Abstract
The provocative exchanges between Jesus and his interlocutors in John 8 and 10 both climax in the interlocutors rejecting Jesus’s claims and seeking to stone him before tersely describing Jesus’s escape from a premature death: in John 8:59, Jesus hides himself and departs from the temple, whereas in John 10:39, he merely departs. These enigmatic descriptions of departure create “narrative silences.” Considering ancient expectations for violent divine retribution against those who failed to recognize and honor a deity’s manifestation, I argue these “narrative silences” would have provoked an ancient audience to anticipate violent divine judgment. John, however, subverts this expectation. While maintaining that Jesus’s departure from the temple, and, later, from the world, are divine judgment in the form of the removal of the divine presence, John nevertheless presents this judgment as distinctively non-violent. This non-violent divine judgment in turn furthers the Gospel’s aim of convincing the audience to accept the Gospel’s claim that Jesus is the enfleshed divine presence.
Even among the distinctively long and acrimonious exchanges between Jesus and Jewish interlocutors that characterize John’s Gospel, the debates between Jesus and the Jews in the temple courts in John 7–8 and in Solomon’s colonnade in John 10 particularly stand out. 1 Complex interpretive issues proliferate both exchanges and have generated rich and fruitful debates among scholars. The full theological and interpretative import of each exchange’s enigmatic conclusion, however, is comparatively neglected. 2 Both episodes close in a similar manner: the Jews attempt to stone Jesus for blasphemy, yet Jesus, without any elaboration as to how, escapes (8:59; 10:39). John 8:59 states only that when the Jews took up stones to stone him, “Jesus hid himself and went out from the temple.” 3 Similarly, John 10:39 merely states that “they were seeking again to seize him, and he went out from their hands.” 4
For many Johannine commentators, these two instances of Jesus’s serendipitous escape merit little comment beyond drawing a connection back to John 7:30, which states that the Jews were unable to seize Jesus since his hour had not yet come. 5 Consequently, commentators often (briefly) note that Jesus could not be arrested due to the divine necessity of his death occurring through the crucifixion. 6 Although this observation remains coherent with John’s narrative, it essentially relegates Jesus’s escapes from his would-be executioners to a footnote to the principal episodes, so that the escapes primarily enable a transition to the next scene. 7 But would the Gospel’s early audiences have likewise understood Jesus’s escape from a premature end merely as a scene transition? 8
I contend that in the authorial audience’s symbolic world, these (apparently) understated descriptions of Jesus’s escape from attempted violence could have activated expectations for a similarly violent divine response, which the Gospel subverts, thereby propelling the audience toward a particular interpretation of Jesus’s death and absence as divine judgment on the unbelieving world. 9 I make this argument in the following three moves. First, I highlight several literary examples from across the ancient Mediterranean basin to illustrate a common expectation: a failure to recognize and respond adequately to a manifestation of divine presence merited a response of (often violent) divine wrath. Second, I show how John subverts this expectation for divine violence while nevertheless maintaining that God does respond in judgment by removing the divine presence (in the person of Jesus) from the temple. 10 Third, I briefly draw attention to several implications for how one reads the remainder of the Gospel’s narrative considering Jesus’s departure as an act of divine abandonment.
Rejection of the divine and divine wrath
The expectation that deities intervene in human affairs and could and did manifest themselves in a manner discernible to humans (whether in the physical world or in dreams, visions, etc.) proliferated in the ancient Mediterranean basin. 11 The records of these divine manifestations, commonly described by scholars as epiphanies, in literary, oral, and visual sources shaped the symbolic universe through which ancient audiences would have likely heard the depiction of Jesus in John’s Gospel. 12 It remains difficult to link John’s portrait of Jesus to Greco-Roman conceptions of epiphanic appearances apart from considering the debate over Ernst Käsemann’s reading of John. Käsemann stressed that John depicts Jesus as a divine epiphany in the sense that Jesus’s humanity was only a “costume” for one who appeared to humanity without “being subjected to earthly conditions.” 13 While I agree with those scholars who have countered Käsemann’s assessment and recognized that John maintains that Jesus is fully human, John’s concomitant emphasis on Jesus’s divinity nevertheless suggests that the authorial audience would likely observe parallels between John’s Gospel and epiphanic narratives. 14 These epiphanic narratives, originating across a wide geographic and temporal range, consistently focus on the question of whether a given narrative’s characters will recognize the deity in its chosen form. 15 Failure to “discern the deity” was rarely innocuous, for it resulted in a failure to honor the deity rightly. 16 Consequently, those who failed to discern the manifesting deity routinely experienced divine wrath, often enacted through violence and destruction. Consider the following examples.
First, Ovid recounts a tale, told to justify the gods’ divine power to a skeptic, concerning the appearance of Jupiter and Mercury in a village in the Phrygian hills. The two gods visit one thousand houses seeking hospitality and are rejected at each until they come to the home of Baucis and Philemon. The couple, though conscious of their poverty, endeavor to show as much hospitality to their visitors as they are able. Yet throughout the meal, they notice that the wine bowl never depletes but is miraculously refilled. Rightly apprehending that their visitors are not mere common folk, the couple decide to kill their goose in order not to offend their guests through their poverty. When the gods reveal their identity to the couple, they differentiate between the couple, who has responded with hospitality and rightly discerned the divinity of their guests, and the other villagers, who impiously rejected the divine visitors (Metam. 8.688–93). The gods proceed to flood the entire valley, sparing only Baucis and Philemon’s home, which is transformed into a temple at which the couple serve as priests.
Second, similarly, Apollodorus recounts how Zeus, disguised as a laborer, came to test the piety of Lycaon and his sons (Library 3.8.1). The sons, however, slaughtered a village boy and mixed the child’s organs (σπλάγχνα) with the meat from the sacrificial animal. Zeus, in anger at the impiety, strikes both Lycaon and his sons with thunderbolts. In a version of this tale preserved by Nicolaus Damascenus (Fragm. 43, FHG 3.378), Lycaon knew that Zeus frequently visited in disguise to test his piety. 17 The sons, however, commit the cannibalistic act intentionally to test whether their visitor was truly a deity. Zeus’s violent response, therefore, confirms both his divinity and the foolishness of testing a deity. In both the tale of Baucis and Philemon and that of Lycaon, Zeus responds to impiety and the failure to recognize and honor his epiphany with anger and violent judgment. Yet, Zeus was not the only deity understood to respond violently to human rejection.
