John vs the Synoptics, for Paul Williams

[Nota Bene: the webmaster of the Answering Abraham blog has been kind enough to include this guest post, by Denis Giron.]

Last Monday, Paul Williams posted an entry on his blog, which simply contained the following portion from James Dunn's "The Living Word":

The most difficult case of all for Christians who hold the Bible in high regard: the Fourth Gospel [John]. Here the matter is peculiarly sensitive, since so much seems to depend on it. For if John’s Gospel is straightforward history, then we have in it the most amazing and powerful self-testimony of Jesus. If John’s Gospel is unvarnished history then then all that Christians need ever claim for Jesus is clearly attested there, and by Jesus himself. If John is correct, then the old apologetic-evangelistic question is unavoidable: the one who makes such claims for himself is either mad, bad or God.
 
But the very starkness and unequivocalness of these claims is what begins to raise the nagging question in the mind. If Jesus made such claims, why do the other Gospels make no use of them? What Evangelist having among the traditions which had been passed to him such wonderful sayings as the ‘I ams’ – ‘I am the resurrection and the life’; I am the way, the truth and the life’; ‘Before Abraham was, I am’; and so on – what Evangelist having to hand such sayings could ignore them completely? The question once raised, cannot be squashed into silence, since the integrity of that whole apologetic-evangelistic approach is at stake.
 

I have attempted to discuss this subject with Mr. Williams before, but he has unfortunately ignored what was presented to him, only to return to his original position, as if he has yet to come across any rebuttals. Therefore, here I would like to present the arguments which have been presented to Mr. Williams, so that others might have one possible response whenever he takes an approach like that captured in the excerpt, above.

To begin, the question posed by Dunn (as well as others, like E.P. Sanders) should be examined. How do we explain the Gospel of John having material which the Synoptics lack, yet which some would speculate the Synoptic authors would have used were it available to them? In a correspondence which I had with Mr. Williams on FaceBook, in the summer of 2012, I proposed that a good place to start might be John 21:25.

That verse is important, and relevant, because it demonstrates that the Christian position should be that what appears in the four Gospels captures only a small fraction of all that Jesus said and did. Even without the witness of John 21:25, it should be obvious that such is the case. Note that there are just under fifty thousand words in the Greek text of the Synoptics. If one were to guess that half of that is quoting Jesus, then the conclusion would be that one could read aloud all statements attributed to Jesus by the Synoptics within just a few hours. Ergo, the statements attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics represent only a very small fragment of what would have been said during a multiple years long ministry. This would mean there is considerable material which is not included in the Synoptics, which would in turn mean it would be misguided to consider the statements in John to probably be fictional simply because they differ from the Synoptic fragment.

Once that is understood, the next point to be made is that the initially intended uses for each Gospel (or for the Synoptics vis a vis John) could have differed from one another, thus resulting in one corpus drawing out portions which do not appear in another. The Greek Orthodox priest John Romanides offered an explanation precisely along these lines:

[T]he Gospel of John has the mysteries as its basis and as its purpose the correlation of the historic life of Christ with the present mysterial life in Christ and experience of the community. When we take into account that the Christians carefully and systematically avoided all discussions of the deeper meaning of the mysteries, not only with the hostile outside world but even with the catechumens, then we are able to understand the use of the Gospels in the first Church, and many of the problems raised by biblical criticism are solved. Since the baptized Christians did not discuss the mysteries even with the catechumens, it is sufficiently clear that the fourth Gospel was used in the ancient Church for completing and finishing the catechism of the recently illumined, that is newly baptized. It was particularly suited to this purpose and distinguished from the other Gospels mainly because of its clear dogmatic, mysterial, and apologetical tone. We do not find in John the systematic preparation of catechumens for that is found in Matthew and Mark. This is why John does not begin with the baptism of Christ but with "In the beginning was the Logos...and the Logos was made flesh."^[1]

Similarly, Joachim Jeremias argued^[2] at length that there is evidence within the New Testament itself that different authors deliberately abstained from including deeper traditions in certain texts, out of concerm that such was not appropriate. Jeremias also argues that such carefulness was common among both Jews and non-Jews in the ancient near east. Such a practice lasted for centuries among Christians, as, in the fourth century, bishops in Alexandria expressed alarm at the fact that the deeper mysteries of the faith were being exposed to catechumens and non-believers, when they wrote:

They are not ashamed to parade the sacred mysteries before Catechumens, and worse than that, even before heathens: whereas, they ought to attend to what is written, 'It is good to keep close the secret of a king;' and as the Lord has charged us, 'Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before swine.' We ought not then to parade the holy mysteries before the uninitiated, lest the heathen in their ignorance deride them, and the Catechumens being over-curious be offended.^[3]

Therefore, it should not be any surprise that the aforementioned Father Romanides summed up the issue thusly:

The differences between the Synoptics and the Gospel of John, therefore, are not disagreements as many maintain. On the contrary, they clearly pertain to a difference in depth and fulfillment of the Synoptics by the fourth Gospel in accordance with the catechetical needs of the Church.^[4]

The simple conclusion from all of the above is that the differences between the Synoptics and John need to necessitate that material distinct to the latter is fictional. It is entirely possible for different NT authors to have sufficient reason to not include a given tradition in a given text, even if the critics are unable to discern such reasons.

 

What about the Qur'an?

 

Interestingly, the argument can be placed back on the Qur'an. The Qur'an has material which does not appear in the Synoptics, yet which we might speculate certain authors would have wanted to employ. For example, consider the story in Soora Maryam 19:27-33, where Christ engages in public theological discourse while still an infant, in defense of His mother. Being that Matthew and Luke affirmed the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, might we not think they would have wanted to include a tradition in which her own child miraculously defends her before a crowd which had insinuated she had become pregnant via improper relations?

Any argument a Muslim attempts to raise in defense of the Qur'anic text will ultimately affirm (whether tacitly or overtly) this simple point: even if a text which came after the Synoptics has material that does not appear in the Synoptics (including material some might think the Synoptic authors might have wanted to use), that need not reflect negatively on the historicity of said material. Once such a point is conceded, it undermines any Muslim use of the relevant argument against John.

It is worthy of note that I presented precisely this point to Mr. Williams, via Twitter, last Spring:

Amazingly, Mr. Williams' sole response was to throw back at me the very verse I had appealed to in a correspondence with him nearly two years prior (John 21:25):



I tried to discuss the issue further with him, but he, unfortunately, had no further comment. While no disrespect is intended, I feel compelled to remark that I take this as evidence of an unwillingness on Mr. Williams' part to fully accept the full implications of the arguments and methodologies which he employs as a stick with which to beat Christianity.

End Notes

1. John S. Romanides, The Ancestral Sin, (Zephyr, 2002), pp. 72-73.
2. Joachim Jeremias' The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, (Oxford, 1955), 73-86.
3. The Encyclical Letter of the Council of Egypt, in Athanasius, Defence Against the Arians, part I, chapter 11, in Philip Schaff & Henry Wace (eds.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, (Cosimo, 2007), vol. IV, p. 106.
4. Romanides, opere citato, p. 73, n. 18.