Robert Kysar, Voyages
with John: Charting the Fourth Gospel. Baylor University
Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Such
a book is a great idea: a compendium of notable work, articles and
papers, by a competent and productive scholar. I could use shelves of
these! Kysar’s collection, with its retrospective introductions, reminds
me of Stanley Fish’s wonderful collection of essays Is There a Text
in this Class? In both one not only reads several essays of
considerable interest in their own right, but also one experiences the
DeManian dialectic of “blindness and insight”: the process by which
certain insights are acquired at one point that would not have been
possible after one had gained further knowledge later. Only one’s
earlier, more limited, perspective allowed certain things to be seen at
all. And in Voyages with John, we get to participate with
Professor Kysar in his voyage of Johannine exploration. We follow him as
he labors in the vineyard of historical criticism, then in source and
redactional criticism, then in literary and narratological criticism,
leading into postmodern readings of the Fourth Gospel. Fascinating! And
one hopes Baylor will persuade other veteran scholars to undertake
similar projects.
Reading Dr. Kysar’s
attempts at Reader-Response criticism, I begin to suspect, as I do with
most so-called New Testament narratology (unlike the real thing as
practiced by Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman), that there is a lot
less here than meets the eye. Kysar’s attempt at putting himself in the
place of a first-time (i.e., non-jaded) reader of John is unspectacular.
The roadblocks and flashes of insight he predicates of the unspoiled
reader do not seem much different from those that break upon the
awareness of well-versed John-readers elsewhere in this book or in
others. Who isn’t stuck wondering what “birth from above” might
mean? The “watch me read this” gimmick gets old fast, which it wouldn’t
if we were really learning anything from it. The whole discussion
reminds me of the man who says, “I’m going over to the wall to flip the
light switch. Now I’ve reached the switch. I’m turning it off. So now
I’ve switched the light off. I just switched the light off.” This
“method” produces only a one-step-back double focus on the reader as
well as the text. But all we are seeing of the reader is what he makes
of the text. It is not much different from what happens in a TV news
interview in which the camera is focused most of the time on the
interviewee but now and then switches for a second to provide a glimpse
of the interviewer gravely nodding his head as he listens. The goal of
narratology, as I understand it, is to break the spell of the text’s
rhetoric, explaining how it seduces the reader. It is like explaining
how a stage conjurer’s tricks work. The reader is henceforth forewarned
and forearmed, as well as newly appreciative of the writer’s “magical”
skills. It is all a sub-set of Derrida’s Deconstruction project, laying
bear the illusory immediacy of rhetoric which poses as telepathy, a
medium for the immediate communication of meaning. But I haven’t seen
much of that in New Testament narratology, whose practitioners seem to
think they have accomplished something by providing a Cliff’s Notes
summary of this or that gospel.
In case it is not already
evident, I, as a historical critic, find Kysar’s turn to Reader-Response
criticism a bit disappointing. He has seemingly given up on finding
answers and is content with framing questions. For instance, in the
essay on the Bread of Life discourse (John 6), Dr. Kysar confesses
himself surprised at the seemingly inconsistent enumeration of the
interlocutors of Jesus in that passage. They appear at first to be
sincere seekers, until, that is, Jesus accuses them of being a bunch of
free-lunch welfare abusers. But then they also seem to be the horned
“Jews” vilified everywhere else in the Gospel of John, people who never
had any thought but to kill Jesus as soon as possible. But then they
seem to morph into the disciples. And then we learn that, though this
inner core/corps is all predestined by God to come to Jesus, one of them
(Judas Iscariot) is in fact, as Elvis would say, “a devil in disguise.”
What gives? Dr. Kysar then receives the text as something as an analogue
(though he does not draw the parallel) to the Markan parable of the
Sower/Soils: he takes the instability of the categories of Jesus’
interlocutors as an object lesson. The reader must not be too secure in
his imagined faith: has God really drawn him to Jesus any more than he
did the free-lunchers? Though the reader may consider himself a
disciple, may he also be a devil, not yet disclosed? All right, that is
an edifying, almost a homiletical, exercise.
But I still want to explain
the wild careening between categories of interlocutors. And then other
parallels come to mind. Don’t we have the same difficulty identifying
Paul’s “opponents” in various letters? Who is he upset about, for
instance, in Galatians? Gnostics? Judaizers? Gnostic Judaizers?
