Deception in the Speech Profile of the Johannine Jesus (John 7.1-10) 1

Introduction

As Jn 7 opens with the Feast of Tabernacles drawing near, Jesus’ brothers ask him to leave Galilee and go up to Judea so that his disciples may see his works. But Jesus refuses: ‘Go to the festival yourselves’, he says. ‘I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come’ (7.8). ² After the brothers leave, the narrator adds: ‘Jesus went also, not publicly, but in secret’ (7.10). This action appears to make Jesus a deceiver, or at least puts his actions at odds with his words, a problem noticed as early as the third century ce, when it was raised by Porphyry and rejected by adherents of the nascent Christian movement. ³ It is a problem, however, only if the reader takes for granted that it would be inappropriate for Jesus to say this to his brothers while planning to do something else. This assumption, made by ancient and modern readers alike, is difficult to square with Jesus’ habitual speech pattern in the Fourth Gospel. The present article uses the exchange in Jn 7.1-9 to explore the speech profile of the Johannine Jesus, especially his tendency to produce utterances that – even if a profound, spiritual truth may be divined in them by a paradigmatic reader – are misleading on the mundane level and do not prompt Jesus to attempt to correct the confusion created by his words. ⁴

‘Not’ or ‘Not yet’: A Textual Variant as Index of Discomfort

One of the earliest indications of discomfort with the act of deception seemingly signaled by the discrepancy between what Jesus says and does in Jn 7.8 comes in a widely attested textual variant, where Jesus’ remark appears to have been emended by what Bart Ehrman (1993) might call an ‘orthodox corruption’, a scribal alteration that solves an ethical or theological problem in the base text. ⁵ Instead of ἐγὼ οὐκ ἀναβαίνω εἰς τὴν ἑορτὴν ταύτην (א D K 1241 lat sy^s.c bo arm eth), one finds a strong manuscript tradition supporting the reading ἐγὼ οὔπω ἀναβαίνω εἰς τὴν ἑορτὴν ταύτην ( B ⁶⁶ B ⁷⁵ B L T W Χ Γ Δ Θ Ψ). This second reading, with οὔπω, is taken by most scholars to be non-original, the result of a deliberate change motivated by a desire to eliminate the apparent contradiction introduced by v. 10, where Jesus does go up to the feast. ⁶ The reading with οὐκ is the lectio difficilior, and therefore more likely original. Accepting the consensus view for the priority of the reading with οὐκ, I mention the reading with οὔπω only as an instance of early scribal discomfort with the prospect of a Jesus who says one thing and does another. Unlike most discussions of the variant, which focus on discovering which reading is most original, my aim here is to show how the reading with οὐκ fits the Johannine Jesus’ speech profile and how the tradition of the secondary reading with οὔπω can be understood as a response to the same theological concern about Jesus and deception that drives modern interpretation.

Before coming to Jesus’ speech profile, however, it is worth considering the text-critical arguments for the priority of the reading with οὔπω that, if persuasive, would undermine my point about the nature of the Johannine Jesus’ speech. The priority of the reading with οὔπω is defended most vigorously by Chrys C. Caragounis, who resists using the lectio difficilior potior argument for the priority of οὐκ with an appeal to Edward Hobbs’s observation that ‘if you have enough variations, the two rules [lectio difficilior potior and lectio brevior potior] will inevitably lead to the following absurd results: if you follow the shorter readings, you will end up with no text at all; and if you follow the hard readings, you will end up with an unintelligible text’ (Caragounis 1998; Hobbs 1979: 19). If in Jn 7.8 the reading with οὐκ makes the text unintelligible, and if a satisfying account could be offered for the rise of a later manuscript tradition with οὐκ from an earlier manuscript tradition with οὔπω, then the text-critical question would be settled in favor of the reading with οὔπω, and Jesus in the earliest recoverable text would be spared from having deceived his brothers. Here, after looking at arguments in favor of the priority of the reading with οὔπω, I argue that the reading with οὐκ – far from being unintelligible or absurd – squares well with the Johannine Jesus’ speech profile.

The argument for the priority of the reading with οὔπω on the consideration that the reading with οὐκ creates an unintelligible narrative is a text-critical argument from internal evidence. The strongest arguments for the priority of οὔπω, however, are grounded in external evidence. As Caragounis puts it, ‘in respect of date, text quality, and geographical diffusion, the MSS supporting the reading οὔπω are clearly superior to the MSS supporting the rival reading οὐκ’ (1998: 184). Among these allegedly superior manuscripts the most important have been B ⁶⁶, B ⁷⁵, Codex Vaticanus, the Byzantine text, and a number of early versions. ⁷ It is the date, quality and diffusion of the texts, then, that require attention. Recent work on several of these individual manuscripts and a chastened view of text criticism’s mandate, potential and latent assumptions, however, weaken the ‘clearly superior’ status of the witnesses for the reading with οὔπω.

One of the strongest planks in the argument for the priority of οὔπω is the early date of B ⁶⁶ and B ⁷⁵ relative to the major manuscripts with the reading οὐκ. A relatively early date for these manuscripts would not independently settle the matter, since late manuscripts can in principle preserve earlier readings than early manuscripts. The plank will no longer hold, however, if B ⁶⁶ and B ⁷⁵ are fourth-century productions, as the most recent work on these manuscripts suggests (Nongbri 2014, 2016). The manuscripts with οὔπω, then, are not necessarily more ancient than those with οὐκ.