Third, Euripides’s famous tragedy The Bacchae describes Dionysus’s violent wrath on his homeland, which had rejected him. 18 In the drama, Dionysus (son of Zeus and Semele) comes to his mother’s homeland, the kingdom of Cadmus (his mother Semele’s father), over which Pentheus (technically Dionysus’s cousin) now rules. Although throughout Asia Dionysus has been recognized as “God manifest to men” (22 [LCL, Way]), his mother’s family rejects his divine parenthood, instead insinuating that he is the illegitimate son of a promiscuous mother (27–30). 19 Pentheus, in a manner similar to the Jews’ response to Jesus in John’s account, rejects Dionysus’s claim to divinity and argues that he should be stoned (355–57; cf. John 5:18; 8:19; 9:29). 20
Like his divine father (cf. Bacch. 32), Dionysus takes violent revenge on those who reject his divinity. He begins by driving all the women from Pentheus’s household into the mountains in a Bacchic frenzy. Then, he allows himself to be bound, captured, and brought to Pentheus. 21 Dionysus then tricks Pentheus into disguising himself as a woman and sneaking up into the mountains to spy on the maenads. When the maenads, alerted by Dionysus (1079–81), become aware of Pentheus’s presence, Pentheus’s own mother Agave and her two sisters (all Semele’s sisters) lead the maenads against Pentheus (1088–93). First, they inflict upon Pentheus the fate he desired for Dionysus by stoning him (1096–97). Then, they rip his body apart, and Agave carries his head as a trophy into the city (1110–1143). Although Dionysus reserves this gruesome judgment for his chief adversary, Pentheus, he also punishes the rest of Cadmus’s household by exiling them from their homeland and his presence (1330–76).
Notably, both Cadmus and Agave protest that Dionysus’s wrath is excessive (1249–50, 1348), with Agave arguing that it is not worthy of the gods (1348). Yet, Dionysus responds that the wrath is the fitting response to the rejection of his deity and that Pentheus’s fate serves as a warning to all who would despise the gods: “If there be someone who despises the gods (δαιμόνων), having looked on this man’s death, let him believe the gods (θεούς)” (1325–26 [my translation]). The drama therefore facilitates three expectations that reinforce conclusions from my previous examples. (1) Ancient audiences could understand violent divine wrath as a fitting and even a necessary response to the failure to recognize and appropriately honor a deity’s manifestation. (2) Violent divine wrath was understood as direct confirmation of the legitimacy of the divinity’s appearance (1297, 1302). (3) The example of Baucis and Philemon further illustrates that divine wrath could differentiate between parties, with those who responded appropriately to the deity escaping wrath and receiving blessings instead. At the same time, both Nicolaus Damascenus’s account of Lycaon and Euripides’s The Bacchae describe how divine wrath fell swiftest and most brutally on those who should have known better.
Nor is the expectation of divine wrath against those who failed to discern the deity’s appearance only evident in Greco-Roman traditions. Indeed, one can observe similar accounts in the Hebrew scriptures, such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah occasioned by the townspeople’s treatment of the divine visitors (Gen 19:1–29, esp. 19:10–13). 22
Outside of John (which I discuss below), other New Testament texts also evidence awareness of this connection between failure to recognize a divine epiphany and violent divine wrath. For instance, in Luke, when a Samaritan village fails to welcome Jesus, his disciples James and John ask him, “Lord, do you desire that we should speak fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54). Underlying this request is an implicit assumption that God would naturally respond favorably to the brothers’ request by consuming those who had rejected Jesus. 23 Likewise Acts records how the people of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas as gods based on the miraculous healing of a man crippled from birth (Acts 14:8–18). The Lystrans proceed to prepare to sacrifice to these “gods,” sharply resisting any attempt by Paul and Barnabas to dissuade them (Acts 14:14–18). Commentators have long observed that descriptions of this event may allude to the tale of Baucis and Philemon discussed above, such that the Lystrans are endeavoring to ensure that they respond appropriately to the divine visitors and thereby avoid divine wrath. 24
The examples discussed above illustrate an expectation common throughout the Mediterranean basin: failure to discern and appropriately honor a divine epiphany could occasion violent divine wrath. The attempts to stone Jesus in John 8 and 10 should be understood as such failures to discern and honor properly the divine presence as Jesus, leading ancient audiences to expect a violent demonstration of divine judgment in response.
“Hearing the silence” in John 8:59 and 10:39
In a short book, Bruce Longenecker examined a scene from Luke’s Gospel with many similarities to the Johannine scenes currently under consideration. 25 In Luke 4:28–30, the crowds from the Nazareth synagogue attempt to throw Jesus from a cliff after he pronounces himself the fulfillment of the prophecies in Isaiah 61:1–2 (Luke 4:16–21) and subverts the expectation that those of Jesus’s hometown should be in line for preferential treatment (Luke 4:22–28). Longenecker argues that the Lukan text’s silence as to the means of Jesus’s escape is intentionally provocative and meant to induce the Gospel’s audience to make connections both backward and forward in the narrative. John’s succinct depictions of Jesus’s escape from the hands of those who would stone him contain similarly provocative “silences.” 26 Yet the question of how Jesus escapes is not the only question that the silences of John 8:59 and 10:39 generate. Instead, understanding these scenes both in their narrative context and in comparison to other epiphanic narratives clarifies that the scenes could cause ancient audiences to look for signs of divine judgment in response to the rejection of Jesus.
John’s Gospel distinctively portrays Jesus as the enfleshed divine presence. 27 Not only does John begin by characterizing Jesus through allusions to other figures commonly associated with YHWH’s manifestation of his presence to humanity (including Sophia, Logos, Memra, and the Shekinah), 28 the Gospel’s opening section also describes Jesus as the divine presence made accessible to humanity (“and dwelled among us” [John 1:14]), who provides an unprecedented access to, indeed sight of, God (1:18). 29 At the same time, from its opening section, the Gospel emphasizes that Jesus’s identity as the enfleshed divine presence was and is a contested point, with humanity’s ongoing relationship to God depending on one’s acceptance of that claim: “To his own he came, and his own did not receive him. And as many as received him—to those who believe in his name—he gave authority to become children of God” (1:11–12).
The Gospel’s opening section, therefore, establishes certain expectations for the narrative to follow, which resonate with epiphanic narratives such as those the previous section described. Like other epiphanic narratives, many of the Gospel’s central incidents hinge on whether the interlocutors appropriately discern Jesus’s identity. 30 For example, Nathanael doubts Philip’s testimony about Jesus, only then to confess that Jesus is the “son of God . . . the king of Israel” (1:49). 31 When Jesus comes to the temple, his first conflict with the Jews centers on his authority to disrupt worship in the temple. 32 Heard as an epiphanic narrative, Jesus’s coming to the temple as the enfleshed divine presence amplifies the conflict discernible in the episode. As the divine presence, Jesus enters the place where one would expect to encounter the divine presence and purifies the sanctuary. 33 Yet instead of recognizing Jesus’s identity, the Jews challenge him (2:18). Nicodemus comes to Jesus likewise seeking to determine Jesus’s relationship to God (3:2). Similarly, the exchange with the unnamed woman at the well in Samaria pivots on the question of Jesus’s identity and ability to provide life-giving water (4:11–12).
