Stark offers us a way around this stumbling block indirectly. Although
Stark does not address the Gospel of John directly, he does provide a brief
interpretation of John Chrysostom’s anti-Jewish polemics, which we may
adapt for our present purpose. According to Stark, we should view Chrysos-
tom’s emphatic attacks on Judaism as an attempt to wean Christians away
from contacts with Jews and to consolidate a diverse and splintered faith
into a clearly defined catholic structure. In a similar vein, the expulsion motif
may reflect not the memory of expulsion but, rather, the tension engendered
by ongoing social contacts between Jews and the Johannine community.
In fact, some scholars suggest that one purpose of the rhetoric of the Gospel
of John was to discourage its readers from further contacts with Jews and
Judaism. R.E. Brown, for example, reads John 12:11 as “a tacit invitation
to those Jews who believe in Christ to follow the example of their compa-
triots who had already left Judaism to follow Jesus” (1966, 1:459).
Although Stark argues that Chrysostom’s anti-Jewish rhetoric was not
motivated by a concern that Christians would “backslide” into Judaism,
there is evidence to suggest that this did occur (see Wilson, chapter 3).
Hebrews 10:29 promises dire consequences for “those who have spurned
the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were
sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace.” The context of this warning
compares Jesus’ sacrifice with those offered, year after year, in the temple,
implying that it is the possibility of backsliding into Judaism which is being
addressed. The letter of Ignatius to the Philadelphians (6) warns, somewhat
more explicitly: “if anyone expounds Judaism to you, do not listen to him;
for it is better to hear Christianity from a man who is circumcised than
Judaism from a man uncircumcised; both of them, if they do not speak of
Jesus Christ, are to me tombstones and graves of the dead, on which noth-
ing but the names of men are written...” (Schoedel 1985, 200).
The Gospel of John could also be a tacit warning to Johannine Chris-
tians, whether of Jewish or of Gentile origin, not to seek to return to the
Jewish fold; which, from the Johannine perspective is incompatible with
full faith in Jesus as the Messiah, as R. Alan Culpepper suggests (1987,
281; also Kimelman 1981, 235). Indeed, Reuven Kimelman raises the pos-
sibility that “the whole charge [of exclusion and persecution] was con-
cocted to persuade Christians to stay away from the synagogue by making
them believe that they would be received with hostility” (1981, 234–35). This
argument for exempting the expulsion passages from a two-level reading
is not entirely convincing. Nevertheless, it points to the complexity of recon-
structing the demography and history of a community on the basis of a doc-
ument in which it is described only indirectly, if indeed at all.
nora
(Nora)
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