Similarly, the geographical diffusion of the manuscripts reading οὔπω is impressive, if one accepts the traditional provenance of the manuscripts involved. In a choice between two variants, one of which is confined to a relatively small geographic area and the other spread far and wide, an argument can be made that the one with the greater spread is more likely to contain the earlier reading (Epp 2011: 100-103; Parker 2008: 171-74). This argument can easily morph, however, into a variation on the now-defunct ‘majority of manuscripts’ canon when there are no means for discovering whether a secondary reading entered the widespread manuscript tradition before or after proliferation. In any case, the appeal to geographical diffusion is not convincing in the case of Jn 7.8. Assigning provenance for the particular manuscripts involved is complex and perhaps intractable (it will no longer do to speak of a ‘Western’ text that was geographically typical of ‘the west’, an ‘Alexandrian’ text that was specific to Alexandria or Egypt, and so on), and there is no agreement on the ultimate provenance of most manuscripts (Epp 2005a: 683-84). Furthermore, even if one accepts the traditional provenance for the various witnesses, the geographic distribution of the manuscripts supporting the reading with οὐκ is at least as widespread, and the witnesses for the two readings do not fall neatly into two groups based on traditional provenance. Finally, it is not difficult to imagine that scribes in several locales, faced with the difficult text with οὐκ, could come up with οὔπω as a solution.

Discussing the relative ‘text quality’ of the manuscripts involved is too large a problem to pursue satisfactorily here. At the very least, however, against the view that some texts are better for ‘reconstructing’ the ‘original text’, it is instructive to attend to recent cautions noted by text critics. ⁸ For that matter, the futility of ‘reconstructing’ the full text of a New Testament document for any point prior to the fourth century, let alone in an unadulterated first-century form, has been well known (in theory, if often ignored in practice) since the time of Karl Lachmann. At any rate, as we have seen, there is fourth-century manuscript support for both readings in the case of Jn 7.8. Reaching behind this to make bold declarations about the ‘original text’ is beyond the purview of this article, except to say that the reading with οὐκ fits a Johannine narrative pattern in a way that the reading with οὔπω does not.

The argument for the priority of the reading with οὔπω is also weakened by a lack of ancient citations of the text in that form, while we do have several patristic references to the version of the reading with οὐκ. Of the fathers who cite the text, none suggests knowledge of a parallel text tradition with οὔπω, even though extant manuscripts make plain that such a text was circulating during their lifetimes. At least since the time of Origen and Jerome, some fathers aware of variant readings were known to entertain multiple readings without rejecting one and, if they felt compelled to make a choice at all, to decide in terms of what ‘suited the immediate context’, a principle that in this case might well have pushed them to decide in favor of the reading with οὔπω (Epp 2005c: 130; Pack 1960).

It has been suggested that the criticisms of Porphyry, noted above, were responsible for a scribal change from οὐκ to οὔπω (Howard 1952; Morris 1995: 354 n. 23). Caragounis rejects this on the grounds that manuscripts with the reading οὔπω are older than Porphyry, but this is premised on a second- or early third-century date for B ⁶⁶ and B ⁷⁵ (which, as we saw, may more probably date to the fourth century) and an overly simplistic model of how changes were introduced to the tradition. After all, Porphyry need not have been first to notice the ‘inconstancy and fickleness’ of Jesus in Jn 7, a likelihood borne out by the fact that later and unrelated readers like Chrysostom, Ephrem and Epiphanius noticed the problem in the reading with οὐκ and addressed it independently. Furthermore, the nature of text production and reproduction was less centralized than the response-to-Porphyry proposal suggests. Granted that the ‘problem’ with the text is visible to the careful reader, there is no reason to rule out the plausible scenario in which it was noticed by multiple scribes at different times and places, who then independently arrived at the same solution. ⁹

For the present conversation, arguments for the priority of the reading with οὔπω are most significant for illuminating their defenders’ anxieties about or inability to consider the possibility that Jesus deceives his brothers. Even when found deficient, as they are here, the text-critical arguments for the priority of the reading with οὔπω are worth noting as apologetic interpretive moves alongside the internal, narrative-based resolutions considered below. The date, provenance, and quality of the manuscripts cannot make a compelling case in favor of the priority of the reading with οὔπω; and, turning to the internal evidence, a scribal change from οὐκ to οὔπω is easier to explain than a change in the other direction. ¹⁰

Naturally, it remains a possibility that the text with οὐκ predated the reading with οὔπω as an unintended mistake, an authorial or editorial blunder begging for scribal correction. The scribe(s) who changed οὐκ to οὔπω may well have thought as much. ¹¹ But there is no need to read the text with οὐκ as an unintended mistake if it can be framed meaningfully in a broader narrative context, such as the broader speech profile of the Johannine Jesus. We must forgive the readers of the Fourth Gospel who overlooked this pattern, since it involves a Jesus who traffics in deception, an activity in tension with most subsequent Christological developments in orthodox traditions.