Yet John 1:10–12 do not merely foreshadow a storyline concerned with whether the audience (both the audience in the narrative and those listening to the narrative) will rightly discern Jesus’s divine identity. Instead, the verses programmatically foreshadow the reality that Jesus’s identity will be unperceived by the world and rejected by those whom the Gospel’s audience would have expected to be most likely to recognize it. 34 Indeed, from its outset, the Gospel presents itself as the narrative of a divine figure coming to his own, who then fail to accept him (1:11). 35 By foreshadowing at its outset this rejection of Jesus by those who should have recognized him, the Gospel activates for its audience comparisons to other tales where divine figures were rejected. Consequently, the authorial audience would likely hear the Gospel expecting not only a narrative describing conflicts concerning Jesus’s identity but also an account of God’s response to this failure to recognize and honor Jesus’s divine identity. 36
The context of the episodes in John 8 and 10 amplifies this connection to epiphanic narratives. Jesus arrives in Jerusalem in John 7 just prior to the Feast of Booths (Sukkoth). Although John 10:22 indicates that it describes events occurring some 2–3 months later at the Feast of Dedication, 37 the narrative’s setting throughout John 7–10 remains fixed on the Jerusalem temple and its environs. This is the second time Jesus has appeared in the temple since the “temple incident” (2:13–22). John 5:14–47 records an encounter between Jesus and the Jews in the temple at which the Jews begin seeking to kill him, “not only because he was breaking the Sabbath, but also because he was saying God was his own father, making himself equal to God” (John 5:18). This conflict in the temple generates parallels with epiphanic narratives such as The Bacchae, in which Pentheus rejected Dionysus’s divine parentage. Even for those unaware of this intertext, however, it would be clear to any who agree with the Gospel’s claims about Jesus’s divine identity that seeking to kill Jesus represents precisely the wrong response. In the ancient audience’s symbolic universe, such rejection of legitimate claims to divinity would prompt expectations for a divine response of judgment against the offending party.
After the intervening episode in Galilee in John 6, when Jesus returns to Judea in John 7 the narrative reengages the theme of the Jews seeking to kill Jesus for his blasphemy. 38 Indeed, John frames the entire section of John 7–10 with the expectation that the Jews are trying to kill Jesus (7:1) and the question of whether Jesus will reveal himself openly (7:3–4). Throughout these chapters, Jesus speaks with increasing clarity of his relationship to the Father and his interlocutors’ response correspondingly becomes increasingly aggressive. 39
Understood in connection to epiphanic narratives, the dénouements of Jesus’s conflicts with his interlocutors in John 8 and John 10 gain prominence in the storyline. In both episodes, Jesus makes statements commonly understood to communicate his divine status. For instance, in John 8, Jesus claims divine parentage in contrast to his interlocutors (8:38), argues that God glorifies him (8:54), and asserts that he pre-exists Abraham, employing a formula that in the Hebrew Scriptures signified YHWH’s distinctiveness (8:58). 40 Similarly, in John 10, Jesus claims the ability to grant eternal life (10:28) and unity with God (10:30, 38). 41 Strikingly, in both episodes, the Jews deny the veracity of Jesus’s claims, accuse him of blasphemy, and seek to execute Jesus by stoning (8:48–59; 10:31–39). 42 For an ancient audience familiar with epiphanic narratives, the Jews’ open rejection of Jesus’s divine status and attempt to execute him violently would have likely provoked expectations of similarly violent divine judgment in response.
Thus, in context, the brevity of John’s depiction of Jesus’s escapes from a premature end actually generates two questions for ancient auditors attentive to the narrative’s silences: (1) How does Jesus escape? (2) Why is there no divine violence? I contend that John answers both questions in a manner that supports his claim that Jesus is the enfleshed divine presence and responds to potential objections. 43
Jesus’s departure from the temple and divine judgment
John’s answer to the first of these two questions remains the more readily apparent. A deity’s abrupt departure was a frequent feature of epiphanic narratives and served to confirm that the disappearing figure was indeed a divine manifestation. 44 Consequently, by leaving any precise means of Jesus’s escape unnarrated, John confirms to the authorial audience that they should understand Jesus as the enfleshed divine presence. 45 Each scene’s setting reinforces this conclusion, for both episodes take place in the temple. Thus, Jesus does not simply escape from the crowds but, as the enfleshed divine presence, departs the very location where one would have expected to encounter the divine presence.
Yet understanding Jesus’s departure as a confirmation of the Gospel’s claim about his identity heightens, rather than minimizes, the second question that the scenes would raise for ancient auditors. If Jesus really is the divine presence in the flesh, then why is there no divine wrath against those who reject him and seek to do violence to him? The second-century philosopher Celsus exemplifies this type of objection: But the men who tortured and punished your God in person suffered nothing for doing it, not even afterwards as long as they lived . . . [“these gods whom you blaspheme”] however, actually do take severe revenge on anyone who blasphemes them.” (8.41)
46
For Celsus, depictions of violent divine wrath, such as those discussed in the previous section, come readily to mind when he considers blasphemy against the gods. Indeed, such divine wrath confirms the deity’s legitimacy. As a result, the “silences” in these passages should alert modern audiences of the Gospel to consider how the Gospel would have responded to an objection similar to Celsus’s, for a failure to communicate some form of divine judgment against the rejection of Jesus would have likely undermined the veracity of the Gospel’s claims for the authorial audience. 47
Again, the setting of each scene plays an important role in clarifying how the narrative could be understood to address an objection such as Celsus’s. In the ancient Mediterranean, divine abandonment of the deity’s temple was understood as a sign of divine judgment against impious worshipers. 48 By forsaking the place at which one could expect to encounter the divine presence, 49 the divine abandonment of a temple signified a rupture in the deity-worshiper relationship and was often understood as the deity’s removal of protection from the city and people. 50 Thus, despite the brevity of John’s description of Jesus’s departure in each scene, given both the overall narrative context, which has stressed Jesus’s identity as the enfleshed divine presence, and the immediate context of disputes about Jesus’s identity in each scene, an ancient audience could readily perceive Jesus’s departure as acting out the divine presence’s abandonment of the temple. 51
