The Liturgy of the Last Gospel

Preface

St John’s Gospel is more often than not referred to as the ‘Fourth Gospel’ by New Testament scholars, to avoid any implied commitment as to authorship. Whenever the ‘Last Gospel’ is referred to on the other hand, it is always in connection with the custom of my boyhood days of reading the Prologue of John at the end of Mass; and, for reasons which will become clear, I have chosen this way of referring to the Gospel in the title of this article to preserve this liturgical association.

Introduction

One of the many open questions in Johannine scholarship concerns literary genre: is the Gospel a historical biography of Jesus composed for a Christian community, for example, or is it a missionary tract, or was it written for another purpose altogether ?

I suggest here that the Gospel is actually a liturgical text - a ‘confessional recital’ of salient acts and teachings of Jesus - and to be precise and for the avoidance of doubt, I use the word recital here to connote performance and, though I do not mean to press the point too hard, quite probably a sung performance.

An association of John with early Christian worship has often been noted in the literature, usually by remarking that the farewell discourses may have been early eucharistic homilies. But the proposition that the whole Gospel text is a ‘service of the Word’ liturgy of a primitive Christian synagogue has received hardly any attention. Only one Johannine scholar, W. H. Raney ¹ , has expressly proposed John as a liturgical performance piece before and his work has been entirely overlooked or dismissed: none of the main commentaries on John even reference his work.

Moreover, the essence of the primitive liturgy I propose is of anamnesis and koinonia rather than sacrament and it is on this point my argument departs from Raney’s thesis, because there are no grounds for holding that all early Christian liturgy should necessarily have had any sacramental ritual pattern. I contend that the Gospel is in fact an ante-sacramental liturgy, despite the sacramentalism usually read into it.

The principal strands of my argument are as follows:

These topics will be enlarged upon in subsequent sections of the article.

Literature Review

As a matter of fact, there is not an extensive literature on liturgical aspects of John but it is convenient to review the literature that does exist in two broad but sparsely populated groups: Eucharistic Homilies and Lectionary Hypotheses. (Note that I do not claim that the following surveys are exhaustive.)

Raney’s Thesis

Raney, alone so far as I have found, treats the Gospel explicitly as a liturgical text and it is a great pity that Johannine scholars have not given his thesis the attention it deserves.

As indicated earlier, Raney suggests that the sections of the Gospel having a ‘poetical and liturgical character’ are ‘prose-hymns’ intended for liturgical use by an early Christian community, in fact intended to be sung.

…Christianity was pre-eminently a religion that called for sacred song …One of the notable features of this triumphant religion was its gift of song: Carmenque Christo quasi Deo dicere invicem secum. This custom of singing hymns antiphonally (invicem secum), or of singing responses is clearly traceable to a Hebrew origin and offers evidence of a desire to continue the practice of the Temple choir. … These preliminary considerations may suffice to introduce our thesis which is that the Prologue of The Fourth Gospel (John I: 1-18), the ‘comments’ of John III: 16-21; 31-36; the parable of John. X: 1-18 the ‘discourses’ of John XIV, XV, XVI and the prayer of John XVII are prose-hymns written to be sung or chanted by cantor or choir; and that in all probability the Gospel was written for use in two or more consecutive periods of worship. ¹⁵

Further, he identifies as ‘narrative prose-hymns’ the following as ‘…intervals where the narrative, interwoven with discourse, takes on a note of more tragic seriousness, deep-voiced intonations are heard proclaiming and defending the truth in the well-known forms of Hebrew parallelism and accent…’ : John 6: 32-58; 5: 19-47; 8: 12-20; 21-30; 31-58; 10: 25-38;12: 20-36; 44-50; 13: 12-30; 31(b)- 35. ¹⁶

Drama

The literary characteristics of John are very well known:

