Abstract
Despite the distance in time and space that separates twenty-first century readers from the people in biblical stories, our own everyday experience equips us to understand these events as traumas. In this essay, trauma theory will be applied to illuminate the much-contested process by which the Johannine community developed an identity different from, and in opposition to, the Jews among whom they apparently lived.
The New Testament recounts numerous traumatic situations, shocking events that arouse strong emotions of fear and that abruptly change the lives and even identities of those who experience them. In Matthew, Joseph is astonished by the unexpected pregnancy of his betrothed, and even more surprised when the angel dissuades him from a quiet divorce (Matt 1:19–20); in Luke it is Mary who is shocked to learn that she will conceive a child, despite the fact that she has not known a man (Luke 1:34). In Mark, the women who come to mourn at Jesus’ tomb are startled into silence by the absence of his body (Mark 16:8). Paul’s dramatic transformation from a persecutor of the church to the Apostle to the Gentiles was the result of a trauma on the road to Damascus: a flash of heavenly light followed by the voice of Jesus (Acts 9:3–6).
Despite the distance in time and space that separates us twenty-first century readers from the people in these stories, our own everyday experience equips us to understand these events as traumas. We can readily identify with the characters and imagine the shock, fear, or astonishment that they felt in these circumstances. We can accept the possibility that dramatic life changes followed upon these experiences, whether they are described (as for Joseph, Mary, and Paul) or not (as in the case of the women at the tomb). What, then, can trauma theory, with its specialized definitions and complex analyses, contribute to our understanding of the New Testament? To address this question fully would take one, or perhaps several, monographs. The present short exploration will focus on one specific Gospel—the Gospel of John—and one specific issue: Can trauma theory help to illuminate the much-contested process by which the Johannine community developed an identity different from, and in opposition to, the Jews among whom they apparently lived?
Trauma and the Johannine Community
The circumstances and raison d’être of the Johannine community may sound like arcane topics to those outside the field, but within Johannine studies, and the larger field of New Testament scholarship, they loom large. The Gospel of John has often been viewed as the foundational text of a group—the Johannine community—that was outside the mainstream of the first-century church. 1 A history of this community was constructed by J. L. Martyn, who argued that the Gospel’s narrative and theology was shaped by a specific experience: the expulsion of Johannine Christians from the synagogue. 2 The purpose of the Gospel was therefore to help the community cope with and understand this trauma by showing that the experience of expulsion was integrally related to Jesus’ own life experiences. 3 The expulsion theory has been used to explain several important themes in the Gospel, such as Johannine Christology and the representation of Moses. 4 In particular, the Gospel’s anti-Judaism has been explained as a response to the trauma of expulsion. Harold Ellens argues that the Gospel’s negative portrayal of the Jews was “the only way the community could maintain psychic equilibrium in the aftermath of the trauma of expulsion.” 5
Despite its widespread acceptance, 6 the expulsion hypothesis is problematic on methodological and historical grounds. 7 Nevertheless, it does cohere with a particular definition of trauma as an event that “involved ‘actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others’ and if the individual’s response at the time involved ‘intense fear, helplessness, or horror’.” 8 According to this definition, fear is the determinative factor in determining the presence of trauma.
The Gospel describes several situations in which characters experience fear, and perhaps even helplessness and horror. In 7:13, the crowd does not talk about Jesus openly “for fear of the Jews”; in 20:19, the disciples lock themselves into a room “for fear of the Jews.” John 9:22 and 12:42 describe the fear of being put out of the synagogue (literally, becoming an aposynagōgos, one who is outside the synagogue) as motivation for silence (9:22) or secrecy (12:42), whereas in 16:2, Jesus utters a prophecy that seems calculated to instill fear not only of expulsion but even of death: “They will put you of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God.”