Interpretive Gymnastics: Reading οὐκ and Squirming

Where modern interpreters have agreed on the priority of the reading with οὐκ, as they almost invariably do, a felt need often seems to emerge for explaining the coherence of the passage, usually with the assumption that the simplest explanation – Jesus is deceiving his brothers – is a priori impossible. These explanatory readings tend to fall into one of several broad categories. One possibility is that Jesus changed his mind between vv. 8 and 10, perhaps in response to a divine sign. A second is that there is only a superficial contradiction in the passage. A third suggestion is that Jesus in his answer is only denying that he is going up to the feast presently, without ruling out the possibility of his going up later. A fourth possibility emphasizes the pattern of double signifiers in the Fourth Gospel, focusing on a Johannine ambiguity in the language of ascent (ἀναβαίνειν). A fifth suggestion recognizes that Jesus in some real sense deceives his brothers, but puts this in a more nuanced view of when deception might be considered permissible in antiquity. We turn now to take a closer look at these reading strategies, noting in each case their apologetic attempts to save Jesus from misleading his brothers and leaving them in that consequent state of ignorance.

The first reading, imagining that Jesus changed his mind after the brothers left, is tenable only as an argument from silence. ¹² The pericope says nothing explicitly about Jesus changing his mind, nor about his receiving a divine sign. ¹³ In fact, Jesus never explicitly changes his mind about anything in the Fourth Gospel. Furthermore, for this first view to be defensible, Jesus would here need to have a restricted view of the future, which does not cohere with the gospel’s presentation of Jesus as sharing in God’s superhuman cognizance and goes against the idea that Jesus could ‘know from the start’ about those who would not believe and in particular about Judas, who would betray him (e.g., 6.64; cf. 2.24-25).

The second suggestion, that there is only a superficial contradiction between what Jesus says and does in Jn 7.8-10, ignores the frame of reference constituted by the brothers’ point of view. This second interpretive strategy is sometimes supported by connecting Jn 7 to episodes in chs. 2 and 11, where Jesus apparently refuses implied requests for him to show his power (in response to the shortage of wine and the illness of Lazarus, respectively) and then goes on to act later, in his own time (Barrett 1978: 312; Blomberg 2002: 132; Bultmann 1971: 288-89). In ch. 2, and perhaps implicitly in ch. 11, Jesus seems to defer because his ὥρα has not yet come (2.4), language which is reminiscent of Jesus’ utterance in 7.8, ‘my καιρός has not yet come’. The parallel breaks down, however, at several significant points. First, the conversations in chs. 2 and 11 are with ‘in-group’ figures, Jesus’ mother and disciples, respectively, while the conversation in ch. 7 is with his brothers who – as the immediate context makes explicit – did not believe in him (7.5). ¹⁴ Second, despite the ease with which we imagine implied requests for Jesus to act in chs. 2 and 11, neither episode includes a direct request for Jesus to act in the way that there is a direct request in ch. 7 for Jesus to go to Judea for his disciples there to see his works (7.3). Third, and most important, Jesus does not refuse in chs. 2 or 11 to do what he ultimately does do. It is probably because of this lack of an explicit disavowal that the sequences in chs. 2 and 11 have not generated among readers of John the same anxieties about Jesus and deception as 7.8 has. John 2 and 11 will resurface below in a discussion of the Johannine Jesus’ characteristic two-level speech. While these passages do not constitute a narrative pattern involving a request for Jesus to show his power, a refusal from Jesus and an eventual move on Jesus’ part to reveal his power nevertheless, they do share with the exchange in ch. 7 an apparent disregard on the part of the Johannine Jesus for the confused mental states that his utterances produce in listeners.

A third way of reading 7.8 takes οὐκ ἀναβαίνω κτλ. as ruling out only the prospect of Jesus’ going up to Jerusalem presently, openly and/or in a festal caravan of pilgrims, but leaving open the possibility that he will go up to Jerusalem later, secretly and/or alone. This interpretation is easily combined with the second interpretive strategy mentioned above and contributes to the view that the contradiction between 7.8 and 7.10 is only superficial (Blomberg 2002: 132; Morris 1995). This reading also seems to account for the rise of the textual variant οὔπω discussed in the first part of this article. John Chrysostom offers the earliest example of this reading strategy, suggesting that there is an implicit νῦν (‘now’) in what Jesus says to his brothers, so that Jesus in 7.8 is not foreclosing the possibility that he will go at some future point. ¹⁵ As before, the apparent concern is to settle matters so that Jesus’ words can be construed as truthful. The mechanism lies in seizing on the qualification that John offers for Jesus’ journey: he went up οὐ ϕανερῶς ἀλλ’ [ὡς] ἐν κρυπτῷ. It is, however, unlikely that this reading can be sustained strictly on the function of the present active indicative, as Morris (1995: 354) seems to suggest. As in English, unless the context makes clear that a given instance of the present tense applies only to the moment of utterance (an effect usually achieved by the use of a modifier like ‘for the present’ or ‘right now’), the default is to take the present tense as referring both to the present and foreseeable future (cf. Caragounis 1998: 180).