The Synoptists were compilers of tradition; John on the other hand is an author. The material has passed through his mind, and it has been changed in the process… John’s Gospel is therefore a developed literary work akin to drama. Devices and techniques have been used such as Ambiguity, Misunderstanding, Irony, the double stage, the god’s eye view. Characters are brought on to play their part; but when they have fulfilled their role in the plot, they disappear, often without further mention, because the reader is not intended to be interested in them for their own sake, but in the development of the theme …(Fenton). ¹⁷

The particular literary devices Fenton refers to have all received attention in the literature (see, for example, Mlakuzhyil). ¹⁸

The dramatic form of John becomes clear when it is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ as a series of episodes, beginning with the Prologue (John 1:1-18) and concluding with John 21 as Epilogue. The episodes can then be grouped together as Acts, and it has become customary to adopt the ‘five act rule’, as follows.

The story is introduced in John 1:19 – 4 as Act I where Jesus’ public ministry begins. There is an intensification of the drama in Act II (John 5-10) as conflict develops with the religious establishment, culminating in the spectacular raising of Lazarus, the Anointing and Triumphal Entry in Act III (John 11-12). The onset of catastrophe is described in Act IV (John 13-19) as Jesus bids farewell to the disciples, is betrayed and crucified. John 20 as Act V is the triumphal resolution of the story, marked by Mary Magdalen’s recognition and Thomas’ confession.

Exegesis of John as drama actually has a long history. In fact, Butler Pratt ¹⁹ and Montgomery Hitchcock ²⁰ achieved all the essential results over a century ago. While Montgomery Hitchcock’s work is quite well known and often referenced in the literature, Butler Pratt’s work is practically unknown and has not received the attention it deserves.

He draws parallels with the great Greek tragedies, as follows:

From the first, Greek tragedy had a religious significance. It began with the worship of Dionysos, and grew out of the choral song and dance which accompanied his festivals, but came to be means of presenting the noblest traditions of the nation and the grandest themes of human thought. The great Greek tragedies were not mere entertainments. They were, rather, serious productions expressing the convictions of national conscience, the hopes and fears of the profoundest minds grappling with the mysteries of life. They were presented at the great religious festivals and voice all that was noble and uplifting in Greek life. They were earnest attempts to reveal god or moral purpose in history, to explain the meaning of providence.

Thus tragedy, no longer confined to trifling local myths or to the mad orgies and ecstasies of the worship of Dionysos, became the nearest approach to a Bible which Greece produced. … In the actual presentation of a Greek tragedy there was at first little in the way of stage setting and almost no acting, in our modern sense. So long as there was only a single actor, who was often the poet himself, he merely related events which occurred elsewhere. A chorus always assisted. Aeschylus is said to have introduced a second actor, and Sophocles, a third, thus making it possible to act events in the theatre itself, although the acting was of the simplest sort. … The stage was the place for soliloquy, debate, plotting and pleading, for the whole range of human emotions…. The appeal was made directly to the intellect and emotions through the medium of song and speech. ²¹

He goes on to argue that John would have been familiar with Greek customs and ideas and the great theatres, as at Ephesus, must have been familiar to him as well as the themes of the great tragedies. It is of particular note that: ‘[c]hapter after chapter can be rewritten in dramatic form with no violence to the text.’ He illustrates these points by casting the Gospel into dramatic form of five acts each of four or five scenes separated by choruses. ‘The suggested divisions are, of course, purely arbitrary and are used simply to illustrate this method of studying the book.’ ²²

An excellent modern discussion of use of the conventions of Greek drama in John is given by Brant ²³ together with a comprehensive literature survey. Brant does not propose any particular emplotment but concentrates on technical matters: how the Gospel uses speech as gesture, as action; the creation of identity through dramatic action and dialogue etc, and the death of Jesus as the ‘beautiful death of a hero’:

The gospel as a literary form may indeed be sui generis, but the methods of representing time, setting, action and characters found in the Fourth Gospel are not. As this study has demonstrated, the author of the Fourth Gospel drew upon many of the established and proven methods of dramatic composition found in Greek tragedy in order to construct a story dependent more on the speech of the characters than on that of its narrator. ²⁴

She proceeds with the following important observations:

