John! With Hugo Méndez  ## Metadata - Author: [[Data Over Dogma]] - Full Title: John! With Hugo Méndez - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/5bb985fd-7bbf-41df-b29f-479dd44a2256 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Dragon Con Cold Story** - Dan McClellan caught a head cold after attending Dragon Con while bringing home comics and shirts. - The hosts joke about 'allergic to dragons' to lighten the discussion. Transcript: Dan McClellan I brought home from Dragon Con in Atlanta, I brought home a number of comic books, a number of t-shirts, and a head cold, which I'm not happy about. Dan Beecher Apparently you're allergic to dragons. Anyway, we should introduce our guest. We have a guest this week on the show. Dan McClellan Please say hello, everybody, to Hugo Mendez, who is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in case you were wondering. Thanks so much for being here, Hugo. We appreciate your time. Hugo Méndez Thank you all so much for having me on. ([Time 0:01:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb2ea1fc-1762-4448-909f-321aa95f86b9)) - **Origins Of 'Johannine Community' Questioned** - Similar language across the Gospel and epistles led scholars to posit a shared origin called the Johannine community. - Hugo Méndez argues similarities better reflect authors copying and imitating one another, not a single community. Transcript: Hugo Méndez In the new Testament, we have four books that historically were attributed to a figure named John, really five, if you add revelation, but, but the four that we're really interested In as scholars, okay, the Gospel of John and the letters that are called 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John. John is one of the big gospels. 1, 2, and 3 John, they're tucked away in the back of your New Testament right before you hit the book of Revelation, take a left Jude and you're there. So these books are really interesting because they share a number of similarities between them. I mean, the moment you open up the Gospel of John and the moment you open up 1 John, it just smacks you in the face that these texts have some sort of relationship. You'll hear a lot of key words, beginning, word, life. It talks about this word, this logos, which is somehow communicated truth. And the authors of each of these texts present themselves as people who have seen this word in this world somehow become flesh in the words of John. And so the consistencies between these texts, the similar language, the similar themes, the similar ideas, have been for 2,000 years nearly a real source of interest for Christians. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, the explanation that was given for the profound similarities between these texts was that they must have shared a single author, that they must Have been written by a single hand. And that author, not surprisingly from the titles that later scribes put on these texts, was thought to be John, the son of Zebedee, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, one of the closest Disciples of Jesus. What happened in the 20th century is that scholars thought, examining these texts more closely, in fact, there are subtle differences in the language. There are subtle differences in the themes and ideas. And so instead of just imagining one author, they imagined multiple authors. But you have to explain why are these texts so similar? Why the same language? Why the same ideas? And what scholars developed was the idea of a Johannine community. ([Time 0:04:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df80db47-1418-414a-85b5-68da624d1215)) - **Pseudepigraphy Explains Similarities** - Méndez rejects the Johannine community and favors pseudepigraphy to explain textual similarity. - He reads 1–3 John as later authors imitating the Gospel of John to extend its authority and address new issues. Transcript: Hugo Méndez You can find it online. It's open access. So anybody who's listening to this can easily pull up that academic article. And the abstract for that probably should have just been one word, no. I don't think that the Johannine community existed. And the reason is that when I'm looking at the Gospel and Letters of John, it strikes me that the similarities between them are not simply a matter of coincidence, of the idea that maybe These authors had a common extraction. The best way to understand these similarities is that one author is very clearly, each author really, is copying from other authors. So in antiquity, you know, there are, and we can find instances of this in the New Testament in the Bible, right, where individuals have access to earlier texts. And what they decide to do is to imitate the style of those earlier texts, often in an attempt to try to look as if they are writing texts written by the same author as some other work. So this is the phenomenon we call pseudepigraphy in ancient Christianity and beyond, right? Classics, other fields. So pseudepigraphy, you know, kind of, you know, my colleague Bart Ehrman prefers the vocabulary of forgery, but something where an author is using another person's name for some reason. Forgery tends to be a little negatively loaded, so we don't tend to use that as a field. But that's basically what I see happening in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. I think the authors of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John knew the gospel. I think they loved the gospel. I think they also saw how attractive and popular the gospel was. And I think they also in some ways saw what the gospel of John didn't do when it was first published. And so they wrote letters that present themselves as if they're works, supplemental works by that original author, but addressing new sorts of challenges, exploring new sorts of Directions. And we would have