John’s depiction of this departure from the temple in stages facilitates, rather than undermines, this contention, for other texts also describe the departure of the divine presence occurring in stages. 52 For example, Ezekiel (a text with which scholars have long observed Johannine parallels 53 ) describes the departure of YHWH’s presence (as the דובכ) occurring in three stages: (1) from the sanctuary to the temple’s threshold (Ezek 9:3; 10:4); (2) to the temple’s east gate (Ezek 10:18–19); (3) out of the city and to a mountain east of the city (Ezek 11:22–23). Similarly, Jesus first departs from the temple’s courts near the treasury (cf. John 8:20) in John 8:59. Although he returns to the temple in John 10, he only enters to Solomon’s portico on the temple’s eastern side, from which he departs east of the city and crosses the Jordan (John 10:39–40). 54
Understanding Jesus’s departure from the temple as divine abandonment in response to Jesus’s Jewish interlocutors’ rejection of him fits the narrative context. The departure does not signal judgment on the Jewish temple or cult, in themselves. 55 Rather, ancient audiences sympathetic to the Gospel’s claim that Jesus is the enfleshed divine presence would have likely picked up on the irony that those eager to stone Jesus for blasphemy were themselves (from the Gospel’s perspective) guilty of blasphemy for rejecting the enfleshed divine presence in the very location that they should have recognized it: the temple. 56 Jesus’s abandonment of the temple serves, therefore, as the divine judgment against that impiety in a manner that ancient audiences could have understood. At the same time, considering the divine response to the attempt to stone Jesus to be divine abandonment would have generated additional questions. Indeed, the expectation that blasphemy merits a violent judgment (i.e., stoning) amplifies the scene’s dramatic tension, for the divine response enacted in Jesus’s departure, though rightly understood as divine judgment, is surprisingly non-violent. 57
Violence, non-violence, and divine judgment in John
For an audience understanding Jesus’s departure from the temple in John 8:59 and 10:39 as God’s abandonment of the Jerusalem temple in judgment of unbelief, John’s depiction of this multi-stage departure could generate two additional questions. First, if the attempted stoning of Jesus required a divine response, then what was the divine response to the crucifixion? As Celsus’s objection recorded above indicated, an absence of divine wrath in response to those who crucified Jesus would be even more incomprehensible to an ancient audience than an absence of divine judgment against those who attempted to stone Jesus. Second, given that the opposition against Jesus becomes increasingly violent (progressing from verbal assaults to attempted arrests, to attempted stonings, and culminating in the crucifixion), then why does the divine response remain non-violent? Space precludes a comprehensive engagement with either of these questions, but here I point to several avenues of exploration. 58
First, consistent with both John’s and the synoptic conception of Jesus is that John nowhere describes him enacting violent judgment against unbelief, even in response to the crucifixion. 59 For instance, in Luke’s account of James and John’s request to call down fire from heaven against the Samaritan village discussed above, Jesus rebukes the brothers and continues his journey, leaving the village unscathed (Luke 9:55). 60 Likewise, as examined by other articles in this issue, Jesus’s actions even at his arrest and crucifixion remain decidedly non-violent. At the same time, judgment, including divine judgment, remains a prominent theme in the Gospel. 61
I suggest that divine judgment against those who reject Jesus in John takes the same form as that seen in John 8:59 and 10:39, namely divine abandonment. Especially compared to the Synoptics, John uniquely highlights Jesus’s impending absence throughout the narrative, gradually connecting Jesus’s departure explicitly to his crucifixion (7:33–34; 8:21–22; 12:32–33; 13:33). Just as the departure of Jesus as the divine presence from the temple could signify divine abandonment to the authorial audience, so could the removal of the divine presence from the world in Jesus’s crucifixion. 62 As noted above, the divine abandonment motif often functioned to explain and vindicate divine sovereignty over calamities. Similarly, in John, framing Jesus’s death as divine abandonment of those who rejected him transforms the cross from a shameful defeat to an act of divine judgment against the perpetrators. 63 John facilitates this characterization of the crucifixion by distinctively emphasizing Jesus’s agency throughout the arrest and passion narratives. 64
At the same time, describing Jesus’s departure as divine abandonment seems to sit uneasily with both the fact that believers continue to have a relationship to Jesus’s presence (as described in John 13–17) and the Johannine emphasis on God’s love for the world. On the first point, other texts (such as the tale of Baucis and Philemon and Ezekiel) understand divine judgment to differentiate between parties, and John seemingly does likewise. While the divine presence abandons the world in Jesus’s departure as judgment on unbelief, the Spirit-Paraclete provides continued access to the divine presence for believers.
In my assessment, perhaps the Johannine emphasis on God’s love for the world could explain why the divine judgment against unbelief through the removal of divine presence remains non-violent. 65 In the examples I discussed in the article’s opening section, Zeus’s and Dionysus’s violence against the impious left no opportunity for repentance. In contrast, though John clearly depicts Jesus’s interlocutors as deserving of divine judgment, the narrative itself pushes the audience to make decisions for or against the Gospel’s claims, implies that the believing community’s boundaries remain porous (cf. 13:35; 17:20–21), and concludes with an explicit exhortation to believe (20:30–31). 66 In this way, the Gospel’s depiction of God’s judgment as non-violent coheres with the possibility of repenting from unbelief, accepting Jesus as the enfleshed divine presence, and receiving the gift of access to the divine presence even in Jesus’s physical absence through the Spirit-Paraclete. 67
Conclusions
John 8 and 10 both contain debates between Jesus and his interlocutors that scholars have long intuitively recognized as essential to the Gospel’s plot. Each exchange climaxes in the Jews rejecting Jesus’s claims and seeking to stone him for blasphemy, before describing Jesus’s escape from a premature death in a somewhat anti-climactic fashion (especially to modern readers). In John 8:59, Jesus hides himself and departs, whereas in John 10:39, he merely departs. The terse language provokes not only the question of how Jesus escaped but also, especially for ancient audiences expecting divine violence in response to impiety, the question of whether divine judgment against the rejection of Jesus will come.
I have argued that these narrative silences support John’s claim that Jesus is the enfleshed divine presence. Not only do Jesus’s departures echo motifs of the abrupt departure of deities in epiphanic narratives, but Jesus departs the temple specifically, which, in the narrative’s context, could lead to the understanding that Jesus (the enfleshed divine presence) has abandoned God’s dwelling place in divine judgment on unbelief. In a similar manner, I suggested that John depicts Jesus’s departure from the world in his crucifixion as divine abandonment of the unbelieving world. So, while John does account for divine judgment against those who reject Jesus, this judgment is distinctively non-violent.