The purpose of the tragic conventions that the Fourth Evangelist employs is not limited to the theatrical experience of following a past action as though you were there or as though it were unfolding before you in the present. The audience takes a role in the performance not as a member of a jury to determine historical veracity of the events or the guilt or innocence of an individual or a party, nor as a member of an assembly to be persuaded to adopt a sacramental theology or a distinct form of Christology, but as a congregation to engage in a corporate act of remembering. ²⁵

The dramatic form of John surely suggests very strongly that the Gospel was intended for performance. As both Butler Pratt and Brand find, ‘no violence to the text’ is required in structuring the various acts and scenes with the story line based on the speech of the characters rather than the narrator, the audience as a congregation engages ‘in a corporate act of remembering’ and is expected to understand and respond to the various literary devices John makes use of.

Poetry

A summary of the relatively few published works on poetic forms in John is given by Brown ²⁶ who cites Burney ²⁷ , Bultmann, ²⁸ Smith, ²⁹ Gächter ³⁰ and Mollat ³¹ . He makes no reference to Raney who presents annotated texts of the Gospel passages identified as prose-hymns in Chapter 5 of his book and a complete analysis of incidences and classes of parallelism, chiasmus and rhythm in these texts together with extensive references to similar pre-Christian and early Christian liturgical texts.

The chief characteristic of Semitic poetry is ‘rhythm of thought’, first identified systematically in the Gospels in Burney’s classic book on the subject, published a few weeks before his death. Note that since parallelism consists of rhythm of thought it survives translation very well. (Raney, Bultmann and Gächter all use the Greek text.)

The reader may consult the Jerusalem Bible for the English text of John in poetic form, after Mollat’s Bible de Jerusalem.

Burney identifies several classes of parallelism: Synonymous Parallelism, Antithetic Parallelism and so on. ³² However, it needs to be said that whereas parallelism is easily identified it is not always so easy to decide on how to classify it, and even some of Raney’s classifications are questionable. I propose therefore to leave aside all questions of classification of parallelism – it does little to advance the argument in any event.

For much the same reason, I will leave aside discussion of accentual rhythm, a second characteristic usually attributed to Semitic poetry. This is not to deny a sense of rhythm in the Greek text, but it seems to me to be more ‘rhythmic in effect’ if recited, rather than having a regular rhythm. I dare say a native orator could recite the text in a regular pattern of beats with practice, and there is little doubt that in the ancient world where oral traditions were strong, an orator would be well practiced and probably able to recite the text by heart. But the situation is quite different if the text were sung, as suggested by Raney, because some form of rhythm is then much easier and is actually quite natural.

Smith’s book is essentially a critique of Bultmann’s classic commentary on John and so discussion of Bultmann can be omitted for present purposes, except to say that the objective of his commentary was to uncover the Urtext of the Gospel by isolation of what he considered to be its component sources, among which the texts from the Offenbarungsreden source (see Smith ³³ ) are distinguished by their rhythmic poetic style.

Of Smith’s work, Brown ³⁴ writes:

Smith’s isolation and printing of the material which Bultmann attributes to this source [the Offenbarungsreden] shows at first glance how good a case can be made for casting John in poetic format. And we suggest this holds true even if we do not resort to putative Aramaic originals or even to counting off accentual beats. In the various discourse sections of the Gospel there is a constant rhythmic effect of lines of approximately the same length, each constituting a clause. Possibly this does reflect a stress rhythm in an Aramaic original, but the general pattern is quite observable in the Greek.

On the next page (cxxxiv) he writes: ‘It is difficult to give any conclusive proof that a poetic format is justified. Perhaps all that can be said is that, when one has worked with the material for a while, searching for a format, one does get caught up into the pattern.’ However, despite this apparent diffidence he goes on to use a poetic format throughout his own translation of the Gospel, as if ultimately convinced by the text in front of him.

Apparently quite independently of Raney, Gächter’s series of papers published between 1934 and 1936 provide detailed analyses of selected texts from the Gospel on very similar lines to Raney, although his interests are primarily poetic form and rhythm rather than liturgy.

