The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus by Bird Michael F

Author:Bird, Michael F. [Bird, Michael F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2014-08-21T21:00:00+00:00

8. Synoptic-Like Sources. Rudolf Bultmann influenced much of continental European scholarship with his view that the Synoptics had little if any direct influence on John’s Gospel. He saw the Gospel of John as based on a number of sources including a miracle source, a discourse source heavily influenced by Gnostic themes, a passion and resurrection source, and an ecclesiastical redactor who created and rearranged materials. Bultmann envisaged John drawing from parallel sources that often described the same events in the Synoptics, such as the passion story. For the most part, the John-Synoptic similarities are due to sources that are similar and parallel yet independent of each other. The few verbatim agreements are due to a final redactor who did in fact know the other Gospels.216 So, for example, Bultmann regarded John 1:26 (“I baptize you with water”), which verbally agrees with Mark 1:8, as an addition by an editor because it is intrusive to the context. He also regarded the feeding miracle of John 6:1-26, which like Mark 6:30-51 combines the feeding miracle with Jesus walking on the water, as containing considerable agreements in details, yet also possessing many divergent characteristics indicative of independence.217

Though Bultmann had a profound grasp of the source-critical, literary, and theological questions of the Fourth Gospel, especially its unities and disunities, his own solution is dissatisfying. To begin with, other than a possible signs source, none of his proposed sources for the Fourth Gospel have survived the day, and even the signs source has not won universal consent among Johannine scholars.218 On top of that, projecting the similarities between John and the Synoptics either to parallel pre-Gospel sources or to post-Gospel redactional activity seems to posit similarity at every level other than that of the original Evangelist. While Bultmann rightly understood the literary and theological independence of the Fourth Gospel, he did not give a compelling account of the reasons for its similarity to the Synoptic tradition.

9. Independence. When it had been simply assumed that John was dependent on the other Gospels as a supplement or replacement, along came Percival Gardner-Smith with a Johannine thunderbolt, arguing for John’s independence from the Synoptics.219 According to Gardner-Smith, the widespread dissemination and interpretation of the oral tradition about Jesus can account for much of John and the Synoptics. The number of verbal agreements are very few and the structural similarities might be based on a widely known kerygma rather than on literary dependence. Not only that, but he pointed out that the problem is not just explaining the similarities but accounting for the differences too. After moving systematically albeit briefly through the Fourth Gospel, Gardner-Smith thinks it better to account for the sameness-yet-difference between John and the Synoptics on the basis of Johannine independence.

Gardner-Smith was somewhat of a John the Baptist to C. H. Dodd, who prosecuted the thesis of Johannine independence with even greater verve and gusto in his landmark study Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel.220 Dodd engaged in a near-exhaustive comparison and analysis of similarities between

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