Other definitions of trauma, however, draw attention away from expulsion towards other potentially traumatic events. One such definition focuses on the profoundly shocking, unimaginable nature of the event itself. Ron Eyerman defines trauma as the “impact of shocking occurrences which profoundly affect an individual’s life.” 9 Greg Forter uses the term “punctual traumas” to refer to “historical events of such singularity, magnitude, and horror that they can be read as shocks that disable the psychic system.” 10 The experience may be individual (the death of a loved one) or collective (the Holocaust, Hiroshima, slavery), experienced first-hand (e.g., by first generation survivors) or second- or third-hand, when transmitted by trusted authorities as part of group identity. 11
But an originating event is not enough. Also needed is an interpretative reaction that labels that event a trauma. Cultural traumas, notes Eyerman, are not a single event but an ongoing process of meaning-making and attribution. 12 Philip Alexander emphasizes that “trauma is a socially mediated attribution. The attribution may be made in real time, as an event unfolds; it may also be made before the event occurs, as an adumbration, or after the event has concluded, as a post-hoc reconstruction.” 13 For Eyerman and Alexander, traumas are socially constructed. Traumatic status is attributed to a specific event—whether historical or not—when identity, which Alexander defines as a group’s “sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go,” is perceived as being threatened or otherwise affected by that event. 14
Proponents of the expulsion theory argue that their hypothesis is strengthened by these definitions of trauma: the Johannine community constructed their group identity in relationship to or as a consequence of the trauma of exclusion from the synagogue. Within the context of the Gospel, however, there is another event that fits the bill: Jesus’ passion and crucifixion. Indeed, it has been argued that “the organizing framework for the New Testament is that of the survival of trauma and growth in its aftermath. The central trauma is the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus of Nazareth.” 15
The Gospel’s insistence that Jesus’ death was a crucial part of God’s plan for the salvation of humankind—an expression of God’s love for the world (3:16)—suggests that at least some of its audience saw it as a shocking human tragedy. When Jesus compares the imminent suffering of his followers to the pain of a woman in labor, he acknowledges the potentially traumatic nature of the believers’ experience in the aftermath of his crucifixion. He reminds his audience, however, that “when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world” (16:20). So, too, in time, their pain will turn to joy, and indeed, that time for the Johannine community has already come (e.g., 5:25).
Of course, we are not compelled to choose between expulsion and crucifixion; the Johannine community may have experienced multiple traumas, as do many and perhaps most individuals during their lifetimes. Those who apply trauma theory to literary texts, however, do not simply posit that the texts reflect traumas. Rather, they argue that these texts are in some fundamental way stimulated and shaped by trauma, or, to be more precise, by the interpretation of a real (or imagined) event as traumatic.
If so, then the identification of a trauma by one or another definition must meet an exegetical test: are either (or both) the traumas of Jesus’ death and the community’s hypothetical expulsion from the synagogue central themes in this Gospel? In both cases, the answer would seem to be negative.
Certainly Jesus’ passion looms large for the Fourth Gospel, as it does for the other three. Nevertheless, in comparison to the Synoptics, John’s Gospel does not construe these events as a central trauma for the community or, indeed, for Jesus. Absent are the disciples’ shocked response to Jesus’ prophecy of his own death (Mark 8:32–33; contrast John 12:27), Jesus’ anguished Gethsemane prayer: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matt 26:39, 42), and his anguished last words: “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which the narrator translates “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; see Ps 22:1). John’s Jesus is cool, calm and collected, accepting and unafraid—un-traumatized—by his impending death, as he wishes his followers to be. While Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension are crucial to the story, and to John’s theology, the Gospel implicitly cautions against viewing the death itself as a trauma. The Gospel of John therefore minimizes or domesticates the traumatic impact of Jesus’ death. Jesus’ death is an essential part of the divine plan; Jesus himself faces his death without fear or anxiety. His disciples, and the Gospel’s audiences, are asked to do the same.
Similarly, the fear of expulsion, or a more generalized fear of the Jews, cannot account for most of the narrative and discourse material in the Gospel of John. It is true that the Gospel of John is far more preoccupied with the Jews than the other Gospels are, and that, overall, the Gospel expresses a rather high level of hostility toward the Jews, who are portrayed as lying, murdering children of the devil (see especially 8:44). 16 The motif of expulsion may be prominent in Johannine scholarship, but it does not take center stage in the Gospel itself.
