The Gospel of John and Christian Origins by John Ashton

Author:John Ashton [John Ashton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4514-7982-9
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Interestingly, what Martyn singles out as “the dicta most basic to the apocalyptic thinker” are ignored altogether in John J. Collins’s widely accepted definition of the apocalyptic genre. [See above, p. 107]. But Martyn is not wrong. He recognizes that one distinctive feature of apocalyptic writing is the subsequent projection down to earth of the heavenly events watched and recounted by dreamers and seers. A good example is what Daniel says about the feet of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s first dream. Having interpreted the upper parts of the statue to represent three successive kingdoms, he then turns to the kingdom that interests him most: the fourth. “As you saw the feet and toes,” he tells the king, “partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom; but some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the miry clay . . .” (2:41). And so on: the particular characteristics of the fourth kingdom closely correspond to the detailed composition of the statue’s feet. After his vision of the statue, the king saw “a stone cut by no human hand,” which “smote the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces” (2:34). The interpretation that follows introduces a new, indestructible kingdom, founded by God himself, which “shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end . . . just as you saw that a stone was cut from heaven by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold” (2:44-45). So Martyn’s suggestion that events on the heavenly stage not only correspond to events on the earthly stage but also, as it were, lead them into existence is a perfectly reasonable one. It would be borne out by a close examination of the other dreams and visions recorded in Daniel’s text.

Yet we should not fail to notice that when we apply this analogy to the Gospel the focus shifts quite radically. Martyn is clearly thinking of the relation between the dramatic conflict between Jesus and the Jews portrayed on the story level of the Gospel, and the conflict the evangelist himself had lived through between the Jesus group and the hardliners in the synagogue. What is basically the same conflict, Martyn argues, is resumed at a different time and in a different place. But of course both of these episodes take place on earth, and Martyn nowhere suggests that one of the two stages on which the Johannine drama is enacted is really situated in heaven. The correspondence evident in the apocalyptic literature between the dramatic events in heaven and their counterparts on earth is spatial: the temporal element is of secondary importance. In the Gospel, on the other hand, the correspondence is essentially temporal. (The confusion is assisted by the ambiguity of the word stage, which can be used either of time or of place.) Stereoptic vision

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