It is noteworthy that most of the passages Gächter examines are those denoted by Raney as ‘narrative prose hymns’ (see above) rather than the more obviously poetic passages.There is in fact a remarkable interlocking and overlapping of the poetic text of John if the poetic sections as per Raney, Gächter and Bultmann are set out side by side.

Mollat, ³⁵ who worked on translation of the Bible into French (Bible de Jerusalem), evidently saw this independently and casts all the discourses in John into poetic form. Mollat makes no reference to Raney or Gächter and shares none of Brown’s diffidence as to the poetic format. He describes the text of John in these words: ‘Il se dégage de ces courtes phrases, qui se suivant comme les vagues à la marée montante, un rhythme d’une gravité quasi liturgique. C’est ce rythme que nous avons voulu mettre en évidence en disposant par stiques le texte des discours de Jésus.’ This same format is used in the English translation of the Jerusalem Bible, as above.

Scripture

There is an extensive literature on the OT influences in John and I will make no attempt here at more than a brief sketch of these influences because my point is rather to underline the liturgical setting for the Gospel they imply.

The earliest Christians either inherited or adopted the OT scriptures and saw in Jesus their promised fulfilment. In consequence, the books of the NT contain extensive OT scriptural allusions and quotations - even a cursory glance at the outer margins of NA²⁸ will show the extent of these influences - and there is no doubt that Christians were expected to recognise and understand these allusions. To quote Schlatter, ³⁶ for example, who treats this topic at some length: ‘Paul took it for granted that his readers were familiar with scripture, and that familiarity could have been acquired only at their gatherings for worship.’

As a matter of fact, John actually has fewer direct OT quotations than the Synoptic Gospels but the wealth of OT allusions and parallel themes is nevertheless unmistakeable. The Gospel opens with the momentous words of Gen 1:1 and the Gospel then is structured around Jewish liturgical festivals, the Sabbath (John 5), Passover (John 2, 5, 6, 18 & 19), Tabernacles (John 7-10), Hannukah (John 10: 22-39), to underline the liturgical connection. It is also significant that the first and last ‘signs’ take place on the ‘third day’, reminiscent of Gen 22:4-5 and Ex 19:16-19: and perhaps the changing of water into wine at the Wedding in Cana is intended to symbolise the new order referred to in the Prologue at John 1:17.

John the Baptist refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God (John 1:29, 36) with obvious Passover references, and as the Bridegroom (John 3:29) of the Prophets. Jesus refers to himself as the serpent lifted up in the desert (John 3:14), symbolizing salvation to everyone believing in him, as the Light of the World (John 8:12, 9:5), as the Good Shepherd (John 10:11) of Ezekiel and the Psalms, as the True Vine (John 15:1) and so on in the other ‘I am’ passages, all of which convey multiple scriptural allusions.

It can be said here that there is no order of priority among the ‘I am’ sayings: they all signify Jesus as the ‘Holy One of God’(John 6:69): ‘Bread of Life’ no more or less than the ‘Way, the Truth and the Life’, etc. And, seen in this light there are really no eucharistic connotations in the former text, despite the sacramentalism usually read into it. (Martin Luther made this point quite forcefully somewhere.) It can also be noted that the usual claim of a baptismal reference in John 3:5 fails if the Greek word kai is meant epexegetically, which arguably was the intention in this passage, thus tying in very nicely with similar figurative references to water elsewhere (see John 4:13, 7:39). The case for sacramental references in John is actually very weak, in my opinion.

The OT references are intended to show Jesus as fulfilment of the scriptures (John 1:17), as the human personification of the Divine (John 1: 1-14). They are not merely literary devices, they are clearly liturgical motifs derived from Jewish worship and would have been recognised as such in the early Church, given some carry over of Temple worship into synagogue use via the Maamadot and thus into early Christian liturgy.

Liturgy

It is not unreasonable to speculate from the foregoing discussions that John was intended for liturgical performance and it is appropriate now to say something about liturgy to qualify the speculation with regard to the type of liturgy, specifically whether or not it was eucharistic.