Neither Jesus’ death nor expulsion from the synagogue is at the core of this Gospel’s story and theology. And yet, a mood of tension, fear, anxiety, and reckoning hover over the Gospel as a whole. Something of world-shattering magnitude has taken place. The Gospel proclaims a radical rupture with the past that requires human beings to break with their prior identities and communities and to reconfigure their understanding of the present and future, life and death. Most important, this event demands a new relationship between the divine and human realms and a rewriting of the covenant between God and humankind.
Incarnation as Trauma
The understanding of trauma as a profound rupture with the past corresponds to yet another definition proposed by trauma theorists. For Geoffrey Hartman, the essence of trauma is “the rupture of the symbolic order.” 17 For Roger Luckhurst, “trauma violently opens passageways between systems that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections that distress or confound.” 18 Caruth suggests that, for Sigmund Freud, the rupture is not only symbolic but also historical: “In [Freud’s] rethinking of Jewish beginnings, then, the future is no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through a profound discontinuity. The exodus from Egypt, which shapes the meaning of the Jewish past, is a departure that is both a radical break and the establishment of a history.” 19
The Fourth Gospel is not subtle about the event that shakes the world order but rather describes it at the very outset. The poetic prologue to the Gospel (1:1–5) introduces readers and hearers to the pre-existent Word who was with God and indeed was God. This Word was the active agent of creation, without whom “not one thing came into the world” (1:3). And here is the crucial point that makes all of the above possible, and indeed crucial, for human beings: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (1:14). It is the incarnation that constitutes the radical rupture with the past and forges a new path for the future.
It is the incarnation that breaks open the boundaries between the divine and human realms. The Son of Man constitutes the ladder between heaven and earth upon which the angels ascend and descend (1:51). The incarnation forces a choice upon humankind. Those who receive, accept, know and believe in the Word—and that the Word became flesh and dwelt among humans—become children of God “born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (1:13). They glimpse the divine and believe that “the hour is coming and now is” when they, too, will cross the seemingly firm boundary between life and death to reside with God’s Son in their father’s mansion (14:2). Those who do not accept, however, “are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (3:18).
Whether the ancient authors and audiences of this Gospel would have used the word trauma, a Greek term meaning “wound,” to describe Jesus’ incarnation is impossible to determine. In this essay, however, I hope to show that the Gospel, as a literary work, constructs this event in ways that resonate with elements of trauma theory as it has been applied to literary texts. The analysis will rely primarily on the work of Cathy Caruth, who is widely regarded as a principal architect of literary trauma theory, and specifically her masterful analysis of Freud’s essay Moses and Monotheism. 20 The first step will be to establish the relevance of Caruth’s exposition of trauma theory to the Fourth Gospel and, in particular, to the concept of the incarnation. This will be done by examining three sets of oppositions, discussed in Caruth’s essay, that are particularly applicable to the Gospel of John: departure and return, knowing and not knowing, and life and death. Next, the essay will consider how the trauma of the incarnation functions in the construction of identity implied by the Fourth Gospel. The essay will conclude with an assessment of the relevance of trauma theory to the New Testament more broadly.
Trauma Theory, Incarnation, and the Gospel of John
1. Departure and Return
In Moses and Monotheism, Caruth tells us, Freud “connects the explanation of the Jews’ persecution to their very liberation, the return from captivity to freedom.” 21 On the basis of the exodus account, Freud posits that the “history of a culture, and its relation to a politics, [are] inextricably bound up with the notion of departure” due to the nature of departure as traumatic rupture with the past. 22 For Freud, “the exodus from Egypt, which shapes the meaning of the Jewish past, is a departure that is both a radical break and the establishment of a history.” 23 From this perspective, “the future is no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through a profound discontinuity.” 24
The Gospel of John presents a double departure: the departure of the Word from the realm of the Father as he enters the world, and Jesus’ departure from the world as he returns to the Father. The pattern is summarized in 13:3, which declares that Jesus knew “that he had come from God and was going to God.”
The view that the passion—including betrayal, trial, and crucifixion—is the central trauma in the Gospel focuses on the second part of this narrative arc: the Son’s departure from the human realm and return to the divine realm. But Jesus’ departure from the world would have traumatized only Jesus himself and his immediate circle of friends and relations were it not for his first departure—the incarnation—and what it signified for humankind. It is the incarnation that constitutes the primary trauma insofar as it requires human beings to reorder their understanding of the world, their place in the cosmos, and their relationship with God; following Freud, the incarnation creates the possibility of history for the community that sees itself as implicated in and addressed by this Gospel.