When modern interpreters read John’s narrative, especially the scenes in John 8 and 10, John’s use of οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι (the Jews) to characterize the opposition to Jesus stands out. The Gospel’s reception and cooptation to justify antisemitism throughout history rightly trouble interpreters and have generated valid debates about whether the text itself is inherently anti-Judaic. 68 The reading I propose in this article could provide a different angle on this question. The harshness of Jesus’s rhetoric in John 8:44, when he calls his Jewish opponents “children of the devil” (ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστέ) naturally strikes modern interpreters as problematic and has been used throughout history to justify despicable evil against Jewish people, which should not be dismissed or minimized. Yet in the ancient context where such rhetoric was more commonplace, I suggest that Jesus’s response to the attempts to stone him—or, rather, the lack of any violent response by Jesus or from heaven—would have been more conspicuous to ancient audiences. 69
A common expectation in the authorial audience’s symbolic world would have been that deities respond to the failure to recognize and rightly honor their manifestations with divine violence. This expectation pertains in Greco-Roman, Jewish, and even early Christian texts. 70 Such divine violence necessarily precluded an opportunity for repentance. In contrast, by depicting Jesus’s response to the attempts to stone him as non-violent, John implies that an opportunity remains, for the characters in the narrative who attempted violence against Jesus as well as for the Gospel’s audience, to believe in Jesus and experience the benefits of the divine presence reserved for believers (and mediated through the Spirit-Paraclete). John’s perspective is certainly exclusivist, yet the theme of non-violent divine judgment may render the Gospel’s perspective less antagonistic against its unbelieving characters, especially the Jews, than is often assumed.
Footnotes
1.
The Fourth Gospel’s often polemical characterization of the Jews (οἱ Ἰουδαιῖοι) creates multiple interpretative issues, especially considering the Gospel’s historical reception and use for antisemitic purposes. One such issue is the decision of how to translate οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι: transliterate the term, place quotes around it, etc. For helpful discussions of the concerns involved, see Tina Pippin, “‘For Fear of the Jews’: Lying and Truth-Telling in Translating the Gospel of John,” Semeia 76 (1996): 81–97; Adele Reinhartz, “‘Jews’ and Jews in the Fourth Gospel,” in Anti-Judaism and the Fourth Gospel, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Didier Pollefeyt and F. Vandecasteele-Vanneuville (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 213–27; Ruth Sheridan, “Issues in the Translation of Οἱ ᾽Ιουδαῖοι in the Fourth Gospel,” JBL 132.3 (2013): 671–95. In this article, I follow Reinhartz and render οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι as the Jews, without quotation marks. As will be clear, especially in my conclusion, I agree with Myers that, “employing commonplaces and techniques known in the ancient Mediterranean world, the Gospel casts a pervasive yet indistinct portrait of the Jews who, like their ancestors, struggle to decipher God’s revelation in their midst” (Alicia D. Myers, “Just Opponents? Ambiguity, Empathy, and the Jews in the Gospel of John,” in Johannine Ethics: The Moral World of the Gospel and Epistles of John, eds. Sherri Brown and Christopher W. Skinner [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017], 176). Despite the Gospel’s often negative and polemical use of οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι, I maintain that a goal of the text remains to create empathy within the audience for these characters with the explicit goal of bringing the audience to respond in faith in Jesus.
2.
This scholarly attention normally focuses on both the content of each dialogue as well as each dialogue’s setting during the celebration of a major Jewish festival.
3.
All translations of New Testament texts are my own. I understand ἐκρύβη to be in the middle voice (“hid himself”) rather than the passive (“was hidden”). With Lidija Novakovic, John 1–10: A Handbook on the Greek New Testament, BHGNT (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2020), 314; contra Hartwig Thyen, Das Johannesevangelium, 2nd ed., HNT 6 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 454. If the verb is passive, however, God would be the unspecified agent, which would not, ultimately, contradict my argument below that the verse connotes the removal of God’s presence as Jesus from the temple.
4.
Though 10:39 states that the Jews were seeking to seize (πιάζω) rather than stone Jesus, Michaels rightly observes that in context “stoning and ‘arrest’ here are seen as pretty much interchangeable” (J. Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John, NICNT [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010], 608).
5.
E.g., Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, 2 vols., AB 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 1:367, 414; Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. George R. Beasley-Murray, Johannine Monograph Series 1 (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 391; George R. Beasley-Murray, John, Accordance electronic ed., WBC 36 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 178; Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 236; Edward W. Klink, John, ZECNT 4 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 483.
6.
E.g., Adolf Schlatter, Der Evangelist Johannes (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1960), 221; Francis J. Moloney, Signs and Shadows: Reading John 5–12 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 114; Michaels, Gospel of John, 536. Note that frequently comparatively more attention is given to 8:59 due to the language of “hiding.” Morris comments that this hiding implies divine intervention in 8:59, while he simultaneously denies that similar divine intervention occurs in 10:39; cf. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 421, 470.
7.
“The closing sentence, ‘and went out of the temple’, is necessary as an introduction to the following story” (Ernst Haenchen, John: A Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. Robert W. Funk, 2 vols., Hermeneia [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984], 2:30).
8.
Intriguingly, Brant observes that this scene is the first in the narrative to close with an action instead of the narrator’s comment and that from this point exits play an increasingly prominent role in the narrative (Jo-Ann A. Brant, John, Paideia [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011], 148).
9.
By “authorial audience” I mean the audience to/for whom the text’s author imagines herself/himself to be writing. Given that most authors desire their works to be understood, I presume this audience and the author share the same general symbolic universe. For a fuller description of this methodology, see Josiah D. Hall, “‘The World Will See Me No Longer’: Themes of Divine Presence and Absence in the Fourth Gospel” (Ph.D. Diss., Baylor University, 2022); and the discussions in Charles H. Talbert, Reading Luke-Acts in Its Mediterranean Milieu, NovTSupp 107 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 14–18; Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Whirl without End: Audience-Oriented Criticism,” in Contemporary Literary Theory, eds. G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow (London: Macmillan Education UK, 1989), 81–100.
10.
Some commentators do acknowledge a possible connection (at least in 8:59) to the concept of divine abandonment of the temple (e.g., G. H. C. MacGregor, The Gospel of John, MNTC [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928], 224; Morris, Gospel According to John, 421; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, Pillar New Testament Commentaries [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991], 358; Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols. [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003], 1:774) but none (to my knowledge) develop this theme in light of expectations of divine retribution and violence.
11.
There were of course those who denied that the gods cared and/or intervened in the world. See, for example, Plutarch, Superst., especially 1–2, 6–7.
12.
Our access to this symbolic universe is limited to extant literary and visual records without the accompanying oral traditions and explanations that likely played a major role in shaping how ancient audiences would have interpreted the material records. A significant amount of scholarly literature seeks to circumscribe what the category of epiphany includes. I follow Georgia Petridou’s broad definition: “Epiphany denotes the manifestation of a deity to an individual or a group of people, in sleep or in waking reality, in a crisis or cult context. The deity (of Panhellenic or local stature) may appear in an anthropomorphic, enacted, effigies, pars pro toto, or zoomorphic form; it may also appear as a φάσμα or in the form of unexpected and extreme natural disasters (amorphous). The perception of the deity’s epiphany may be sensorial (i.e. the perceiver may see, hear, feel, or even smell the deity) or intellectual (i.e. the perceiver may be aware of the deity’s presence without seeing or hearing, etc. anything).” Petridou, Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2. While this definition is quite broad, it is more limited than that of Henk Versnel: “the term epiphaneia denotes two things: the personal appearance of a god and his [sic] miraculous deeds.” See H. S. Versnel, “What Did Ancient Man See When He Saw a God? Some Reflections on Greco-Roman Epiphany,” in Effigies Dei: Essays on the History of Religions, ed. Dirk van der Plas, SHR 51 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 52. While Versnel’s description of what qualifies as epiphany generally aligns with Petridou’s, he includes miracles performed by individuals on behalf of a deity on the grounds that “we may infer that Greeks had considerable difficulty in imagining a miracle happening without the god who was responsable [sic] for it being in the immediate proximity” (“Epiphany,” 52). Although I do not dispute the general accuracy of Versnel’s observation here, I focus on epiphanies as instances of divine manifestation that are not mediated by human action.