The fourth possibility mentioned above sets Jesus’ remarks within a larger Johannine pattern of double signification. Unlike many ancient texts, which were read allegorically despite having only one obvious level of meaning, Jesus’ speech in the Fourth Gospel requires that the reader attend to polysemy. Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, for example, does not work without the double meaning of the adverb ἄνωθεν: in ch. 3 it is clear that Nicodemus takes the word to mean ‘again’, while the primary sense with which Jesus must be using it is ‘from above’, that is, from the spirit, from the space he descended from as son of man and whither he intends to ascend in the hour of his glorification (cf. 3.13; 6.62). The ascent mentioned in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus is also a piece of the double-signifying discourse throughout the Fourth Gospel and, on this view for the paradigmatic reader, precisely what is at play in 7.1-10. The brothers are speaking of ‘going up’ to Judea (7.3), but ἀναβαίνειν can have a second layer of significance when found on the lips of the Johannine Jesus, as was noticed already by the fourth-century Syriac theologian Ephrem in connection to this passage:

I am not going up during the feast, that is, to the cross. He did not say ‘to [l-] the feast’, but during [b-] the feast. For even his brothers did not believe in him. But they were saying to him, No one does anything in secret. They were seeking him in order to hand him over. Therefore, he deceived them, I am not going up. But he went up secretly, so that it might be confirmed that they were going to hand him over. ¹⁶

Ephrem stands apart from all other extant ancient Christian writers in acknowledging that Jesus deceives his brothers, a fact he apparently justifies by attributing a conjectured motive to the disbelieving brothers (‘They were seeking him in order to hand him over’). Nevertheless, Ephrem finds a second, spiritual sense in which Jesus’ utterance is technically true, connecting the ascent to the cross for glorification rather than to the city for the feast. ¹⁷

The word ἀναβαίνειν is used both in connection to ‘going up to Jerusalem’ and in connection to ‘ascending to the Father’, and is related to the idea of being ‘lifted up’ (ὑψοῦν), which is used with double significance in the gospel to speak of Jesus being ‘put up’ onto the cross, and of Jesus being ‘exalted’ to heaven. Like many terms in the Johannine theological lexicon, ὑψόω can operate in a mundane or profound register, where the Johannine Jesus’ conversation partner cannot help but understand it in the former, when Jesus and the paradigmatic reader seem to see primarily the latter (cf. 3.14; 8.28; 12.32, 34). The fourth-century bishop Epiphanius also apparently recognized the problem of deception in 7.8 and proposed a two-levels-of-significance reading as a solution:

And at the close of the first year he went up to Jerusalem again, and now they tried to arrest him during the feast and were afraid to; at this feast he said, ‘I go not up at this feast’. He was not lying, never fear! It says, ‘He set out midway through the festival and went up to Jerusalem, and they said, Is not this he whom they sought to arrest? And lo, he speaketh boldly. Have the priests, then, learned that this is the Christ?’ For because he was speaking mysteriously with his brethren, and in supernatural terms, they did not know what he meant. He was telling them that he would not go up to heaven at that feast, or go to the cross then to accomplish the work of the passion and the mystery of redemption, and rise from the dead and ascend to heaven. All these things he accomplished at his own discretion. ¹⁸

These comments are important for highlighting the discrepancy between what Jesus says and does, for flagging the discrepancy as a potential instance of lying, and for articulating the earliest extant instance of the two-levels-of-meaning interpretive strategy in connection to it. Epiphanius emphasizes the ‘mysterious’ level of meaning perceived by the spiritual person and places the onus for not understanding on the brothers. ¹⁹ Epiphanius’s argument for taking Jn 7.8 on two levels, approved by such modern luminaries as Edwyn Hoskyns and Raymond Brown, seems to be motivated by the observation that its ‘plain’ or ‘literal’ level entails making Jesus a deceiver.

A two-level reading of Jesus’ utterance in Jn 7.8 requires that we attend to flexibility in at least two terms: the verb ἀναβαίνω and the preposition εἰς. The former can be used of journeys to Jerusalem or Judea (ἀναβαίνω₁), and was a standard way of speaking about journeys to Jerusalem, Judea and festivals in those places, as one can see from other references in the Fourth Gospel (cf. 2.13; 11.55, 56; 12.12). ἀναβαίνω can also be used of Jesus’ heavenly ascent to the father (ἀναβαίνω₂). εἰς almost always indicates movement towards a destination and is best captured with an English preposition ‘in’ or ‘into’ (εἰς₁), but can also have the force of the English prepositions ‘at’ (εἰς₂) or ‘for’ (εἰς₃), as is visible from other passages in the Fourth Gospel (εἰς₂ at 9.7; 19.13; 20.19, 26; 21.4; εἰς₃ at 9.39; 12.7, 13; 13.29). The straightforward sense of the utterance, the mundane sense in which the brothers apparently receive it, combines (ἀναβαίνω₁) and (εἰς₁). It is more difficult to say with certainty what Jesus’ meaning would be in the profound register. Several possibilities exist.

ἀναβαίνω₁ and εἰς₂ do not readily combine.

ἀναβαίνω₁ and εἰς₃ could combine to give the sense ‘I am not traveling up to Jerusalem for the purposes of the feast’. If so, he is leaving open the possibility that he will be traveling to Jerusalem ‘for’ some other purpose. Some support for this possible rendering of the profound level is found in Jn 13.29, where we find εἰς with the same object as in 7.8, namely, τὴν ἑορτήν. In 13.29, the controlling phrase ἀγόρασον ὧν χρείαν ἔχομεν compels us to render εἰς as ‘for’, rather than ‘to’ the festival (cf. also 12.12).