2. Knowing and Not Knowing
Caruth begins her book Unclaimed Experience with Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the story of Tancred, a twelfth-century Norman crusader who becomes known as the “Prince of Galilee.” Tancred accidentally kills his beloved Clorinda (she had disguised herself as an enemy knight), and then, upon slashing a tall tree in a magic forest, hears her soul cry out that he has wounded her once again. Freud comments, “Tancred does not only repeat his act but, in repeating it, he for the first time hears a voice that cries out to him to see what he has done. The voice of his beloved addresses him and, in this address, bears witness to the past he has unwittingly repeated.” 25
For both Freud and Caruth, this story demonstrates why literature is an appropriate expression of trauma. The traumatic experience, they assert, cannot be fully known at the very moment of its occurrence; instead, “it emerges subconsciously through dreams and other psychological means. Writing about these experiences makes it possible to know them, and to integrate them in some way into one’s own identity. At the same time, however, it creates a paradox, for the language of such literature ‘defies, even as it claims, our understanding.’” 26 Literature therefore engages us in the experience of trauma precisely because it expresses and enacts a “complex relationship between knowing and not knowing.” 27
Following Freud, Caruth and other trauma theorists refer primarily to the subject (Tancred and all those who suffer trauma) as the ones who, through literature or psychoanalysis, simultaneously know and do not know. The theme of knowing and not knowing is also central to the Gospel of John, but with one crucial difference. In John, the subject, Jesus, is the one who knows. It is others who do not know yet (the disciples) or choose not to know at all (unbelievers). The disciples’ knowledge is necessarily partial until after Jesus’ return to the Father, and the full narrative arc is completed; the unbelievers, identified as Ioudaioi (Jews), choose not to know and will face the consequences of that choice unless they choose otherwise.
By means of this Gospel, the narrator, or implied author, 28 challenges its own audience to choose between knowing and not knowing. Unlike the disciples throughout most of the Gospel, the readers are privy to knowledge of the incarnation from the prologue onwards; they do not need to wait until the end of the story. Such knowing, the Gospel proclaims, will transform their lives in ways they cannot fully know otherwise (20:30–31).
Knowledge of Jesus’ pre-existent and divine origins is crucial to understanding the fundamental christological claim in this Gospel: the mutual abiding of Father and Son. In 10:38 Jesus urges the Jews to “know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” He assures his disciples, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9), and promises that they will reach understanding: “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (14:20). He testifies on their behalf to the Father: “For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me” (17:8).
In the Gospel of John, Freud’s paradox of knowing and not knowing is untangled: those who do not know can know, after which, they are “in the know.” The paradox, however, creates an irony: those who claim to know do not know. In 8:14, Jesus tells a group of Jews: “I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going.” The Jews themselves ironically acknowledge their ignorance in 9:29: “We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man we do not know where he comes from.”
If the disciples are the ones who know (or will know), the Jews are the ones who refuse to know and therefore do not and cannot know. In John 8:19 Jesus declares that the Jews he is speaking to know neither him nor the Father: “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” He reiterates this point and develops it further in 8:55: “But you have not known him. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word.” Indeed, it is the Jews’ inability or unwillingness to know that will cause them to persecute the disciples after Jesus’ death: “But all these things they will do to you on account of my name because they do not know him who sent me” (15:21).
Knowing and not knowing are therefore intimately related to the narrative’s central conflict between Jesus and the Jews. Yet even those who know do not truly know but can know only insofar as that knowledge is conveyed and mediated by the Gospel itself. It is only Jesus who knows directly; others must know through his word, the witness of the disciples who heard him, and, most important for this Gospel, through the words of the Beloved Disciple whose testimony, John claims, is recorded within the Gospel itself (21:24–25).