13.
Ernst Käsemann, The Testament of Jesus: A Study of the Gospel of John in the Light of Chapter 17, trans. Gerhard Krodel, NTL (London: SCM Press, 1968), 10.
14.
The precise way John characterizes Jesus’s divinity is the subject of much scholarly discussion. For this article’s purposes, I understand John to employ a variety of motifs and rhetorical strategies to place Jesus “on the side of the one God.” See Ruben A. Bühner, Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variants of Second Temple Judaism (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2021), 170–72; see also, Gabriele Boccaccini, “From Jewish Prophet to Jewish God: How John Made the Divine Jesus Uncreated,” in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism: Royal, Prophetic, and Divine Messiahs, ed. Benjamin E. Reynolds, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 106 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 335–57. For discussion of Käsemann’s perspective, see Marianne Meye Thompson, The Humanity of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); Jörg Frey, The Glory of the Crucified One: Theology and Christology in the Fourth Gospel, trans. Wayne Coppins and Christoph Heilig, BMSEC (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018), 264–68.
15.
Petridou, Divine Epiphany, 21. While I focus here on literary records of epiphanies, examples of epiphanic phenomena proliferate in a wide variety of Greco-Roman material culture. For a broader treatment of epiphanies that attends to pictorial representations, see Verity J. Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion, Greek Culture in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Note that deities could manifest in a wide variety of forms; the key conceptual principle is that the form was perceptible to humans in some way (cf. n. 12).
16.
“Seeing or listening, however, is not enough; idein is not enough; the aim is always to comprehend and acknowledge (gignōskein or noein) the divine” (Petridou, Divine Epiphany, 21).
17.
See Frazer’s English translation of this passage in Apollodorus, The Library, Books 1–3.9, trans. James G. Frazer, repr., LCL 121 (London: Heinemann, 2001), 391 n. 1.
18.
See the comparison of John and The Bacchae in Dennis R. MacDonald, The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 23–123. Although I disagree with MacDonald’s underlying thesis that the earliest strata of John intentionally imitates Euripides, MacDonald nevertheless highlights multiple informative parallels between the two texts.
19.
In fact, keeping with the expectation that Zeus responds violently to human impiety established in the example above, in the Bacchae, Semele’s family attributes her death to Zeus’s judgment on her impious attempt to blame her pregnancy on the god (31).
20.
In an earlier passage (242–47) Pentheus argues Dionysus should be killed by hanging (ἀγχονή).
21.
An intriguing thematic similarity exists between Pentheus’s servants’ reluctance to arrest Dionysus (440–50) and the guards’ reluctance to arrest Jesus (John 7:45–47).
22.
In Genesis, YHWH had already determined to destroy the cities prior to the divine visitation; the townspeople’s treatment of the divine visitors, however, is still an act that immediately occasions the divine wrath. Similar to the other episodes I have described, in Genesis YHWH sends representatives to Sodom and Gomorrah to test the inhabitants’ piety and see if any godly are left among them (Gen 18:27–33). This episode also provides an example of divine wrath that differentiates between parties, for Lot and his family are spared.
23.
On Luke’s depiction of Jesus in epiphanic terms more generally, see Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), esp. 149–92.
24.
Daniel B. Glover, Patterns of Deification in the Acts of the Apostles, WUNT 2/576 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), 158–65; Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 2:2146–47.
25.
Bruce W. Longenecker, Hearing the Silence: Jesus on the Edge and God in the Gap: Luke 4 in Narrative Perspective (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012).
26.
Longenecker himself recognizes, but does not develop, the similarity between the silences in John 8:59; 10:39; and Luke 4:30 (Longenecker, Hearing the Silence, 63 n. 2).
27.
For a fuller version of this paragraph’s argument, see Hall, “World Will See Me.”
28.
Gieschen rightly argues multiple figures underly John’s description of Jesus in John 1:1–18 rather than only one (e.g., Wisdom). See Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, LEC (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017), 350. Similarly, Bühner argues that John “deliberately develops his own Christology in dialogue with these earlier traditions, adopting, developing, and deducing from them, and sometimes even including new motifs into the messianic discourse.” See Bühner, Messianic High Christology, 171.
29.
Catrin H. Williams, “(Not) Seeing God in the Prologue and Body of John’s Gospel,” in The Prologue of the Gospel of John: Its Literary, Theological, and Philosophical Contexts: Papers Read at the Colloquium Ioanneum 2013, ed. J. G. van der Watt, R. Alan Culpepper and Udo Schnelle, WUNT 359 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 97–98. Williams argues that John describes biblical precedents for this type of vision of God’s glory (as in Isaiah) as visions, ahead of time, of the glory of God manifested in Jesus’s life.
30.
Though his focus is broader than epiphanic narratives, see Larsen’s work on the theme of recognition in John. Kasper Bro Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger: Recognition Scenes in the Gospel of John, BIS 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
31.
On this passage, see Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 103–12.
32.
Culpepper rightly argues that in the ancient context Jesus’s actions, apart from divine sanction, would have likely been interpreted as a threat to the temple’s inviolability. See R. Alan Culpepper, “Temple Violation: Reading John 2:13–22 at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus,” in The Opening of John’s Narrative (John 1:19–2:22): Historical, Literary, and Theological Readings from the Colloquium Ioanneum 2015 in Ephesus, ed. R. Alan Culpepper and Jörg Frey, WUNT 385 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 310–11. The crux of the challenge from the Jews, therefore, centers on whether Jesus has such divine authorization for his actions.
33.
Johannes Frühwald-König, Tempel und Kult: Ein Beitrag zur Christologie des Johannesevangeliums, BU 37 (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1998), 103–4, 220–21; Alicia D. Myers, Reading John and 1, 2, 3 John, Reading the New Testament, 2nd Series (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2019), 75–77; similarly, Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity Within First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), 180.
34.