ἀναβαίνω₂ and εἰς₁ could combine to indicate Jesus’ denial that his ascension wends towards the feast. This reading sidesteps putting any undue strain on the preposition εἰς. ²⁰ It is also supported by the narrative fact that elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel Jesus specifies heaven as the destination of his ultimate ascent (3.13; cf. 6.62).

ἀναβαίνω₂ and εἰς₂ could combine to yield something like Ephrem’s interpretation: Jesus would then be denying that he will ascend to heaven ‘at’ or ‘during’ the feast. While εἰς can situate spatially (‘at’) elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel (9.7; 19.13; 20.19, 26; 21.4), it does not serve to locate actions temporally (‘during’), which would seem to have been Ephrem’s preference. Ephrem, it should be noted, in advocating his two-level reading, seems to be working with a text of the Diatessaron that affixes the Syriac preposition b- to the word for ‘feast’ here, and he draws specific attention to the fact that it is not the preposition l-. This is curious because the Old Syriac Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts of Jn 7.8 have the preposition l-, which more closely correlates with the semantic force of the Greek εἰς. It is unclear whether the reading with b- is Tatian’s innovation, Ephrem’s, or that of some intermediary. It is also unclear whether Ephrem knew Jn 7.8 in a Syriac text with l- or in a Greek text with εἰς independently of the Diatessaron. And if he had, it is impossible for us to say how this might have changed how he put together his argument in his aforementioned commentary. In any case, the reading with b- makes sense as an orthodox corruption introduced to sidestep the Christological dilemma of a deceitful Jesus.

Finally, ἀναβαίνω₂ and εἰς₃ could combine in a way that would be meaningful, if only in a minor way, in the theological economy of the Fourth Gospel. In this scenario, Jesus would be denying that he is ascending to heaven ‘for’ the festival. Presumably, he would be ascending for some other reason, perhaps to signal his completion of ‘all that the Father gave him to do’ or ‘so that the Paraclete might come’ and comfort those he left behind.

It is difficult and at present unnecessary to decide among these different ways of construing Jesus’ utterance as true on a profound register. However one makes it ‘true’ on the higher-order level, it remains an act of deception on the ‘mundane’ level (ἀναβαίνω₁ and εἰς₁). The discovery of a higher-order truth does not erase the mundane deception.

Interestingly, arguments against reading Jn 7.8 as part of the ambiguous, double-signifying Johannine discourse often appeal to this observation that it would imply the existence and persistence of deception on the mundane level. Bultmann’s comment on the passage is typical:

It can hardly be right to resolve the difficulty by assuming that v. 8 is ambiguous … According to [proponents of the double-significance thesis] the brothers take ἀναβαίνειν κτλ. to mean: ‘to journey up (to Jerusalem) for this feast’; while Jesus takes it to mean ‘to ascend up (into heaven) at this feast’. In that case Jesus would have deliberately deceived his brothers, who in this situation could not but understand his words in the way they did (1971: 288 n. 3).

Leon Morris, who rejects the double-significance reading as ‘too subtle’, notes that ‘if that is what Jesus meant he certainly misled the brothers’ (1995: 354 n. 23).

It turns out, then, that arguments both for Jesus speaking with double significance (Epiphanius, Hoskyns, Brown) and arguments against this reading strategy (Bultmann, Morris) are premised on assumptions about the inappropriateness of Jesus practicing deception. On the one hand, Hoskyns senses a contradiction between what Jesus says and does that calls for his ‘more subtle resolution’ in finding Jesus speaking cryptically about the ascent. On the other hand, critics rightly point out that such an interpretation does not get Jesus off the hook for deceiving his brothers. I submit that both positions have it partially right. The best interpretation, whether or not provision is made here for a higher-order ‘mysterious’ level of intended meaning, must not lose sight of the fact that the brothers are deceived by Jesus’ utterance in Jn 7.8.

Deception and Ethical Rectitude

It would seem self-evident that lying is incompatible with Jesus’ character, not least in a gospel where ‘truth’ is claimed as his special personal attribute (cf. 14.6) and the primary antagonists are made out to be children of the devil, who ‘is a liar and the father of lies’ (8.44). ²¹ The ‘problem’ involves unstated premises: first, that lying and willful deception are wrong; second, that Jesus does not do anything wrong; and third, that Jesus would not practice deception. A separate but related assumption sometimes involved has to do with Jesus’ ethical exemplarity, that is, the manner in which his behavior is meant to represent an ethical ideal to which his followers should try to imitate. ‘How should we then live?’ is answered by ‘What would Jesus do?’ ²²

Rarely recollected in connection to Jesus – in general, but in connection to Jn 7 in particular – is that in ancient contexts (as also in some modern contexts) lying and/or misdirection can be ethically, characteristically and strategically appropriate to some types of people in certain circumstances. One thinks of the general who needs to stoke the courage of his soldiers; of Plato’s theorizing of the ‘noble lie’ and his remarks about the guardian class in his Republic; of the Stoic sage, who ‘never speaks falsely, even if he says what is false, because he does not utter it from an evil but from a kindly disposition’, like a physician (Sextus Empiricus, Math. 7.42), and whose grasp of the Truth is so complete that, even though he ‘will sometimes say what is false’, he will nevertheless ‘never lie since his mind will not assent to a falsehood’ (Math. 7.44). ²³ One also thinks of celebrated figures from Israelite tradition who employed deception with impunity, including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Rahab and Judith. Jo-Ann Brant (2011: 135), who reads οὐκ ἀναβαίνω κτλ. in Jn 7.8 as deception, offers Homer’s Odysseus as a model of an ancient figure who deceived with the assumed approval of the Odyssey’s author and ideal audience. This – the fifth of the five reading strategies signaled above – seems at first glance to be a radically different way of addressing the ‘problem’ posed by Jesus’ utterance, insofar as it does away with the unspoken premise that ‘Jesus would not deceive’. Ultimately, however, it too turns out to be motivated by ethical concerns: it simply replaces the assumption ‘Jesus would not lie’ with the unstated premise ‘Jesus would not act in a way that ancient audiences would find objectionable’.