3. Life and Death
In Caruth’s analysis of literary trauma, death and life, like knowing and not knowing, are intertwined. Caruth comments that “the story of trauma. . . as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from its referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on a life.” 29 The tales of trauma, she notes, oscillate “between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.” 30
For the author of John, knowing and not knowing makes the crucial difference between (eternal) life and everlasting death. As Jesus states in 17:3: “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” It is the death of Jesus, and its aftermath—the return to the Father—that provide a path to eternal life, but only for those who know and believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. The death of Jesus is also essential for the coming of the Paraclete or Advocate, who will remain with the community until Jesus’ return (14:26; 15:26): “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (16:7). Death and life are thus intimately intertwined in at least two ways: Jesus’ death is essential for his own return to his pre-existent life with the Father; Jesus’ death is also essential for the eternal life of the believers.
The disciples declare themselves ready to die with Jesus (11:16), but that is not what he wants. Rather, he wants them to live, now and forever, in the cosmic realm where he dwells with the Father (14:2). John 20:30–31 insists that the signs written in “this book”—the Gospel—are written so that “you” (plural)—the readers and hearers—may believe that Jesus is the Messiah and Son of God, and, in doing so, have life in his name. The reading and rereading of the book serves as a sign that signifies and bears witness to Jesus’ incarnation, his life in this world, and its role as a hiatus in the life that he shared with the Father, before his incarnation, and after his departure.
One might even go so far as to suggest that the Fourth Gospel not only testifies to the resurrection but in fact is the medium of or vehicle for that resurrection, en-fleshing the Word anew every time the text is read. Geoffrey Hartman notes the macabre nature of this aspect of trauma literature: “The more we try to animate books, the more they reveal their resemblance to the dead—who are made to address us in epitaphs or whom we address in thought or dream. Every time we read we are in danger of waking the dead, whose return can be ghoulish as well as comforting.” 31 But for the Gospel of John, this aspect of the Gospel as a book is a positive aspect that provides comfort, as well as substantive instruction and inspiration, to later believers.
Trauma, the Self, and the Other
1. The Self
As a document of trauma, the Gospel demands a reorientation of the self and the community. John’s readers are asked to situate themselves in history vis-à-vis the rupture caused by the incarnation: will they be stuck in the mundane world, or will they enter the new reality? For John, Jesus’ incarnation signifies that God has redrawn the terms of his covenant with humankind. Whereas the covenant with the people of Israel—the Jews—had previously rested on genealogy (Abrahamic descent) and obedience to Torah, it now rests on belief in Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. Although Torah remains authoritative, its principal importance now lies in its testimony that the incarnate Word is the agent of salvation. Even the most pious and learned Jews will fall short unless they recognize that their holy books point to Jesus as God’s Son. As Jesus tells the Jews, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (5:39–40).
The terms of the covenant relationship with God are the crux of the difficult exchange between Jesus and a group of Jews in John 8. These Jews put forward their claims to covenantal relationship: they are children of Abraham, and indeed of God, and have never been enslaved. 32 But Jesus asserts that those who do not know that Jesus is the Messiah have been expelled from the covenant community. It is only by and through Jesus that humankind can be in relationship with God. As he proclaims in 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” In sending his Son into the world, God annulled the earlier covenantal contract with humankind and replaced it with his own Son. For the Fourth Gospel, knowing and believing in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God—the pre-existent Word who became flesh, entered the human realm, did signs and held discourses, and then returned to the Father—determines the fate of the individual, and, collectively, provides a new basis for group identity for those who believe.
2. The Other: Potential Believers
As Caruth comments, however, the literature of trauma engages not only the self but also the other. Indeed, the trauma of the self leads to an “encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.” 33 Like other literary works, the Gospel invites its hearers and readers to experience the trauma that it describes, that is, to turn from being “other” to being the “self” that, through the medium of the Gospel, has engaged in the transformation required by the traumatic rupture with the past. Forter comments that “[c]ritics deploying the category of trauma have stressed in particular the power of texts that seek less to represent traumatizing events—since representation risks, on this view, betraying the bewildering, imperfectly representational character of traumatic memory—than to transmit directly to the reader the experience of traumatic disruption.” 34
Central to this experience is the concept of latency. In trauma theory, latency refers to a well-known and widespread aspect of trauma: the victim does not feel traumatized at the moment of the “punctual trauma” that he or she has experienced. Rather, the psychological and emotional impacts that we normally call “trauma” set in only later. 35 Whereas physical traumas or wounds can appear at the moment of trauma, trauma’s psychological manifestations are not coincident with but subsequent to the events that cause them.