Note that the world’s response changes from “failing to recognize” to active rejection, even hatred, by the Gospel’s conclusion (15:18, 23–25; 17:14; already foreshadowed in 3:20 and 7:7). With Dennis, I take 1:11 as a progression from, rather than repetition of, 1:10. See John A. Dennis, “Conflict and Resolution: John 11.47–53 as the Ironic Fulfillment of the Main Plot-Line of the Gospel (John 1.11–12),” in SNTSU, ed. Albert Fuchs, Serie A 29 (Linz: Albert Fuchs, 2004), 34. Thus, I take τὰ ἴδια . . . οἱ ἴδιοι (1:11) to refer primarily to the Jewish people. It is certainly true that, because John connects Jesus to the creation of the whole world (1:3), the whole world may in once sense be thought of as his own (Michaels, Gospel of John, 65–66); yet the connection of Jesus to the God of Israel throughout 1:1–18 would have led ancient audiences (in my judgment) to assume that οἱ ἴδιοι most naturally referred to those who claimed to be this God’s people (with Brown, Gospel According to John, 1:10).
35.
Larsen, in contrast, focuses on a comparison to scenes of figures (like Odysseus or Dionysus) returning to their homeland, though he concedes that the comparison breaks down to some degree because John describe the people as Jesus’s own without describing the earth as Jesus’s (the Logos’s) home (Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 85–88).
36.
This expectation pertains whether one understands the Gospel to characterize Jesus as a divine emissary or as the enfleshed divine presence as I do.
37.
Sukkoth was celebrated in Autumn (September or October), and the Dedication Feast was in the winter (10:22), most likely in December (Brown, Gospel According to John, 1:326, 402). This feast marked the temple’s dedication specifically and should be understood as distinct from Hannukah. See Hans Förster, “Zur Bedeutung von ἐγκαίνια in Joh 10,22,” RB 123.3 (2016): 400–417.
38.
Those who reject Jesus in Galilee in John 6 merely depart from him, whereas in John 5 and 7–10 the opposition is violent.
39.
Michaels highlights the contrast between the pre-mediated attempts to arrest Jesus earlier in the narrative (7:32–52; 8:3–6 [if 7:53–8:11 is considered part of the narrative]) and the apparently spontaneous attempts to stone him in 8:59 and 10:39 (Michaels, Gospel of John, 536, 608).
40.
On pre-existence, see Friederike Kunath, Die Präexistenz Jesu im Johannesevangelium: Struktur und Theologie eines johanneischen Motivs, BZNW 212 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 241–77. On the use of ἐγὼ εἰμί in 8:58 see Catrin H. Williams, I Am He: The Interpretation of “Anî Hû” ̓in Jewish and Early Christian Literature, WUNT 2/113 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 275–83.
41.
As Thompson notes, John attributes to Jesus the unique ability to participate in God’s action of giving life because the Father has granted the Son to have life in himself (5:26–27). Thus, John 10:28 reinforces both the functional unity between Father and Son made explicit in 10:30, 38, as well as the Son’s unique ability to mediate knowledge of God and corresponding divine benefits. See Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 77–80; also, Marianne Meye Thompson, “Eternal Life in the Gospel of John,” ExAud 5 (1989): 35–55.
42.
The charge of blasphemy remains implicit in John 8 (cf. 10:33, where it becomes explicit), though commentators commonly recognize that the desire to stone Jesus fits an understanding that the audience perceives him guilty of blasphemy. See, for example, Beasley-Murray, John, 140; Charles H. Talbert, Reading John: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles, rev. ed., Reading the New Testament (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2005), 158; Thompson, John, 197. On the connotations of stoning in the Jewish context, see Josef Blinzler, “The Jewish Punishment of Stoning in the New Testament Period,” in The Trial of Jesus: Cambridge Studies in Honour of C. F. D. Moule, ed. Ernst Bammel (Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1970), 147–61.
43.
Most commentators discuss only the first of these questions (cf. n. 5, 6, 10).
44.
Petridou, Divine Epiphany, 23–24; similarly, Wilson, Embodied God, 186. For examples see Judg 13:19–22; Luke 24:30–32; Valerius Maximus, Mem., 1.8.6; Pausanias, Descr. 1.32.5; Jos. Asen. 17.6–7. This phenomenon was not limited to human figures; the disappearance of weapons (e.g., Diodorus Sicullus, Libr. 15.53.4; Xenophon Hell. 6.4.7) and even animals (e.g., Herodotus, Hist. 8.41) could also signal an epiphany. I argue elsewhere that this phenomenon is also at play in John 6 (Hall, “World Will See Me”).
45.
Similarly, MacDonald highlights parallels between these passages and Dionysus’s escape from Pentheus’s captivity (MacDonald, Dionysian, 71–72, 75–76). Some may argue that this connotation of Jesus’s unnarrated absence was not evident to all ancient auditors, as evidenced by apparent scribal emendations in John 8:59. At the same time, the emendations actually heighten the implication of divine activity, for they describe Jesus passing directly through the midst of the angry crowd unscathed.
46.
Translation from Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). For an updated critical edition of the Greek text, see Origen, Origenes Contra Celsum: libri VIII, ed. Miroslav Marcovich, VCSup 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
47.
Note that I am not arguing for any direct literary relationships between Celsus and John. Rather I am using Celsus to illustrate what I argue is a plausible objection to the Gospel’s claims for early audiences.
48.
This understanding was common especially in ancient Mesopotamia. See Daniel I. Block, “Divine Abandonment: Ezekiel’s Adaptation of an Ancient Near Eastern Motif,” in The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Margaret S. Odell and John T. Strong, SymS 9 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2000), 15–42. At the same time, the connection between gods departing temples and divine judgment also pertained in the broader ancient Mediterranean milieu. See, for example, Josephus, J. W. 6.293–300; Tacitus 5.13; and note 50, below.
49.
It was not, especially in the Greco-Roman and Jewish understandings, that the divine presence could only be accessed in temples, but that temples were a point of consistent divine accessibility.
50.
The Roman practice of evocatio, for example, sought to call the gods of a city to depart (and often come to Rome) so Rome could enter and conquer the city. See Gabriella Gustafsson, Evocation Deorum: Historical and Mythical Interpretations of Ritualised Conquests in the Expansion of Ancient Rome, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 16 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2000); John S. Kloppenborg, “Evocatio Deorum and the Date of Mark,” JBL 124.3 (2005): 419–50. This association with divine abandonment becomes even more pronounced given the Gospel’s probable composition after the Jerusalem temple’s destruction in 70 CE. In this context, ancient auditors may have perceived Jesus’s departure from the temple as the sign of divine abandonment which explained why God permitted the temple’s destruction (similarly, Mary L. Coloe, God Dwells with Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001], 143).
51.
So, already, MacGregor, John, 224. MacGregor, however, argues that “Jesus symbolically abandons his own people (the temple) and goes out to humanity (the man born blind, chap. 9).” The man born blind, however, is likely Jewish. John does not develop a contrast between the Jews and the world through this motif, but rather between unbelievers and believers, as I argue elsewhere (Hall, “World Will See Me”).