From accounts in the New Testament the earliest Christians in Jerusalem continued at first to worship in the Temple but also met together privately in houses and other places for prayer with and without ‘breaking of bread’. Away from Jerusalem, similar customs were observed but with worship in a synagogue rather than the Temple and in the earliest days Christian synagogue worship was set in the OT liturgical matrix referred to above. ³⁷

Thus, Martin ³⁸ describes the early Church as:

…cradled in Judaism. And as such the earliest believers who were all Jews entered the Church with no tabula rasa of spiritual experience, but as those who stood in a long and developed cultic tradition, with forms of Divine service and liturgical offices and language already known to them. … The new content, as far as the early Church in Jerusalem is concerned, is epitomized in the conviction that the Messiah had come and that His name is Jesus of Nazareth. This fact is seen in that, as far as cultic praxis was concerned, the chief things which marked out the ‘sect of the Nazoraeans’ was the offering of prayer in the name of Jesus and the distinctive practice of table-fellowship. … One of the features of Greek religion which would be familiar to the Christian converts from their acquaintance with the cults of their day was hymnology.

There are several NT references to hymn singing in the early Church and most commentators agree that hymns were an important ingredient of early Christian liturgy.

According to Macdonald ³⁹ :

[a] few fragmentary remains, scattered over the New Testament, are almost all that we possess of the distinctively Christian hymns of the early worship. Nor has any one of the sacred writers paused to indicate the form and content of these hymns, or the manner in which they were sung. Consequently we have to rely upon such inferences as may be drawn from sparse and incidental hints. Indeed, our difficulties are actually greater than usual, by reason of the fact that we get scarcely any assistance from the writers of the second century, or even those of the third century, and so must depend on the New Testament itself …

Had Macdonald been aware of the work of Raney or Gächter he would no doubt have amended his conclusions here.

With regard to the Lord’s Supper, the earliest form, in Macdonald’s words, was of a ‘semi sacred meal’, ‘… in so far as it was a meal of religious fellowship, not only with one another, but, in some way, also with Christ.’ However, it was also a meal ‘of an everyday, hunger-satisfying kind’, but that to the Jewish Christians food was sacred and came from God, ‘even the most ordinary meal was no ordinary thing to them.’ ‘…In their national religion there had been a long history of sacrificial meals, reaching far back into the past, and though our knowledge of these is dim, it helps us to understand the aura of sacredness investing their meals, and the attendant conceptions of table-fellowship with one another and with God.’ There were, however, occasional meals of special religious import, such as the annual Passover meal and the weekly Kiddush for sanctification of the Sabbath. The Kiddush was celebrated in the family home or in the company of a group of friends, who have come

together for a social meal, at some hour on the Friday afternoon. The closing hour or two of the day were thus spent at table, the meal being drawn out in conversation and discussion on religious matters lying close to their interest. Then, at dusk, when the Sabbath was about to begin, the meal was interrupted, in order that the head of the household, or the presiding host, might perform the simple but solemn rite of Sanctification. ⁴⁰

The eucharist may well be derived from this simple custom and what dominated the thoughts of the early Church observing the custom ‘as they joined in the blessing and breaking of the bread was not the broken body of Christ, but His continued presence in their midst as they sat at His Table. The Presence of Christ - not his death - was the keynote of the earliest Lord’s Supper.’ ⁴¹

It was not until later in the second or third century that there is evidence for use of more recognisably eucharistic rituals in the early Church. These same general conclusions are held by many liturgical scholars today (see Bradshaw, ⁴² for example).