Republicans? Vegans? Flat-taxers? It is so hard to frame a coherent
police artist sketch of them that Van Manen and the Dutch Radicals were
driven to realize there are no genuine historical entities in view, but
that these (actually post-Pauline) texts are just firing scattershot at
a whole syllabus of contemporary (late-first, early second-century)
errors. The “historical scene of writing” in Paul’s day for which we had
sought was an illusion. Likewise, it seems quite likely to me that John
6 does not care who we envision Jesus debating with. He is not trying
for a coherent character portrait of Jesus’ interlocutors, whether as an
historical report or as a bit of literary verisimilitude. He just has
some business to get done: he wants to define certain Christological and
sacramental stances, and in order to do so, he needs voices from the
audience proposing errors so as to allow him to have Jesus refute them
and clarify the truth (= the evangelist’s view). Some false ideas might
fit naïve sympathizers best, while others would make more sense coming
from a dyed-in-the-wool enemy. And so we hear them all.
This way of reading John 6
makes even more sense if we remember that it is probably John’s rewrite
of the Caesarea Philippi Confession story. Mark wanted to refute a
hand-full of inadequate Christologies currently held in that region:
Jesus was John resurrected, the view of the ongoing Baptist sect; Jesus
was Elijah returned. (Thomas adds other views popular in his milieu:
Jesus was a Cynic philosopher, or an angel.) The beliefs of the
well-wishing but misguided masses are contrasted with that of the inner
circle of disciples, whose spokesman Peter is: “You are the Christ.” We
see the same essentials in John 6: the crowds seem friendly, but they
are wrong and cannot handle the truth. Some think Jesus is like one of
the old prophets, Moses in particular. Jesus sets aside their belief and
asks what the inner circle thinks: “What about you? Will you leave too?”
And again Peter speaks for the rest: “You are the Holy One of God.” So
again we have a mulligan stew of false views of Jesus, combated with one
blast, and a contrast between them and the truth. And just as Matthew
(which John was also reading) called one of the twelve a devil (“Get
behind me, Satan!”) in the same story, so does John say Jesus has
recruited one. And we also find the root of what so preoccupies Kysar
with his synchronic reading of John 6: divine initiative giving rise to
human faith. For, just as Matthew has Jesus congratulate Peter that he
owes his correct Christology not to human opinion (“flesh and blood”)
but to divine revelation, John 6 blesses the followers of Jesus as those
who are all “taught by God” (John 6:45). So, obviously, I wish Dr. Kysar
hadn’t abandoned historical criticism; the use of it still seems to
elucidate puzzling texts in a way synchronic scrutiny does not.
I must report that the main
thing I have gotten from this impressive book is a reinforcement of my
suspicion that all of modern Johannine scholarship might be aptly summed
up (to use again the old cliché) as a series of footnotes to Bultmann
and C.H. Dodd. Of the annotators, some are original and have much
enriched the discussion at some points. These, from my perspective,
would include Raymond E. Brown (the orthodox alternative to Bultmann),
Robert Fortna, and Wayne A. Meeks. Most of the rest of the Johannine
guild (reminiscent of the missionary order of the Johannine Epistles?)
seem to me to have busied themselves with dotting “i’s” and crossing
“t’s”—or even with crossing “i’s” and dotting “t’s”! Here are dizzying
vistas of concentric Mishna-Gemara-Talmud boxes functioning like square
epicycles to form an exegetical Tower of Babel. (Sorry for the confused
mess of metaphors!)
And amid all this work, so
ably and exhaustively reviewed by Professor Kysar, his guiding star may
be summed up in one sentence: “The truth doubtless lies somewhere in
between” (pp. 140-141). I believe I detect here the conventional “let’s
split the difference” methodology that lets almost everybody be at least
partially right. The result is a more-or-less “safe” critical product.
Sure, there is likely to be some truth in Bultmann’s Gnostic approach,
but once we throw in a fistful of Brown’s Dead Sea Scrolls “reclaim John
for Judaism” apologetic, we can bounce half the way back from Bultmann’s
radicalism as if executing a historical-critical Bungee jump. This one
is probably right in reducing John’s expectation to realized
eschatology, but that one is probably right in restoring some
kind of future expectation to the recipe. I get the same sort of uneasy
feeling I do when I read Crossan: Jesus or John is being made a function
of the variety of perspectives used by scholars to study him, as if they
were a committee of Olympian gods each making their contribution to
creating Pandora. Again, Dr. Kysar’s approach is reminiscent of the
Fellows of the Jesus Seminar counting votes on their reading of a gospel
passage and canonizing the result as the official position of the
Seminar. And yet perhaps it is only this tendency that moves a scholar
so to survey and catalogue such a wealth of material. Perhaps no one
else would bother.