That the Jesus-as-liar hypothesis has not been considered by most readers in connection to Jn 7 probably has to do with the fact that no obvious justification can be readily found in Jn 7 for Jesus to deceive his brothers. ‘I am not going up to this feast’ cannot be for the brothers’ own good, unless by a stretch of the imagination one supposes that Jesus means to protect his brothers from the danger that his arrival in Jerusalem among hostile Jews would inevitably attract (cf. 7.1 etc.). Such a reading would presuppose Jesus’ concern for his brothers’ physical safety and might be supported by reference to Jesus’ apparent concern for the well-being of his mother and the beloved disciple later (cf. 19.26). Even apart from the fact that those characters are ‘insiders’ where Jesus’ brothers are ‘outsiders’, physical well-being is not nearly as prominent a ‘good’ in the theological economy of the Fourth Gospel as is one’s spiritual well-being, one’s belief status, one’s ability to ‘see’ or not. On that measure it is difficult to see how ‘I am not going up to this feast’ redounds to the brothers’ spiritual good.

The physical or spiritual betterment of the one deceived is not the only circumstance in which a figure might employ deceit. As Brant recognized and briefly notes, figures like Odysseus were praised in antiquity for skillfully using deception. The ‘good’ achieved, then, is some noble end not focused on the party deceived. For example, Odysseus arrives home in Ithaca and disguises himself as a beggar in order to infiltrate and reclaim his estate from inimical suitors (cf. Od. 13.429-38). His deception is directed primarily at the suitors, and becomes a piece of his strategy to reclaim his rightful position in his house. It is ‘a short-term strategy to mislead in order to achieve a noble end’. Jesus’ deception of his brothers, likewise, ‘would be considered prudent rather than wrong’ (Brant 2011: 135). If the noble end pursued by Odysseus was the restoration of his estate, what noble end is pursued by the Johannine Jesus, and how does deceiving his brothers help him achieve it? Now we are on thinner ice. It is easy to see how deceiving the suitors served Odysseus’s goal; it is less obvious how deceiving the brothers serves any explicit goal of Jesus in Jn 7. On the dialogue’s mundane register, he is simply deceiving them, and their inability to see through the lie seems to invite its own condemnation.

The parallels between Jesus and Odysseus go further than that they both employ deception. Both are recognized by those who, to borrow a biblical idiom, have ‘eyes to see’. ²⁴ Just as everyone on Ithaca is ultimately for or against Odysseus, and just as those who are ‘for’ Odysseus (the nurse, the dog, Telemachus, Penelope) come to recognize him quickly or at length, so too in the Fourth Gospel the characters that Jesus encounters are either ‘in’ or ‘out’, and come to understand his message (which is simultaneously to recognize who he is) haltingly, if at all. This adds a degree of texture to the bifurcation of responses to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. Characters’ responses to Jesus are not always easy to pin down, as Susan Hylen (2009) has shown, but the logic of this gospel requires that every figure is finally ‘in’ or ‘out’. This principle is made no less severe if in some cases it is difficult for us as readers to place particular characters in or out. Although Jesus’ brothers appear to fall in the ‘out’ group, it would be an oversimplification to suggest that the Johannine Jesus only uses deceptive language with out-group characters. As Odysseus puts on a deceptive front to his wife and friends as well as his enemies, so too Jesus speaks in a characteristically ambiguous or deceptive way to believing figures, especially his disciples (e.g., Jn 11.4, 11). He does not hold himself responsible for their ability or inability to recognize; and, perhaps more surprisingly, he does not regularly affirm or confirm their apparent recognitions (e.g., 4.19-20; 6.69-70; 11.27; 20.28). The pattern – of Jesus deceiving or confusing a person, and leaving them in that state without making any obvious effort to help them along – recurs frequently in Jesus’ dialogues in the Fourth Gospel (e.g., when in ch. 8 ‘the Jews’ wonder whether Jesus is talking about going abroad or killing himself). Jesus’ apparent lack of concern for his conversation partners’ confusion, incidentally, stands in contrast to the Socratic model with which Jesus’ dialogues are frequently compared.