Latency is a factor in the Gospel of John in two main ways. First and most obvious, the Fourth Gospel, like the Synoptics, postdates the events it recounts by several decades. It is likely that in the interim, stories of Jesus circulated orally until they came to the point of written expression. 36 Nevertheless, even such oral narratives, no matter how early they may be, reflect a period of latency from the time of the incarnation. By the time Jesus is visible to anyone within the narrative world, such as John the Baptist or the disciples, the incarnation is a past event inaccessible to direct knowledge.
Second, latency functions as a theme within the Gospel itself. The Gospel asserts that those who were alive in Jesus’ time could not fully understand the import of Jesus’ existence and his relationship with God until after his death, that is, after the entire narrative arc from departure to return had been completed. The narrator states, for example, that the disciples did not understand Jesus’ words after the cleansing of the temple scene until afterwards: ”When therefore he was raised from the dead his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken” (2:22). At the conclusion of the ministry, the narrator indicates that “[h]is disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him” (12:16). And at the Last Supper, Jesus himself tells his disciples, as he sets out to wash their feet: “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand” (13:7).
Later readers and hearers experience a second degree of latency. For them the central trauma is not accessible except by reading or hearing the Gospel, which in itself, as we have seen, is temporally distant from the traumatic event itself. Yet the Gospel does not consider this doubled latency to be a negative factor for its audiences. On the contrary, as the Johannine Jesus gently chides “doubting” Thomas: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29).
3. Traumatizing the Untraumatized “Other”
Latency is therefore an integral part of the experience that this Gospel creates for its audiences, the “others” who are urged to take on the trauma as their own. But “others” play another, less benign role in this Gospel: as those who do not acknowledge the incarnation through the pattern of departure and return. These others—identified as “the Jews”—do not know the Son and therefore are estranged from the Father in life and in death. 37 To them the doors to the divine relationship, previously accessible through belief in and performance of the Torah as God’s revealed will, are now firmly shut. In the language of trauma theory, their failure to believe can be seen as a failure to enter into and appropriate the trauma that has formed this Gospel and its community. In remaining thus “untraumatized” by the incarnation and its aftermath, they are cut off from its transformative power; they remain caught in the paradigm of salvation which the incarnation had ruptured and shut out from the new paradigm which this traumatic event has ushered in.
At the same time as it forcefully articulates the implications of the incarnational trauma that has produced it, the Fourth Gospel also threatens eternal condemnation for those who reject its message. The Jews within the story world are not unaware of Jesus’ claims about his own identity as God’s incarnate Word; they just do not believe them. For them, the incarnation is a misguided fantasy or even a fabrication that violates their monotheistic belief in the unity and uniqueness of the God of Israel, and their commitment to Torah as the content of their covenant with God. From the Gospel’s perspective, on the other hand, the Jews’ rejection of the claim that Jesus is the divine Word and God’s incarnate Son severs them from God and reveals that the devil, not God, is their true father.
The Gospel warns that these non-believers will experience pain, death, and eternal condemnation (3:18). This dire prophecy is not fulfilled within the Gospel’s narrative world itself, but it has been amply attested within the history of Christian anti-Semitism, which has perpetuated the Gospel’s portrait of unbelieving Jews as the devil’s offspring. 38 Of course, neither the Gospel writer nor his earliest audiences could have foreseen the this-worldly consequences of this depiction. Nevertheless, in positing a divine author and a universal and eternal scope for the process of incarnational rupture, the Gospel does not refrain from imagining the traumatic consequences for those who disagree with this interpretation of history.