52.
In contrast, Davies contends that 8:59 represents Jesus’s decisive departure from the temple and maintains that Jesus’s presence in Solomon’s portico should not be considered a return to the temple. See W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 291–94.
53.
Both Coloe and Peterson similarly connect Jesus’s departure from the temple in John with Ezekiel, though Peterson contends that divine abandonment motif begins in John 2. See Coloe, God Dwells with Us, 143, 155; Brian Neil Peterson, John’s Use of Ezekiel: Understanding the Unique Perspective of the Fourth Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 116–19.
54.
A multi-stage departure of the divine presence is also found in other texts such as Gen. Rab. 19 and Livy, Hist. 5.15–22.
55.
Pace C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, repr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 301; Haenchen, John, 1:185, 187; Jean-Baptiste Latour, Le signe du sanctuaire: le péricope johannique de l’expulsion des commerçants du temple, Jean 2, 13-22, CahRB 71 (Paris: Gabalda, 2008), 59. This perspective on the temple’s cult is already found in Origen, Comm. Jo. 10.16.
56.
Coloe, God Dwells with Us, 155. This connection is heightened by the connection between the Feast of Dedication to Antiochus Epiphanes’s desecration of the temple. See discussion of the irony in this scene in Moloney, Signs and Shadows, 148, 150; Ruth Sheridan, Retelling Scripture: “The Jews” and the Scriptural Citations in John 1:19–12:15, BIS 110 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 211.
57.
One might argue that the non-violence is only delayed temporally. Divine abandonment of temples was routinely employed to explain a temple’s destruction. In John’s case, some have plausibly contended that John depicts Jesus’s departure from the temple as an explanation for Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 CE, which was notoriously violent (cf. Josephus, J. W. 6.352–55, 363–73; 7.1). See, for example, Andreas J. Köstenberger, “The Destruction of the Second Temple and the Composition of the Fourth Gospel,” in Challenging Perspectives on the Gospel of John, ed. John Lierman, WUNT 2/219 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 69–108. Even if the allusion to the temple’s destruction does lie close at hand (cf. n. 50), John’s omission of any explicit reference to that destruction (esp. compared to the Synoptics) maintains the audience’s focus on Jesus’s departure and not the temple’s physical destruction in se as the divine response to unbelief.
58.
For fuller engagement with these questions, see Hall, “World Will See Me.”
59.
Though see discussion of John 2:13–22 in this issue in Alicia D. Myers, “Revelation through violence? Jesus in the Temple in John 2:13–22.”
60.
Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51–24:53, BECNT 3B (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 971.
61.
See discussion in R. Alan Culpepper, “Jesus the Judge (John 5:21-30) : The Theme of Judgment in John’s Gospel,” in Signs and Discourses in John 5 and 6: Historical, Literary, and Theological Readings from the Colloquium Ioanneum 2019 in Eisenach, ed. Jörg Frey and Craig R. Koester, WUNT 463 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 59–86.
62.
See extended defense of this position in Hall, “World Will See Me.” Others have previously recognized allusions to the motif of temple abandonment in Jesus’s departures from the temple in John 8:59 and (often) 10:39, but none (to my knowledge) has argued that this motif should serve as a framework through which to understand John’s depiction of Jesus’s actual physical departure. Davies, Gospel and the Land, 290–95; Coloe, God Dwells with Us, 143, 155; Köstenberger, “Destruction of the Second Temple,” 103–104; Michael Theobald, Das Evangelium nach Johannes: Kapitel 1–12, RNT (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2009), 621–22.
63.
As Dodd argues, “[Jesus’s] death is itself a judgment upon those who compassed it through their rejection of the light . . . the death of Christ is κρίσις τοῦ κόσμου τούτου, while at the same time it is the necessary condition under which new life will spring from the buried seed (xii. 24)” (Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 360–61).
64.
Jörg Frey, “Die ‘theologia crucifixi’ des Johannesevangeliums,” in Die Herrlichkeit des Gekreuzigten: Studien zu den Johanneischen Schriften I, WUNT 307 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 535–38. On the interplay between divine, satanic, and human agency in John’s account of Jesus’s death, see Craig R. Koester, “Why Was the Messiah Crucified?: A Study of God, Jesus, Satan, and Human Agency in Johannine Theology,” in The Death of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, ed. Gilbert van Belle, BETL 200 (Leuven: Leuven University Press ; Peeters, 2007), 163–80.
65.
To be noted is that the removal of God’s presence as Jesus should not be understood as the only means of divine judgment. Indeed, the Gospel maintains an expectation of an eschatological judgment (John 5:29), though it does not characterize that judgment as either violent or non-violent. To compare this theme of non-violent divine judgment with the violent perspective on divine judgment found in Revelation would be interesting, given the common association between the two texts in their reception history as Johannine literature.
66.
As Loader observes, John portrays the rejection of Jesus as “warranting divine wrath” and yet, at the same time, “the possibility of change is clearly presupposed in John.” William R. G. Loader, “Dissent and Disparagement: Dealing with Conflict and the Pain of Rejection in John,” HvTSt 77.2 (2021): 6.
67.
My reading of this passage finds intriguing resonance with earlier Christian interpreters. For instance, in his comments on John 8:59, Augustine observes the fittingness of divine retribution in the scene, that the absence of such retribution evidences divine patience, and that Jesus’s absence connotes the judgment of God (though he implies a motive of self-preservation in Jesus’s departure that I do not find in John’s account): “For when they took up stones to throw at him, what would have been great about having the earth immediately split apart and swallow them, and finding hell instead of stones? That wouldn’t have been a great thing for God, but what was called for was a demonstration of patience rather than a show of power. So he hid himself (Jn 8:59) from them to avoid being stoned. As a man he fled from stones, but woe to those from whose hearts of stone God has fled!” (Tract. Ev. Joh. 43.18). Translation from Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald and Boniface Ramsey, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2009). Chrysostom likewise recognizes that one might expect divine judgment but argues that God demurred because a demonstration of divine judgment in this case would not have led Jesus’s interlocutors to change their hearts any more than did God’s judgment against Pharaoh (Hom. Jo. 55).
68.
See the various perspectives in R. Bieringer, Didier Pollefeyt, and Frederique Vandecasteele-Vanneuville, eds., Anti-Judaism and the Fourth Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001); R. Alan Culpepper and Paul N. Anderson, eds., John and Judaism: A Contested Relationship in Context, RBS 87 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017).
69.
On ancient polemic, see Luke Timothy Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,” JBL 108.3 (1989): 419–41.
70.
One thinks of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, which Acts attributes to their lying to God’s spirit (Acts 5:1–11). Cf. J. Albert Harrill, “Divine Judgment against Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1–11): A Stock Scene of Perjury and Death,” JBL 130.2 (2011): 351–69.