The Western Church celebrates the Feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist, on December 27. It’s one of several festivals that fall just after Christmas, including St. Stephen’s Day on Dec. 26, and Holy Innocents on the 28. It’s striking that both the latter feasts commemorate martyrs. To this mix we might add Thomas à Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on Dec. 29, 1170. The early days of the Christmas season are surprisingly awash in blood.
St. John is superficially an exception to this rule. His book is the great gospel of the Incarnation. Among the highlights of the Christmas Eve liturgy is the reading of the Johannine Prologue, climaxing with the affirmation: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). In Christmastide we rightly focus our attention on the Word’s taking on of our human flesh, the infant swaddled and lying in a manger, adored by angels and shepherds. Christmas is a time for meditating on what Karl Barth called “the humanity of God”; and in that endeavor, John is a welcome companion.
And yet one does not need to read very far in John to see that this is only part of the story. As all the major commentators point out, the book is from beginning to end oriented toward the hour of Jesus’ death, which is at the same time his glorification. As Raymond Brown puts it in his great commentary: “Jesus is lifted up on the cross; he is raised from the dead; and he goes up to the Father—all as part of one action and one ‘hour.’” Likewise, John Behr has argued that the Fourth Gospel does not (as is often imagined) tell of a divine being who makes his dwelling on earth for a while, with a Passion narrative awkwardly tacked on at the end. No: this gospel is crucicentric and paschal “all the way down.” Hence the title of Behr’s insightful if somewhat contrarian work of theological exegesis: John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel (Oxford, 2019).
John the Theologian—for this is how he is remembered in the Eastern church, as ho theologos (Gregory Nazianzen is the only other saint accorded that title). But who is this John? The older view is that he is John the son of Zebedee, the brother of James. He is often mentioned as part of a trio that includes his brother and Peter, together with whom he witnessed the Transfiguration, and kept fitful company with Christ in Gethsemane. This same John the fisherman is traditionally credited with writing not only the Fourth Gospel but the Johannine epistles as well as the Book of Revelation. If the latter is true, then he lived out his days as an exile on Patmos—the only one of the Twelve not to suffer martyrdom.
Most scholars today, however, reject this view of Johannine authorship. This is true even of those of a quite traditional theological outlook. But if not the son of Zebedee, who did write these works? The theories have been many. Perhaps a certain John the Elder, attested by Papias as still living in Asia Minor in the late first or early second century, the founder of a “Johannine school” (Martin Hengel). Perhaps the author who helped his community of Jewish Jesus-followers cope with the trauma of being banned from the synagogue by writing a drama about Jesus that also told the story of their lives (J. Louis Martyn). Perhaps a Jerusalem disciple of Jesus, who preserved traditions about him and local knowledge different from those of the Galilean Twelve (Richard Bauckham). Of the making of hypotheses about John and his book there seems to be no end.
I love a good mystery story as much as the next person, and I must confess to a certain geeky fascination with what is sometimes called “the Johannine riddle.” When it’s done in the proper spirit, historical inquiry of this sort is unlikely to do much harm, and it may even sharpen our attention to the text of Scripture and its divine-human subject matter.
But here’s the thing: the apostolic claim advanced by the Gospel of John and its sibling works doesn’t depend on our answering the question about authorship. Of the Johannine writings, the Apocalypse is the only one whose author names himself, and who employs the pronoun Ifreely; a visionary more or less has to refer to himself, the one having the visions. The “elder” we meet in the second and third epistles chooses to remain anonymous. So too the evangelist. Tellingly, the only time the word I appears in John is in the closing lines of the book, in which the author writes: “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). I suppose! The author comes out of hiding, but only for a moment, and only to underscore the partial and selective character of his account of Jesus’ works.
The gospel and the other Johannine writings do make a tremendous claim to authority. But the authority in question is not that of the individual charismatic leader. Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote on “the difference between a genius and an apostle”—the difference being that geniuses are born, while apostles are made. They are but emissaries of the One who sent them. Apostolic authority is certainly not to be trifled with—as the Galatians would soon enough discover in their dealings with Paul! You don’t mess with an apostle. But the latter’s authority is nevertheless derivative, a mandate and not a possession.
This is why, in the Fourth Gospel, our author defers at key moments to the testimony of the Beloved Disciple, the Johannine eyewitness par excellence. When the soldier pierces Jesus’ side at the Crucifixion, causing blood and water to gush forth, the author can’t resist offering an aside to the reader: “He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony (martyria) is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe.” And at the very end of the book, we’re told: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 19:35, 21:24).
The hermeneutics of apostolicity, we might say, is a hermeneutics of trust and of truthfulness. We trust that the apostolic tradition gives us “the real Jesus.” There is no going behind the apostles to some more fundamental, historically secure foundation for Christian faith. The buck, as it were, stops here. We must—or rather may, for this is a matter of grace, not law—entrust ourselves to what the apostles heard, saw, and even touched concerning the Word made flesh (cf. 1 John 1:1-4).
Which brings us back to “John, Apostle and Evangelist.” Why does this feast appear in the days after Christmas? I have suggested there may be a connection through the theme of martyrdom that has, rather curiously, attached itself to the season. The Fourth Gospel ends, after all, with Jesus’ words to Peter about being led where he does not wish to go, and the evangelist’s comment: “He said this to indicate the kind of death by which [Peter] would glorify God” (John 21:19).
But a more obvious and perhaps more fitting connection is through the theme of “flesh.” The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. Christ gives us his flesh to eat. By ancient consensus, the blood and water flowing from his side at the Crucifixion figure the sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism. Johannine Christianity is incarnational, and just so sacramental. It’s medicine for our perennial temptation to Docetism, a heresy that our modern “materialism” rather exacerbates than cures.
Matthew and Luke give us the infancy narratives, stories we clothe ourselves in this time of year. St. John gives us a necessary commentary on those tales, so that we might know that the baby lying in the manger is the very Word of the Father—what the Father wants to say to us. Let us pause to give thanks today for the evangelist, his book, and his apostolic testimony to Jesus the Word.
Joseph Mangina, PhD is professor of theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto. His published work includes Karl Barth on the Christian Life (Peter Lang, 2001), Karl Barth: The Ecumenical Promise of His Theology (Ashgate, 2004), and the Brazos Commentary on Revelation (2010). From 2008 to 2017 he was the editor of Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology.