Conclusion: Trauma Theory and New Testament Studies
At this point it is possible to step back and consider the question with which we began: can trauma theory help us understand the Johannine community and the processes by which it developed a unique identity? The answer seems to be a modest yes, to some extent. If one accepts the premise that the Gospel of John reflects upon a central traumatic event, then, I have argued, the best candidate for that event is the incarnation. It is the incarnation that is at stake in the conflict between Jesus and the unbelieving Jews that propels the narrative; it is the incarnation that transforms Jesus’ death into a trauma that affects not just a small group but the entire Christian church, and that provides the reason, or excuse, for the Jews (within the Gospel if not necessarily within history) to put out from the synagogue “anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah” (9:22). The trauma of the incarnation contributes to the creation of a new identity for the believing community by rewriting the terms of God’s covenant with humankind. In accepting the terms of this new covenant, the community must now define itself over against, and in dire opposition to, those who remain committed to the “old” covenant.
One cannot draw conclusions with regard to the entire New Testament on the basis of one Gospel. Nevertheless, a few comments can be made about the Gospel of John that may be relevant to the New Testament more broadly. First, in our lives and in trauma theory, trauma is generally viewed in a negative light, a life-and-death crisis that is disorienting and destabilizing. For the Fourth Gospel, by contrast, the incarnation, God’s revelation of the divine Word in the flesh, is the most exhilarating, life-giving event imaginable. The disorientation and destabilization caused by the trauma of the incarnation are essential for salvation and constitute the foundation for the renewed divine–human covenant.
It is important to note, however, that the ways in which we identify and talk about trauma in relation to the New Testament will depend to some degree on the definitions that we adopt and the theorists we choose to follow. In this sense, there is circularity to the enterprise; I chose the work of Caruth because of its interest and importance, but also because of its coherence with my own prior perspectives on the Fourth Gospel. Others may find the work of other theorists more appealing and come to different conclusions about the Fourth Gospel or other New Testament texts. And while I have argued that the incarnation is the central trauma for this Gospel, I would agree that for the other Gospels, as well as for Paul, it is the crucifixion, Jesus’ death, that constitutes the trauma that has shaped their writings to a great extent. 39
These reflections suggest that trauma and narratives of trauma may play an important role in the formation of the collective identity of nascent Christian groups and thereby also in the murky and contested process of the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity. This thought suggests that trauma theory may provide a way to think and talk about the role that sharing, or not sharing, in common traumas might have in relationships among or within communities. One may speculate, for example, that the church fathers’ claim that the destruction of the temple was not a trauma for the church, and the Jews’ claim that Jesus’ life and death were irrelevant to their own covenant with God, meant that separation was inevitable.
Of course, it is hardly news that the incarnation is an important theme in the Gospel of John, or that the Johannine story and theology are structured on the pattern of departure from and return to the divine realm. 40 In that sense, trauma theory is not necessary for understanding this Gospel’s narrative and Christology. Nor is trauma theory essential in order to connect the themes of knowing/not knowing and life/death and to perceive the Gospel’s vilification of the Jews who refuse to believe. The Gospel itself is explicit with regard to these concepts, which have therefore been examined in numerous studies. Nevertheless, trauma theory, like other methods, provides a way of looking with fresh eyes at a familiar text, and perhaps providing a new way to imagine the impact that this text might have had on its original audiences.
Footnotes
1
This view was articulated persuasively by Wayne A. Meeks, “Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972): 44–72. For the argument that the Gospel was written for the entire church rather than a specific group, see Richard Bauckham, The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). For a critique of Bauckham’s position, see Adele Reinhartz, “Gospel Audiences: Variations on a Theme,” in The Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity (ed. Edward W. Klink; London: T&T Clark, 2010), 134–52.
2
The classic exposition of the expulsion hypothesis is J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (3rd ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003).
3
Ibid., 89.
4
Ibid., 103–8.
5
J. Harold Ellens and Wayne G Rollins, Psychology and the Bible: A New Way to Read the Scriptures (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 120. This is a widespread view; see, for example, Kevin Quast, Reading the Gospel of John: An Introduction (New York: Paulist, 1991), 148. Some urge caution in reading the Gospel’s hostile comments about Jews as an understandable response to the trauma of expulsion. See, for example, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2007), 53.