Deception and Misdirection in Jesus’ Two-Level Speech Profile

The interpretive principle assumed here is that one of the best ways to interpret literary representations of behavior, both speech acts and actions like ‘going up to the feast’, is by reference to patterns characteristic of the figure whose behavior is in question, a principle taken up most thoroughly in recent scholarship on Johannine characterization (Bennema 2009b, 2009a; Du Rand 1985; Hunt, Tolmie and Zimmermann 2013; Hylen 2009; Myers 2012; Skinner 2013). Ancient theorists held that words reveal ‘character’, and that some historical people had specific ways of speaking that could be studied and reproduced. In the context of a rhetorical education, the exercise for developing this skill, prosopopoeia, is described by Aelius Theon as ‘attributing the right words to each of the characters introduced’ (Theon 60; trans. Kennedy). ²⁵ Prosopopoeia can be done well, as it is (he says) consistently in Homer, or poorly, as when Euripides makes Hecuba speak like a philosopher (Theon 60). Later handbooks would differentiate between prosopopoeia, ethopoeia and eidolopoeia, but these all share the conviction that speech ‘in character’ was a recognizable and assessable element of representing people in narrative. ²⁶

An important dimension of the Johannine Jesus, then, considered as a character, is what I have been calling his speech profile. My contention is that the Johannine Jesus characteristically speaks in a manner that invites misunderstanding and that telling his brothers ἐγὼ οὐκ ἀναβαίνω εἰς τὴν ἑορτὴν ταύτην is typical rather than exceptional with respect to this manner of speaking. A few examples from Jesus’ first conversations in the Fourth Gospel may help illustrate the point. At 1.38, Jesus asks two disciples of John, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see’. This interaction introduces at least two important Johannine motifs, both of which are subject to the double-significance principle: the first is the ‘looking’ or ‘seeking’ language that pervades the gospel, culminating in the extended account of healing the man born blind; the second is the language of ‘staying’ or ‘remaining’. The question ‘What are you looking for?’ has an immediate, mundane referent in the man Jesus indicated earlier by John to these two disciples, prompting their move to follow Jesus (1.36-37). The question also has a spiritual referent, the specifics of which are elusive but must include other pieces of the Johannine constellation of desiderata (God, belief, eternal life, etc.). The question ‘Where are you staying?’ (ποῦ µένεις;) can likewise be read on two levels. The mundane sense of µενεῖν, presumably intended by the askers, concerns Jesus’ lodgings. Jesus’ answer, ‘come and see’ (ἔρχεσθε καὶ ὄψεσθε), can be read as answering the question on this level. We learn in the next verse, after all, that ‘they came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day’ (1.39). But both the question and the register of Jesus’ answer can be read in light of the Gospel’s theme of ‘remaining’ or ‘dwelling’, introduced prominently in the prologue above in language reminiscent of God’s ‘tabernacling’ with Israel in the Exodus narrative (1.14; cf. Exod. 40.34; Sir. 24.8) and developed throughout the gospel, especially in the True Vine discourse (5.38; 6.56; 8.31; 12.34, 46; 14.10, 17; 14.25; 15.4-10; cf. 21.22-23). Jesus’ answer, significantly, includes an ambiguous invitation to sight: ‘come and see my lodgings’ and ‘come and develop spiritual sight’ are both latent, meaningful significations.

There are many other exchanges in which the Johannine Jesus speaks and – from the perspective of the paradigmatic reader – is misunderstood, often in dialogues where someone takes Jesus’ words at face value when – again, from the perspective of a paradigmatic reader – a potential ‘mysterious’ meaning is present and primary. There is Nicodemus and the question of being born ἄνωθεν (3.3-10), the Samaritan Woman and ‘living water’ (4.10-15), the disciples and Jesus’ ‘food’ they do not know about (4.32-34), Philip and the question of where to get ‘bread’ for the people (6.5-6), the disciples and Lazarus’ having ‘fallen asleep’ (11.11-15). The group with which this misunderstanding manifests itself most often is οἱ ᾽Ιουδαῖοι, ‘the Jews’. It is on display when Jesus invites them to ‘destroy this temple’ (2.19-22), when Jesus is going to where they cannot find him (is he going to the Gentiles? 7.33-36), when Jesus is going where they cannot come (is he going to kill himself? 8.21-29), with ‘the Jews’ and Jesus as the bread of life (6.22-59), with the Pharisees over the question of who is blind and who can see (9.1-41), with a crowd over the issue of Jesus being ‘lifted up’ from the earth (12.32-36). Sometimes the misunderstanding is generated when Jesus seizes on an element in somebody else’s mundane language and answers as if they were speaking in the profound register, as in the question of where Jesus ‘abides’ (1.37-39; cf. 8.31). This non-exhaustive list of people ‘misunderstanding’ Jesus is, from another point of view, a list of instances in which Jesus deceives or misdirects those with whom he speaks. What makes the utterances acts of deception, and not merely ‘talking past each other’, as has sometimes been suggested in studies of the ‘misunderstandings’, is that Jesus in John is apparently possessed of privileged access to private thoughts (cf. 2.24). In light of this, it is all the more remarkable that, after deceiving people, Jesus often leaves them in ignorance of the profound sense in which paradigmatic readers are able to register his remarks. Scholars usually point to the examples collected here as instances of failure to understand on the part of those with whom Jesus is speaking, a view predicated on the generally unacknowledged assumptions that Jesus would not deceive, and that any failure in the communicative process must be the fault of his conversation partners. ²⁷ From a theological view abstracted from the narrative of the gospel, those assumptions may be persuasive or even necessary. Taking the gospel in narrative terms, however, and without imputing extra-Johannine benevolent intentions to the Johannine Jesus qua literary character, the more compelling way of reading this pattern involves letting deception and misdirection be parts of his characteristic speech profile on the mundane register, in the eyes and ears of those unable or unwilling to grasp Jesus’ profound truth-telling. ²⁸ It is this literary pattern of characteristic speech – not the ‘problem’ of a lying Jesus or any mind-blowing potential meaning of the utterance at the ‘profound’ level – that inclines me to see support for a two-level interpretation of Jn 7.8.