plenty of analogs for this in ancient Christianity. Paul wrote letters, and we know that other people wrote letters in the name of Paul, some letters that probably made it into the Bible and some letters that definitely did not. And I think that's likely what's happening with these texts. They're not necessarily from a single community. ([Time 0:10:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b49439f4-9b1b-4461-b5e5-861372b5d58b)) - **Look For Literary Networks, Not Just Churches** - Treat New Testament writers as part of literary networks with elevated literacy and access to texts. - When studying origins, look for signs of reading, sharing, and literary imitation rather than assuming local church authorship. Transcript: Hugo Méndez Towards the work of Robin Faith Walsh and before her, right, her doctoral advisor, Stanley Stowers, in suggesting that when we think about where a lot of early Christian literature Comes from, the go-to historically in scholarship has been to think of ancient Christian churches as being a very formative place. And I don't want to detract from the idea that oral and written traditions about Jesus did flow through these communities, but the writers that we see working in the New Testament are Individuals who had higher than the Christian average, higher levels of literacy. They're people who had been trained to be literate. They had read, really kind of gulped down large amounts of ancient literature, just as part of even their training in writing. And they formed networks of people who interacted, engaged with one another, if not personally, sharing writings, sharing drafts, improving one another's work. Then at the very least, they were definitely at least reading the work of others, reading the work of famous writers from the past, reading the works of contemporary writers. ([Time 0:13:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/251c564c-c8f6-4437-a450-3aac9e360483)) - **The Beloved Disciple Is Not Plainly John** - The 'disciple whom Jesus loved' in John fits some traditions but diverges from the fisherman John of the Synoptics. - Méndez uses internal inconsistencies and literacy expectations to argue against direct apostolic authorship. Transcript: Hugo Méndez Yeah. So right from the start, when you read the Gospel of John, you'll see in chapter 1, verse 14, that the author seems to present himself as someone who has seen Jesus in his lifetime. He says that the word became flesh and dwelled among us. And he's talking about Jesus becoming a human being. And he says, and we have seen his glory. He positions himself as someone who's seen this figure. If you keep reading the book, you start to see this character show up, this disciple whom Jesus loved, who seems to be Jesus' closest disciple. On the night of the Last Supper, this disciple is leaning on Jesus himself. He's the very first person to essentially be at the empty tomb. He stands under Jesus' cross when everyone else abandons Jesus. He's everywhere in the book by the end of the book. And then at the end, very end of the book in chapter 21, verse 24, you hear the text say that this disciple, this disciple whom Jesus loved is the one who has written this book, the one who Has written these things. So the question is, who is this disciple? Now, there are great reasons for thinking, historically, that maybe it could have been someone like John, the son of Zebedee, one of the apostles of Jesus. If you turn to Mark, Matthew, and Luke, he's one of the three closest disciples to Jesus. Well, this disciple whom Jesus loved is very close to Jesus. He would make sense as, you know, potentially being John. They could be related that way. But that's kind of almost as far as it goes. There are lots of other attributes of this disciple that don't fit quite neatly with John the son of Zebedee as presented in the Bible. So one of them, as you mentioned, is the fact that, well, for one thing, John is presented to us in Acts chapter 4 as someone who was illiterate, someone who didn't know how to write, someone Who was never trained to write a gospel. So the idea that John would be the author of an entire complicated work, let alone a work that's as theologically sophisticated, as philosophically sophisticated as John, kind of Seems a little different. Other details about this disciple don't seem to match up either. In chapter 18, it seems that this disciple, who in that chapter is called the other disciple, is someone who's supposed to be a friend of the high priest, who has special access to the High priest's home. The John we know from Matthew, Mark, and Luke is a simple fisherman living in Galilee, working on the Sea of Galilee. He lives nowhere near Jerusalem, let alone is he involved with the highest echelons of Jerusalem society. So for various reasons, you know, by the 20th century, scholars looked at the traditional attribution of the gospel to John the son of Zebedee and thought that this isn't quite the fit We want for authorship. ([Time 0:15:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d8d1ae0c-2931-49fd-a90e-a15b3b0c844a)) - **John Shows Coherent Single Authorship** - Despite apparent seams, John shows strong linguistic and thematic unity consistent with one main author. - Méndez attributes minor skips to gradual composition and revision rather than multiple authorship. Transcript: Hugo Méndez Yeah. So for all the reasons you mentioned, right, there has been this notion for a very long time, for decades in scholarship, that John might have been a work that might have been assembled By different authors sequentially expanding a gospel, editing, re-editing a gospel, and that in the process of all that, they introduced all of these weird skips, right? Like you mentioned, like in chapter five, Jesus is in Jerusalem. And then in chapter six, suddenly he goes