like a springtime zephyr between other events.”
• The visit of Nicodemus, a Jewish leader, during which Jesus makes many significant and frequently repeated statements, such as “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit,” (John 3:5), more often translated as “being born again.”
• The visit of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well — Haines-Eitzen writes, “It is fitting that the story concludes with the woman saying that she knows the Messiah is coming and Jesus responds, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you.’ ” (John 4:26)
• The raising of Lazarus from the tomb, during which Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life; those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believe in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)
• Jesus telling Simon Peter, “Feed my lambs.” (John 21: 15) — Haines-Eitzen writes, “Countless faith-based organizations have used the Johannine phrase ‘feed my sheep’ as a kind of call to feed those who are hungry…There is a legacy of the Fourth Gospel that has flourished in social justice movements against slavery, poverty, hunger, and oppression.”
• The story of Doubting Thomas who wouldn’t believe reports of the resurrection of Jesus without putting his finger in the Savior’s wounds — “The story of Thomas as told in John serves to emphasize again Jesus’s humanness — his very real fleshly existence — here post-resurrection,” writes Haines-Eitzen.
• The six references near the end of the gospel to the “disciple whom he loved,” which Haines-Eitzen describes as “a mysterious figure, and one who has inspired rich and imaginative speculation.” — Recounting the crucifixion, John 19: 26-27 reports, “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”

 

“Wild speculations” and real tragedy

Christian tradition over many centuries has held that the “disciple whom he loved” was the apostle John.  But not everyone is so sure.  Haines-Eitzen reports:

The images we find in each of these passages about the “disciple whom Jesus loved” are both intimate and mysterious. One wonders whether the author of John thought readers would instantly know who the figure was, or whether there was a particular reason to obscure the character’s identity.

This has led, she writes, “to various speculations and wild speculations,” such as Doubting Thomas as the most loved disciple or Lazarus or, even, Mary Magdalene.

Because the Fourth Gospel is written the way it’s written — because of its poetic language, because of its maverick nature — it has lent itself to maverick uses. It has fueled debates over the nature of Jesus and the nature of faith and the nature of reality.

It has also, tragically, helped fuel anti-Semitism down the centuries. No one is exactly sure why the Fourth Gospel rails so much against “the Jews.” It may have had something to do with the growing divisions in that era between Judaism and the nascent Christianity.

No matter the reason, however, it has been misused repeatedly down the ages, as Haines-Eitzen writes, “to vilify Jews to genocidal ends.”

It’s less than a century ago that the worst case of such “genocidal ends” was carried out in the horror known as the Holocaust. It is sobering that such a rich spiritual document has been used to such heinous ends.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.23.26