Jesus does go up to the temple in Jerusalem during the first and third
Passover described in the Gospel of John. But if we read the Gospel of John
as the community’s story, the fact that Jesus and thousands of other Jews
with him spend the middle Passover in the Galilee (John 6) may hint at a
critique of aspirations, in the post-70 CEperiod, for the restoration of the
temple in historical or eschatological time. On the other hand, if the Johan-
nine community included a substantial number of Jews opposed to the
temple in Jerusalem, as Oscar Cullmann has argued (1975, 53, 87–89; cf.
also Rensberger 1988, 25–26), then this element, too, might be continuous
with the belief system to which they may have adhered before joining the
Johannine community.
Finally, a word must be said about the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the
Gospel of John. The descriptions of “the Jews” as Jesus’ enemies, who
expel believers from the synagogues and persecute them even unto death
(John 9:22; 16:2), are arguably indicative of the major source of disconti-
nuity that Jewish converts to Johannine Christianity would have experi-
enced. Although Johannine Christianity used some familiar messianic
titles, relied on the Jewish scriptures, and reinterpreted well-known Jew-
ish symbols, the anti-Jewish invective suggests that Jewish adherents
would have had either to renounce their identity as Ioudaioior to risk being
associated with the negative pole of this rhetoric in the Gospel of John.
The anti-Jewish language of the Gospel of John has generally been
seen as evidence that the community no longer was interested in convert-
ing Jews in the late first century CE. As Burton Mack points out in a review
of Stark’s work, “No Jew worth his salt would have converted when being
told that he was guilty of killing the messiah” (Mack 1999, 134). All the
more so, perhaps, if she is told that she is a child not of Abraham nor of God
but of the devil (John 8:44). On the other hand, as Bruce Malina and
Richard Rohrbaugh point out, such statements may be read as a kind of
“anti-language” that “creates and expresses an interpretation of reality
that is inherently an alternative reality...to society at large” (1998, 10–11).
Anti-languages “are generally replications of social forms based on highly
distinctive values. These values are clearly set apart from those of the soci-
ety from which antisocietal members derive” (Malina and Rohrbaugh 1998,
11). If so, the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Gospel of John, though evidence
of, and a contributor to, discontinuity, would not necessarily be an argument
against Stark’s theory. If Johannine anti-language takes Jewish norms as
its point of departure, then it may have been intended precisely for poten-
tial Jewish adherents to the Johannine community.
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