to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is nowhere near Jerusalem. It's the equivalent of saying Jesus is in North Carolina, and then he went to the other side of Lake Michigan, which really makes no sense geographically, right? And so scholars thought this is an explanation that could work. I would say that the trend now over the last several years of Jehannine scholarship has been to say that instead, and this has been something even the last few decades, there's just so Much unity beyond those little skips, though. You know, if you look at John across, you know, so many chapters of the book, you're going to see a very similar language and style. You're going to see very simple patterns of Greek and very predictably, you know, John patterns. You're going to see an impressive unity in the terminology that's used, an impressive unity of thought. You know, another example you gave where Jesus in chapter 14 says, you know, I can't talk much longer, and then he talks for another three chapters, you know, is kind of odd. But if you look at what he's talking about on both sides of that verse, it's actually a really cohesive, coherent, rich, continuous, basically, speech. So the way that most scholars I think today think about it and the way that I argue in the book, I think it happened, is that we're probably instead looking at really one author. One author that had a very clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish in the gospel. One author who had a very distinctive style that is impressed all across the gospel. But an author who developed his gospel gradually. One thing we don't quite understand sometimes is, you know, modern readers of these texts is that ancient authors developed these Gospels, these very large books, in stages and steps, And they worked and they reworked manuscripts. Published on this is James Barker's writing and rewriting the Gospels. And in chapter one, James notes that oftentimes what we should imagine Gospels as in terms of how they were written, is that authors were sketching out potentially particular stories On one tablet, maybe another tablet, maybe reworking them before they ever actually hit their final scroll. And so we can imagine an author who, over the course of developing a manuscript, worked, reworked, put his drafts together, reworked even those drafts, and gradually compiled something That, yeah, ended up having a skip or seam or two. I mean, my book has a skip or seam or two, if you look very closely in the occasional typo that missed the press and all the kinds of things that modern books have, ancient authors were just As prone to those sorts of things in antiquity. Dan Beecher I mean, they didn't even have the advantages of clippy, let alone all the things that we had. So, so yeah, it makes sense that editing might've been a little more cumbersome of a process back then. Yeah. Hugo Méndez And so that can lead to these kinds of issues. ([Time 0:23:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/81ca46aa-4f74-47bb-9875-60d876ac885d)) - **Identifying Later Additions In John** - Two notable Johannine additions are the Pericope Adulterae and chapter 21, both likely later accretions. - Chapter 20 provides a natural ending; chapter 21 and the adulteress story appear absent or late in early manuscripts. Transcript: Hugo Méndez So in the book, I identify two passages as additions to John. So even though I think one individual is responsible for most of this gospel, which of course is what tradition says, and again, what a lot of scholars today would say, there are two passages That are problematic. The first begins in chapter 7, verse 53, and goes on into chapter 8. It's the story of the adulteress, the pericope adultery. This is a story where Jesus is presented with a woman who apparently has been caught in the act of adultery. She's dragged before Jesus, and Jesus is presented with this test of whether or not we should stone this woman. It's a kind of test that reminds you a lot of the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, where Jesus is put on the spot and then he comes up with a brilliant one-liner that gets him out of the Situation. And that's exactly how it works in John. The problem with this passage is that we don't find it in any manuscript before the fifth century. And so it's just, you know, we have lots of manuscripts of John. We can date many of these earlier than the fifth century. And this story doesn't appear in there. It seems to be a later edition that someone added to the text. It doesn't help that one early reference to probably this story places it in a different gospel altogether, the gospel of the Hebrews, supposedly. But there's another passage, right? Chapter 21. It's the final passage of the book, the final chapter of the book, where if you've read the gospel of John and you've gotten to the end of chapter 20, the disciple who's narrating this Book or the author of the book anyways, the narrator of the book, goes ahead and tells you that there are actually lots of other things that Jesus did that I didn't have time to talk about In the the book. But I wrote these things so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. He kind of puts this beautiful bow on everything he's done in 20 chapters. It's an appropriate ending for a book. We know this because we see other ancient books that have this kind of ending in antiquity. But another reason why we know it's a good ending for a book, it is literally the ending of the book a chapter later. What happens is after chapter 20, after the author has told you there are lots of other things that Jesus did, he starts confusingly narrating something else that Jesus did right when You don't expect it. And then, you know, the chapter wraps up with yet another one of these, oh, you know, there's so much more that