March 17, 2021 John 3: 11-13
3Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a
leader of the Jews. 2He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are
a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do
apart from the presence of God.” 3Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no
one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 4Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born
after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and
be born?” 5Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of
God without being born of water and Spirit. 6What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is
born of the Spirit is spirit. 7Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from
above.’ 8The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you
do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is
born of the Spirit.” 9Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of
Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? 11“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we
know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our
testimony. 12If I have told you about earthly things and you do not
believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13No one has ascended into heaven except the one
who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the
Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16“For God so loved the world that he gave his
only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have
eternal life. 17“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but
those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed
in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has
come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their
deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that
their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be
clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
One
of my literary assumptions of the gospels is that they speak not only the
narrative of the moment, in this case, the recording of this conversation
between Nicodemus and Jesus, but that they also ‘break the fourth wall’, they
also speak to us as the audience reading these words. If this were on film, at this moment, I could
imagine Jesus in transition. Nicodemus
is to his right, they have been conversing, but now Jesus turns to the camera
to address the home audience.
The
opening is the familiar “Pay Attention: This Is Important”…very truly I say
unto you… Okay audience, we speak about
what we know and we testify to what we have seen. But you do not accept our testimony.” Except it is not a pure conversation with the
home audience. What Jesus says is still
in keeping with his conversation with Nicodemus.
And
there is a second piece of literary construction built into these words. As we move into verse 12, “if you are not
going to believe me when I talk about the things of the earth, of the world in
which you move and live and experience, how can you believe me when I talk
about the heavenly things that are beyond your comprehension?” Because Jesus is the connection between the
heavenly and the earthly. “No one has
ascended into heaven except the one who descended from it, the Son of Man.” And the Son of Man is a self-reference. But here is the second piece of the literary
construction. Jesus ascending into
heaven does NOT happen until forty days AFTER his resurrection, way ‘down the timeline’.
The
theory of the assembling of the gospels is that first, there were the
eyewitness accounts to the life and death of Jesus. So, the conversation with Nicodemus, the
Death and Resurrection of Jesus, Jesus’ Ascension into heaven, these were part
of the collective memory, the collective worship experience of the believers in
the earliest days after Jesus’ departure.
Then time moved forward, eyewitnesses began to die (in the case of the
disciples, they were martyred), and the Second Coming of which Jesus spoke was
pushed more into the future.
So
the collected body of narrative about Jesus, these stories told in church, these
experiences from the elders of the congregations, they were put down on parchment. From their recording, they were gathered into
the format of the gospel. The gospel of
John, as we have it, was put together. Mark
was put together and it appears Mark was a source for Luke and Matthew as they
put their gospels together. (Which Came
First: see note below).
So,
according to this theory, the purpose of the gospel is specific, to tell the
story of Jesus to the body of believers.
It is certainly a gift that can be given to the non-believer, or the ‘name
only’ believer (raised to be a ‘Christian’, but never accepted). Thus, in its written format, the integrated
message appears. The parts of Jesus’ life
interconnect, organized around the event of his death and resurrection, around
the Plan of God.
Thus,
the conversation with Nicodemus and Jesus’ ascension into heaven, while
separated by time when these events occurred, are gathered together into a body
of knowledge that the gospel records. Not being a history lesson, the gospel does
not simply lay out the events in sequence.
Not being a novel, the gospel does not foreshadow, giving us a taste now
of what will be revealed ‘down the line’.
The gospel is the story of Jesus Christ, the story of salvation, related
to we who believe in him.
It is
a blessing, that we know and remember what Jesus has done for us.
Notes:
Which Came First?
The preponderance
of literary theory of how the gospels were formed, when I was learning this
stuff, was that Mark was written, that Luke and Matthew developed from Mark,
each using other sources, while John is in its own category, drawing on its own
sources.
But
then comes the value judgment. The ‘earlier’
the gospel, the ‘better’, the ‘more accurate’ it is. The closer it is to Jesus’ words and deeds is
the underlying justification. This value
judgment is not always overt, but I see it.
John is almost always presumed to be the ‘last’ gospel, and also the one
where the ‘deity’ of Jesus is most emphasized.
Therefore, the value judgement presumes that the most stuff was added on
to Jesus’ character and conversation as opposed to the more ‘primitive’
rendering of Jesus in Mark.
I
have fallen into that trap myself. There
is a minority opinion that John is the earliest gospel, the evidence for which
I tend to believe. But it was with the
same categorization in my head “earliest=best”.
There is a literary and a theological problem with this.
Theologically,
the Bible is the Word as inspired by God.
The Bible is not ‘the older, the more inspired it is….” The power of the gospels is the complementary
picture that emerges when we look to Jesus from each author’s point of
view. There is not a ‘better’ one.
Literarily,
it comes down to dating. We cannot
objectively date the writing of a gospel, only the parchment on which we find
it written down. Using that, according
to an article written by John Oakes on ‘evidenceforchristianity.org’, using
carbon-14 dating, the earliest written fragment of Mark’s gospel we have is “around”
68 AD (and, according to the author, this date is not widely accepted) and the earliest
written fragment of John’s gospel is “about” 125 AD. (One
source said the date was good “plus or minus 40 years*). So,
within the ‘plus or minus’ of years, these two manuscripts could have been written on the same day or anywhere between 28 AD and 165 AD (if we JUST went by carbon dating and these were two 'perfect' samples). And
that is ‘objective dating’. Trying to determine
dates of authorship from internal evidence does not have a scientific test or algorithm. It is highly subjective, and if there were
not other specific dates to begin and end the search (like every gospel’s
earliest possible date for writing is the Resurrection of Christ), the range
would be on the order of centuries, NOT individual years.
So, on
the strength of literary analysis, we CANNOT get an accurate enough focus to predict
the order in which the gospels were produced.
I am sorry if this is WAY TO MUCH information, but making assumptions that tie what we think is the date of a gospel to the veracity of that gospel is, for me, one of the biggest problems in Biblical scholarship over the last couple of centuries.
· *”Accuracy of Carbon Dating 1” on the website “illustrativemathematics.org”.
Pastor Pete
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