Throughout the book Dr.
Kysar manifests an astonishing mastery of the scholarly debate. He
distills it for us, and it is still a continent! He has recounted not
only the unfolding of his own thinking but also that of the whole guild
of Johannine scholars. At first he manages not to confuse the two
histories, but in the end it begins to look as if all previous research
has after all led gloriously up to his own Hegelian apex. In his turn to
Postmodern interpretation of John (or anything else), Dr. Kysar has
fallen in with the wrong crowd. He confesses to have been influenced by
that Rasputin of retrenchment, Roman Catholic apologist Luke Timothy
Johnson, who calls imaginative scholars to task for daring to “go beyond
that which is written” (1 Corinthians 4:6). Like the similarly
backward-looking John A.T. Robinson (or, come to think of it, today’s
fundamentalist “Creation Science” quacks), Johnson and Kysar let us in
on the big news that speculation (gasp!) is not fact. And
that therefore, somehow, it is pointless. Kysar seems only now to have
discovered that scholarly theories are heuristic devices and
thought-experimental paradigms. And that is not good enough for him.
What did he think he was doing for all those years? Late in the day he
has learned that a purely objective or definitive reconstruction of past
events is impossible. But it is clear from his own earlier essays in
this book it was not so. He understood, as every single historian does,
that all historical “conclusions” are provisional and tentative, not the
stuff of dogma. But now it seems he welcomes permission to throw over
the whole enterprise and to stick to a subjective Rorschach-blot reading
of the text. How the mighty are fallen!
In his essay, “The
Expulsion from the Synagogue: The Tale of a Theory” (a piece that might
have fit well in an anthology called How My Mind Has Lapsed),
Kysar submits the ludicrous conclusion that the so-called Benediction
against Heretics, the aposynagogos shibboleth (no, I’m not
speaking glossolalia) is a fiction, and that we therefore ought to stop
interpreting John (and, one supposes, Matthew) as if there had been a
late first-century expulsion of Christians from Jewish worship. Kysar
wrings his hands for having made such a historical scenario central to
his own theorizing for years, having followed the Pied Piper spell, as
he now views it, of J. Louis Martyn and Raymond E. Brown. That takes
some guts, I suppose. But his mea culpa is premature. He says
that, first, the ancient evidence for a single, ecumenical Jewish ban on
Christians is more ambiguous and more fragmentary than had been
supposed. But this is like arguing that there was never a canonization
of twenty-seven New Testament books because no single Ecumenical Council
ever stipulated it. No, it was the work of Athanasius in his 367 Easter
encyclical, plus ratification by three local North African synods. The
restriction of usage was gradual after that, but the ultimate result was
the same.
Second, Kysar argues, the
depiction in John of some Jews who were not alienated from the Jewish
authorities and yet followed Jesus (Lazarus, etc.) undermines the notion
that the gospel is trying to retroject into Jesus’ time a later ban on
Jesus-friendly Jews. Well, that is just absurd. It is precisely the
inconsistency between such passages, which seem to preserve something of
the Sitz-im-Leben Jesu, and others like John 9:22, where
believers in Jesus have already been excommunicated (especially despite
the fact that such a measure is still regarded as future in John 16:2),
that led scholars to posit that a later crisis had been written back
into the time of Jesus for literary-polemical purposes. This is the
“hermeneutic of suspicion” of which Kysar now claims to make so much in
fellowship with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and others—as if
ideological criticism were not simply a widening of the scope of
Tendenz criticism.
Third, Kysar seems to feel
that to posit an expulsion of Christians by Jews would be politically
incorrect, and so it is dangerous to think that it happened. Perhaps
there was more to it. No kidding. Who will not defend, even today, the
decision of any group to expel, however regretfully, an element of its
membership that is making an intolerable nuisance of itself, insisting
that everyone adopt their pet distinctives? It is regrettable, but that
doesn’t mean such schisms don’t or didn’t happen.
You can tell where Kysar’s
own ideological bread is buttered when he condemns George Bush for
branding Iraq-Iran-North Korea as the Axis of Evil. You mean they
weren’t? But for Kysar, the “Other” appears automatically to be
innocent. He speaks of how we “demonized” the 9/11 hijackers. Seems to
me they did a pretty good job of that themselves! In fact, not to
treat them as demons is to refuse to take seriously their “Otherness.”
No, we tell ourselves over tea, they must be rational, human gents like
us, somehow driven to their deeds by our own. One hopes Kysar’s
ideological criticism will begin at home.