we could talk about, but not all the books in the world could contain all these Things. It's a very unusual thing. Scholars have also noted that there are some other features of this passage that are unusual. But that's another chapter where even though some scholars have argued that it could be part of the original book, I'm still on the side of those people who think that it's probably by A later hand, a later scribe who added to the Gospel of John. ([Time 0:28:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44d76f86-5601-4c52-9865-842c2a07f187)) - **'We' Language May Be Literary, Not Editorial** - The shift between 'he', 'we', and 'I' in John 21:24 reflects authorial literary play, not necessarily multiple editors. - Méndez compares this to ancient historians who mix narrative perspectives to rhetorical effect. Transcript: Hugo Méndez If you look closely, that verse, for one thing, is very clearly modeled on a few other verses in the Gospel of John. And one of them is 114, where the author of this gospel, who seems to be closely identified with his disciple, has also used we language. He says, you know, we have seen his glory. And what I do is I kind of break down this verse and show that actually it answers to a few different verses in the Gospel of John linguistically. I think what the author has done is he's smushed together language from different parts of a gospel, some language coming from parts where the author is used to referring to himself In the third person, some where he's used the first person plural, we. And in this case, it's kind of jarring that he skips from a third person he reference to a first person plural we reference. And then the very next line, verse 25, he skips to a first person singular I way of talking about himself. But we actually see this a lot in antiquity. We see this in Polybius. We see this in Josephus. We see writers who kind of moved between he, we, I language, they language when speaking just about themselves as narrators, sometimes in really tight spaces. Think the traditional interpretation that suggested there's just one author for this entire book, we language be damned, I think is actually close to the truth. ([Time 0:32:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1871a71b-bad7-4f48-8df0-67febf3d360d)) - **Logos Prologue Is Integral, Not Detached** - The Logos prologue feels poetic but functions as a hermeneutical key for John's theology. - Méndez favors keeping the prologue integral because it frames themes developed across the Gospel. Transcript: Hugo Méndez So in chapter one, if you read the gospel of John, chapter one has a little bit of a different style than other chapters of the book. It honestly feels more poetic than the rest of the book. And you know those words very famously that begin the book, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. It's very beautiful, kind of repetitive, and again, kind of poetic. And scholars have looked at that chapter and thought, well, you know, it's different in style a little bit. It feels a little more elevated in style than the rest of the book. About Jesus as the word, as the logos. And this is a concept from Greek philosophy that becomes important in Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, right? Like the writings of Philo. And what they note, though, is that this word, logos word, doesn't really seem to be distributed across the entire gospel. It's pretty much just there that Jesus is described as the logos or word. And so some scholars have thought, okay, so this is yet another sort of seam in the gospel where maybe this part in the Kit Kat bar of the gospel of John can break off neatly. And you can treat this as maybe something that was added later because it's poetic in style. People have thought, okay, so maybe this is like some early Christian hymn or something like that that was added to the text. In the book, what I argue is, and not even actually really an argument in the book, this is really something that I think a lot of other scholars are really talking about right now is, you Know, those arguments are interesting, but the reality is when you read the Gospel of John, A, that prologue, that introduction is really critical for how the Gospel develops all sorts Of themes and ideas. It's often considered even something like a hermeneutical key to the rest of the Gospel. Scholars like Adele Reinhart's bring this out to the point where if the hymn wasn't originally there, it doesn't quite feel like the gospel of John would be as complete as it is in its Current form. Another thing that numerous scholars have noted, and I really try to bring this out in the book, is that it's true that Jesus is only called the word or logos directly right at the beginning Of the text. He's also, by the way, only called God really right there at the beginning of the text. But you would be hard pressed to read all kinds of verses in John without the knowledge that Jesus is divine and that Jesus is on some level the word of God, the logos of God. And at least the words that Jesus speak, the logoi that Jesus speaks in Greek, are actually a really critical theme in the rest of the gospel. So I'm one of those people who has been persuaded that we want to keep chapter one with the rest of the book. ([Time 0:35:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/31e5db04-9310-415a-8fd9-c286019a1f9b)) - **John's Logos Reflects Subordinate Divinity** - John portrays the Logos as a divine but subordinate entity rather than the ultimate Godhead. - Méndez links this to Hellenistic-Jewish logos theology (e.g., Philo), showing proto-Trinitarian yet non-Nicene thought. Transcript: Hugo Méndez There is no question that John even understands Jesus fundamentally as divine. The question that's kind of coming up is in John 1, verse 1, you have the words, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And in that instance, what you have at the very end of that verse is, and the word was God without a definite article in Greek. That's what we mean by anarthros. It doesn't have a definite article. Now, what does that mean? So if you go to the writings of Philo, who is a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of the early first century, Philo seems to have a concept of the logos, of a word of God who is with God, the Same kind of thing we're finding in John. Who else has it before him? We don't know. We definitely know at least Philo has it. Aristobulus clearly had a logos idea, but we don't know much of the particulars of that, etc. But for Philo, what he does in his writings in one place is make a distinction between the transcendent, ultimate God of Judaism, which he uses a definite article for, if you will, the God, and then the Logos, the Word of God, which he conceptualizes as something like the mind, the rationality, the thought of God as an entity that, like anyone's mind or rationality Or thought, is with the person who's thinking, but is also on some level abstractly distinct from that person. And this entity, the word, he doesn't use a definite article for. He distinguishes the two based on his exegesis of a particular verse in the Old Testament, a Hebrew Bible that he thinks works really well for this. The same streams of Hellenistic Jewish philosophy that understand that there is the God of Judaism, the ultimate God of the universe, but that this God interacts with his created universe Through all sorts of intermediary beings. And the highest of these beings is his own abstractified mind, reason, or thought, his word, his logos. And so it's not surprising to me that at the beginning of the Gospel of John, we have a reference to this word, we have a reference to how this word is with God, and at this crucial moment, There's a reference to how this word was God, but the definite article isn't there. This word is not, I think, in the Gospel of John's conception, the ultimate God of the universe, but this is a divine being, an entity, a being who has, I think, in John's conception, a Subordinate participatory divinity. It's divine because of its oneness with God, in its oneness with God. And Christian theology has tried to work out that relationship for centuries, perhaps not arriving at the same sort of synthesis. ([Time 0:40:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6c6dd8de-a59a-47d6-b0b5-17aa201021a1)) - **Stories Function As Symbolic Theological Acts** - John intentionally turns nearly every episode into symbolic action that enacts theological themes. - Méndez argues miracles and gestures function like parables to reveal concepts like belief, life, and abiding. Transcript: Hugo Méndez So let me just start by saying, John is my absolute favorite gospel, and that should not surprise anybody. He has to pick up a book with my name on it. No, but it's such a brilliant, incredibly fun text to play with. So the gospel of John knows the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, I think. I think it's read some of these earlier accounts of the life of Jesus, which is in part why it looks kind of so similar to them. It starts with a baptism, ends with an empty tomb. You know, there's something that feels like earlier Gospels about that. John also knows some of the literary techniques that earlier Gospels have used. If you read good books on Mark, you'll learn that Mark has occasional places where he plays with symbolism, where just like the parables of Jesus, the stories Jesus tells symbolize Ideas. Mark also weaves in a story or two where Jesus does something that seems to symbolize something in his teachings. He flips over the tables of the temple right about the time he's also telling you how the whole temple is going to be destroyed. And it seems one thing symbolizes the other, you know, things like that. In the Gospel of John, whoever wrote the Gospel of John, that author took this literary device and decided to run with it across the gospel and did it in, I think, such a rich and creative Way where, as I argue in the book, nearly every story in the gospel of John, the miraculous ones and the non-miraculous ones, the very memorable ones, and some of those weird transitional Sort of things that you just think is just continuous story have been turned into symbols. John is not simply interested in telling you that this happened or that happened in Jesus's life. He's not here to necessarily say Jesus did this miracle, then Jesus did that miracle, then Jesus did this interesting thing. John wants you to dwell on each of these stories, to reflect on them, and to see that inside these stories is something that represents a big idea in Jesus's teaching. Jesus talks across the gospel of John, and he uses these really important key words, right? Believe, our, you know, life is a key word in the gospel, dwell or abide is a key word. When you turn to the stories in the gospel, these stories are replete with these words. You'll see that these stories of Jesus' miracles weave in these key words in ways that turn the miracles themselves into, if you will, sort of parables of sorts. They're ways in which Jesus, by his gestures, by his actions, actually represents ideas in his teachings. And this comes out all the time in the text because Jesus will do something in the gospel. And it says that his disciples didn't understand what he was doing. For instance, he washes their feet in chapter 13, and it says that the disciples don't get it. Well, the reason, if you can look closely at the language of the text, is that Jesus is doing things in ways that are evoking the key words of his teaching. ([Time 0:54:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bce2d4a0-4273-4716-912f-01523dfee9ab))