6
Although many scholars have now backed away from full acceptance of the expulsion theory, this view remains a staple in New Testament introductions. For an account of the journey of this hypothesis, see Robert Kysar’s chapter, “The Expulsion from the Synagogue: The Tale of a Theory,” in Voyages with John: Charting the Fourth Gospel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 237–45.
7
Adele Reinhartz, “The Johannine Community and Its Jewish Neighbors: A Reappraisal,” in “What Is John?”: Volume 2: Literary and Social Readings of the Fourth Gospel (ed. Fernando F. Segovia; SBLSymS 7; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 111–38.
8
Joanna Collicutt, “Bringing the Academic Discipline of Psychology to Bear on the Study of the Bible,” Journal of Theological Studies 63 (2012): 1–48 (43). Collicutt notes that these are the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), known in the field as DSM-IV.
9
Ron Eyerman, “Social Theory and Trauma,” Acta Sociologica 56 (2013): 41–53 (41).
10
Greg Forter, “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form,” Narrative 15 (2007): 259–85 (259).
11
This would be true of converts to Judaism who take on an identification with national tragedies such as the destruction of the temple, the expulsion from Spain, and the Holocaust, as part of their participation in a new group identity. See Hiro Saito, “Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma,” Sociological Theory 24 (2006): 353–76; Thomas Degloma, “Expanding Trauma through Space and Time: Mapping the Rhetorical Strategies of Trauma Carrier Groups,” Social Psychology Quarterly 72 (2009): 105–22.
12
Eyerman, “Social Theory and Trauma,” 43.
13
Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman et al.; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1–30 (8).
14
Ibid.,10. See also Adele Reinhartz, “The Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple as a Trauma for Nascent Christianity,” in Trauma and Traumatization in Individual and Collective Dimensions: Insights from Biblical Studies and Beyond (ed. Eve-Marie Becker, Jan Dochhorn, and Else K. Holt; Studia Aarhusiana Neotestamentica 2; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 276–88.
15
Collicutt, “Bringing,” 45.
16
Adele Reinhartz, “‘Jews’ and Jews in the Fourth Gospel,” in Anti-Judaism and the Fourth Gospel: Papers of the Leuven Colloquium, 2000 (ed. Reimund Bieringer, Didier Pollefeyt, and F. Vandecasteele-Vanneuville; Jewish and Christian Heritage Series; Leuven: Brill, 2001), 341–56.
17
Geoffrey H. Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” New Literary History 26 (1995): 537–63 (543).
18
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3.
19
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 14.
20
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Knopf, 1939), cited in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 10–24.
21
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 12.
22
Ibid., 13–14.
23
Ibid., 14.
24
Ibid.
25
Quoted by Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 2.
26
Ibid., 5.
27
Ibid., 3.
28
On the definitions of implied author and narrator, see R. Alan Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Foundations and Facets: New Testament; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 71–73.
29
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7.
30
Ibid.
31
Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge,” 548.
32
This latter reference, often taken as evidence of (John’s views of) the Jews as duplicitous liars, may better be read as a statement of their commitment to monotheism. See Adele Reinhartz, “John 8:31–59 from a Jewish Perspective,” in Remembering for the Future 2000: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocides (ed. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell-Meynard; 3 vols.; London: Palgrave, 2001), 2:787–97.
33
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 8.
34
Forter, “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth,” 260; emphasis orig.
35
Laurence J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, and Mark Barad, Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 323.
36
James D. G. Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013).
37
For discussion, see Robert Kysar, “The ‘Other’ in Johannine Literature,” in idem, Voyages with John, 227–35; Adele Reinhartz, Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John (New York: Continuum, 2001), 82.
38
The classic study, written in the midst of the Holocaust, is Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943). The most recent broadly disseminated example of this imagery is in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film, “The Passion of the Christ” (2004). See Adele Reinhartz, Jesus of Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194.
39
Frequently quoted is the statement made by Martin Kähler in 1892, describing the Gospel of Mark as a passion narrative with an extended introduction. See Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ (trans. Karl E. Braaten; repr.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1964), 80, n. 11.
40
This is a major theme in Rudolf Bultmann’s classic commentary on the Gospel of John. See Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971). See also Dwight Moody Smith, The Composition and Order of the Fourth Gospel: Bultmann’s Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).