It is here then that I depart from Raney’s thesis. He proposes an order of service as follows:

The Communion Service, held in the evening, would most likely be for the most part a Choral service. Any one or all of the prose-hymns in chapters 15, 16 and 14 were probably sung before or after the passing of the Bread and of the Cup which followed the reading of Chs. 18 and 19. There is, however, a natural sequence of thought between John. Ch. 20, vvs. 26-29 and John. Ch. 14, vvs. 1-31 which gives support to the view that the great hymn of life and comfort was sung after John. Ch. 20, vvs. 26 -29 as the closing hymn of the second period of worship. The references to Thomas, the exhortations to believe, the impending departure of Jesus all lend strong probability to this view. ⁴³

First, the displacements of the text proposed no longer command scholarly support. In any case they are not necessary; the dramatic structure requires no such ‘violence to the text’. And, if the dating of the Gospel and current thinking on liturgical practices of the early Church are correct, it would seem unlikely that even such simple ritual as Raney proposes would have accompanied the breaking of bread, even as the custom of Kiddush.

Moreover, perhaps the straightforward explanation for the absence of an ‘institution narrative’ in John, dating back at least to Greenup, ⁴⁴ that its inclusion simply did not suit John’s purposes is correct. If this is so it tells against the liturgy being a ‘Communion Service’.

So I think John is much more likely a ‘service of the Word’ of a Christian synagogue, and there is every reason to accept some formality in such a service. The early Church probably did inherit well-developed cultic traditions, as Martin maintains (see above), even if the details of these traditions have been lost to us.

I suggest then a Christian synagogue setting with recital of John replacing the traditional OT readings: a Sabbath gathering in a room somewhere, with Cantor or Reader perhaps at a lectern. The Prologue is sung as an opening hymn, followed by Acts I-IV as hymns and readings. The voice of the Cantor is suggested for the poetic discourses, culminating in the High Priestly prayer of John 17.

The final part of Act IV and Act V, the accounts of Jesus’ betrayal, death and resurrection (John 18–20 or 21) suggest the Reader’s voice in solemn prose, but ending with the promise of Life: and thus the recital comes to a joyful end, the whole liturgy resonant with the ipsissima vox Christi. What higher sense of anamnesis is there but of this reading and singing in persona Christi, what higher sense of koinonia than in Our Lord’s repeated injunction: ‘love one another, as I have loved you’ (John 15:12)?

There is no way of knowing how long this liturgy survived – one or two generations perhaps - before being overtaken by the once simple custom of Kiddush developed into Eucharist. But once overtaken the Liturgy of the Last Gospel provided the necessary foundations for baptismal and eucharistic theology: and perhaps herein lies the genesis of the later tradition of Lex Orandi – Lex Credendi.

And, if we ask how it is then that the liturgy and eucharistic theology has developed over the centuries, and if we believe anything in John, we find the answer in the Gospel at John 16:13: ‘when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth’.

Conclusions & Discussion

In the concluding pages of her book Aileen Guilding says that John ‘gives us, not bare history but the interpretation of history, a painting rather than a photograph.’ ⁴⁵ If my argument has any validity, the painting she had in mind is actually an icon: particular artistic conventions of arrangement, perspective and colouring have been followed by John to convey specific Christological truths in a liturgical setting.

Exegesis of John as liturgy in this way is important for several reasons.

First, to my mind it provides a more convincing answer to the question of literary genre than other possible classifications and correct identification of genre is now recognised as the crucial first step in exegesis.

The case for the Gospel’s composition for a particular community is strengthened, for example, by recognising its liturgical genre. Following on from this some of the other open questions might be answered by admitting the possibility of liturgical alternatives in the text; for example, alternative farewell discourses from the selection of John 14-16, perhaps.

Similarly, if we stop insisting on sacramental themes in John, we also overcome one of the major objections to its priority.

None of this necessarily detracts from the results of other areas of Johannine exegesis but it does open up other perspectives.

It also impinges on the history of early Christian worship: perhaps the liturgical texts from the Didache are not our oldest liturgical texts, but our oldest liturgical texts of a particular kind.

Finally, it impinges on contemporary liturgy - emphatically not to raise futile questions, let alone doubts, concerning traditional liturgy - but to make the more important point that if Christian groups, ecumenical groups especially, simply meet and read John together they are continuing a liturgical tradition as ancient, as truly Apostolic and sanctifying as anything we can recapture from the dawn of Christianity.