Jesus the Purifier by Craig L. Blomberg

Author:Craig L. Blomberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Testament;Jesus Christ—Historicity;Bible—Gospel of John—Criticism|Interpretation|Etc;REL006710;REL006100
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Jesus as Mirrored in James Charlesworth

Longtime Princeton professor, editor of the major English translation of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, and a veteran biblical archaeologist, James Charlesworth (1940–) has also published numerous studies on the Gospel of John. He has updated several of these and combined them with new essays to form his recent book Jesus as Mirrored in John: The Genius in the New Testament.112 Already in 2010, he was heralding a “paradigm shift,” as more and more scholars were using John for Jesus research despite the demurral of other highly influential authors of historical Jesus books.113 In this new volume, he ranges from discussions of the huge amounts of topographical, geographical, and circumstantial detail in John that has been corroborated, especially surrounding the pools of Bethesda and Siloam; the logic of John 5:16–18 depending on a literal reading of Genesis 2:2 that could suggest that God continued to work on the Sabbath; the amount of detail, once assumed to be Hellenistic, that has parallels of varying degrees in the Essene Jewish literature from Qumran; the Old Testament backgrounds and symbolism of the serpent lifted up in the wilderness (John 3:14); the location of Bethany beyond the Jordan; and the possibility of a first edition of John that was written before AD 70. Much less plausible is his defense of Thomas as the author of the Gospel,114 and somewhat tangential is his theory that the Fourth Gospel depends on the Odes of Solomon.115

Appearing only months before Jesus as Mirrored in John was Charlesworth’s edited volume of the proceedings of the third Princeton-Prague symposium.116 All three volumes were devoted to Jesus research, including a couple of essays involving the Fourth Gospel in volume 1.117 The third volume, however, was devoted entirely to the value of John for historical Jesus study. Here Charlesworth himself gives a good summary of six main reasons John has been so little utilized in this fashion: (1) it was believed to be the last of the four Gospels; (2) it was for so long viewed as dependent on the Synoptics; (3) it is too theologically developed; (4) it is not interested in history because it focuses on spirituality; (5) it is too cumbersome to combine with the Synoptics and could lead to anachronism; (6) historical Jesus work thus far has been largely limited to the Synoptics.118 To counter these rationales, Charlesworth argues, in essence, that (1) there may have been multiple editions of John, with the earliest at least as early if not earlier than the Synoptics; (2) it is now widely held that John is independent of the Synoptics even if with considerable knowledge of their contents; (3) we are more appreciative than ever of how highly developed the Synoptics are too, but that does not stop us from mining them for historical material; (4) the very fact John wrote a Gospel and not some other literary form suggests at least some interest in history, and it is a false dichotomy to pit history against spirituality;

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