Bultmann, as noted above, rejects the two-level hypothesis in connection to Jn 7.8 because the brothers ‘in this situation could not but understand his words in the way they did’. The underlying assumption is apparently that the brothers should at least have been given a chance to understand ‘correctly’, that is, in the higher, spiritual sense intended by Jesus. If so, Bultmann is far from alone. But this line of reasoning falters in introducing a modern assumption about fairness and by ignoring the Johannine Jesus’ other conversations in which unfortunate conversants ‘could not but understand his words in the way they did’. The Johannine Jesus is never obviously concerned to condescend to the limited capacity of those with whom he converses. For each of the conversations mentioned above, an argument can be made that the conversation partner ‘could not but have taken his words in the way they did’, always in the earthly, immediate sense of the utterance rather than in a spiritual sense. Considering this broader pattern, there is no reason not to let John’s Jesus be a deceiver. Far from scrupulously avoiding the misleading of his conversation partners, the Johannine Jesus makes a habit out of it, often with the help of ambiguous double-signifiers.

In further support of this reading, it is worth noting that, shortly after Jesus misleads his brothers about his intention to go up to the feast, the evangelist has the crowds in Jerusalem wonder whether Jesus is ‘a good man’ or is ‘deceiving the crowds’ (7.12). The proximity of this schismatic question to the gospel’s clearest-cut instance of Jesus practicing deception is telling. For characters whose primary frame of reference is the mundane, Jesus appears as a deceiver. This does not rule out the conclusion that Jesus is also a ‘good man’. From the evangelist’s perspective, a perspective the reader is invited to share, not only is Jesus not a ‘deceiver’, he is the truth-teller par excellence. The Fourth Gospel, however, offers no example of a character who unambiguously approaches Jesus with this ideal, spiritual frame of reference. While some encounter the man from heaven and come to see the light, Jesus’ brothers are apparently not in this group.

When Jesus does arrive in Jerusalem and begins to teach (Jn 7.14), the conversation he initiates is dominated by the question of where he is from. In typical Johannine fashion, this conversation involves confusion about his earthly origins (Judea? Galilee?) and his cosmic origins (from God? from man?), and is linked to the idea that origins control identity (out of his mind? has a demon? is who he says he is? is a good man? is a deceiver?). Jesus, in the course of his interactions with ‘the Jews’ in Jerusalem, turns the question on its head. ‘The Jews’ are from the devil, who stands outside the truth, who is ‘a liar and the father of lies’. Jesus links where one is ‘from’ with the ability or inability to ‘hear’ his words. Like ‘the Jews’ throughout chs. 7 and 8 – a group to which the brothers may now be assimilated, having preceded Jesus to Jerusalem – the brothers cannot ‘hear’ his words in a profound register connected with his ascension and glorification because in the evangelist’s view they are not ‘of God’ (cf. 8.47). ²⁹ Consequently, they do not believe (7.5) and are deceived – not only in the immediate moment captured by Jn 7.8, but in a cosmic and eternal sense as well. They are, from the evangelist’s perspective, properly the property of the prince of this world (cf. 14.30), the father of lies (8.44). This is a troubling reading, but also instructive if it helps us better appreciate the range of early Christian narrative portraits of Jesus.

Conclusion

Jesus’ deception of his brothers in Jn 7.8 squares with his character’s general speech profile in three respects. He offers an utterance that misleads his dialogue partner. That utterance is nevertheless capable of being interpreted by a paradigmatic reader as ‘true’ in a higher, profound sense. Finally, despite his cognizance of the state of mind formed in the other by his misleading utterance, Jesus does nothing to correct the misunderstanding of what he has revealed, leaving them deceived and confounded. That he appears unconcerned to bring his dialogue partners around to what is, from his perspective, the true understanding of his revelation is especially striking. Perhaps it is not surprising that these literary patterns have received relatively thin attention in discussions of John’s Christology. What is surprising is the ubiquity of attempts to extend the circle of the Johannine Jesus’ concern to include unbelievers and the apologetic attempts to erase his deception or explain it away, either by changing the text (e.g., from οὐκ to οὔπω) or by reading something into it (e.g., a change of plans, or an implied νῦν) that refashions the Johannine Jesus to fit more comfortably into post-Johannine ethical discourses. My concern in this article has not been to argue that Jesus was right to lie, or that his followers should follow the example set by his speech profile – μὴ γένοιτο! Rather, I have set out to offer a literary, descriptive account of Jn 7.8 in connection to the Johannine Jesus’ broader speech profile, drawing attention especially to the role he himself plays in creating the notorious Johannine ‘misunderstandings’ and his apparent lack of subsequent concern for rectifying them. If this figure is not instantly admirable in a post-Johannine context, or if his habits of speech do not square well with what we find in other early Christian memorials of Jesus, we should nevertheless appreciate the power of the Johannine Jesus to illuminate the diversity of first-century Christologies.