CHAPTER 5: THE FOURTH GOSPEL AND THE PLIGHT OF WOMEN AND THEIR ROLES IN THE FIRST CENTURY MEDITERRANEAN WORLD
5.1 Background of the Fourth Gospel
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CHAPTER 5: THE FOURTH GOSPEL AND THE PLIGHT OF WOMEN AND
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Testament. The New Testament was written during the first century43 of the Christian era by different authors in different times and to different audiences. It was later appropriated by an audience very different from the people of its generation. This explains the reason for studying its context with an attempt of grasping some of the main points of its message in its own time. Malina and Richard argue: “If we seek to understand what John’s Gospel meant to its original audiences, our question should be: What sort of situation and what set of concerns might adequately explain the scenes presented in the document called the Gospel of John?” (Malina 1998:4). But our first step will be a brief discussion of the question of the authorship of the Gospel.
5.1.1 Authorship, date and place of writing of the Fourth Gospel
The Fourth Gospel is silent about its author and some scholars believe that the gospel is a product of an anonymous writer. It is argued that the gospel was attributed to the apostle John to claim a certain authenticity and authority (Yamaguchi 2002:2). There are various arguments about the authorship of this gospel; some argue for the plurality of the authorship. They claim that the Fourth Gospel is a compilation of more than one set of material from different authors. From this perspective, some of them prefer to use the term authors (Conway 1997).
But almost all the exegetes of this gospel agree that the author (s) is someone who was familiar with the Jewish area, traditions and customs. After considering the views of various scholars, Perkins (2005) asserts that the Fourth Gospel reflects the Jewish background. Her article looks into different findings of scholars who were involved in the diversity of first century Judaism which include, for instance, the references in the gospel to the patriarchs Jacob and Abraham (John 4:5-6, 1:51; 8:31-58), the exposition on the bread of life which was compared with the homiletic exposition of the midrāšîm, Jewish wisdom traditions (Perkins 2007:944-945). According to Perkins’ conclusion the gospel was written by somebody acquainted with those diversities.
43 Some books of the New Testament were possibly written in the second century, but as the objective of this work is not the exploration of the time of the writing of all the New Testament books, the information given above will be sufficient for the present work.
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Guided by the question ‘what does the author know?’ Neyrey notices that the author has a great knowledge of the geography. He knows about Judea; for instance, he refers to Bethany and Jerusalem. He knows Samaria as he points to Sychar, Jacob’s well. He is familiar with Galilee; he speaks about a number of regions such as Bethsaida, Cana, Capernaum, Nazareth, Sea of Galilee/Sea of Tiberius and others. Neyrey also argues that the author is somebody who knows the Jewish tradition and even the Temple Feasts and the Sabbath. He also knows the Scripture and Midrashic interpretation (Neyrey 2007:2- 4). These considerations pointed out by Perkins and Neyrey lead to the assertion that the author of this gospel had a Jewish background. Recent work by archaeologists also confirms that he had an extensive and accurate knowledge of Jerusalem.44
While some scholars attribute the gospel to an anonymous writer, the tradition and some scholars attribute it to the apostle John the son of Zebedee and Salome. Elwell and Yarbrough write “The view that John, the son of Zebedee, one of the original twelve apostles, wrote the Fourth Gospel, was held uniformly by the early Church Fathers and for this reason became the traditional view held by the Christian church until modern times” (Elwell and Yarbrough 2005:109). More overt is Köstenberger who argues that in reconstructing the historical setting of the gospel one finds that a combination of internal and external evidence provides plausible grounds for concluding that the author is ‘an apostle, one of the twelve (the disciple Jesus loved), John, the son of Zebedee’, even though the hypothesis of the apostolic authorship of the Fourth Gospel is rejected in recent Johannine scholarship (Köstenberger 2004:6-7) 45
44 The paper offered in the recent session of ‘The Fourth Gospel and Archaelogy” at the Society of Biblical Literature Conference in San Francisco (S21-131)19-22 November 2011. I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Draper for bringing this to my attention.
45 There are different arguments on the identification of the beloved disciple who might have written the gospel. Some scholars like Moloney (1998) believe that the beloved disciple was the son of Zebedee but Moloney observes a continuous debate about John’s authorship. He says, “Whether or not the son of Zebedee was the author of the Fourth Gospel is the subject of never-ending debates” (Moloney 1998:8).
But Waetjen expresses his conviction that the beloved disciple is nobody else but Lazarus because of the sisters’ declaration, “Lord, the one you love is sick” (John 11:3). He even identifies the Fourth Gospel as the Gospel of the beloved, referring to Lazarus. The beloved disciple “is none other than Lazarus. For the formula ‘o]n hvga,pa o` VIhsou/j’ that is used of the Beloved Disciple in 13:23, corresponds to the characterization of Lazarus, o]n filei/ that his sisters employed in the message they sent to Jesus while he was sojourning in Transjordan ” (Waetjen 2005:18-19).
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However, what matters to this research work goes beyond the name of the author; the interest is more on the background, his community and all the events that may have marked and influenced his writings. The focus is therefore on the social setting of the author, which may assist to understand the context of the gospel.
Concerning the question of the time of the writing of this document, the date depends on the assumption about the author, as questions of who wrote and when he wrote the gospel actually overlap. Those who agree that John the son of Zebedee was the writer believe that he composed it from Ephesus around A.D. 90s (Unger 1985:698-699; Harrison 1971:218-225; Elwell and Yarbrough 2005:116).46
5.1.2 Recipients of the gospel and their community
Köstenberger mentions that the date may be between A.D. 70 and A.D. 100. But he adds that “If Thomas’ confession of Jesus as ‘my Lord and my God’ is intended to evoke associations of emperor worship under Domitian (A.D. 81-96), a date after A.D. 81 would appear most likely” (Köstenberger 2004:8). The discussion of the authorship and date of the gospel is also linked to the question of its intended audience.
The debate about the original readers/audience of the Fourth Gospel has not reached consensus among biblical scholars. For those who believe that the gospel was written by the apostle John, the intended readers were living in Ephesus and its surrounding as they argue that the gospel was written in Ephesus. Hendriksen, pointing to the explanatory notes about Jewish customs and conditions, attempts to convince us that the original audience was mostly composed of Gentile Christians (Hendriksen 1979:35). Perkins believes that the recipients were the people familiar with the “we” linked with the Johannine community in John 1:14, 16; 21:24 and with the Logos hymn used in the prologue, as well as with John the Baptist (3:24). In Perkins’ view, however, though the audience might be familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the prophetic
46 Although there are some debates among scholars about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, a few of them do not attribute it to John. Many others support the tradition which attributes its authorship to John son of Zebedee and Salome. Only a very limited number of scholars support the authorship, date and place of writing as quoted above. The information on the expulsion from the synagogue in chapter 9 is taken by some to refer to the Synod of Yavney in 80.C.E which supports the view of those who put the date before 100 A.D.
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quotations and even with the major heroes of patriarchal period, reference is made to some events, for instance the Jewish feasts, in a way that may reveal that the author and his audience were no longer observing them. These include the Passover, Sabbath, purification rites, and burial customs. Perkins believes that the readers of the gospel must be envisaged as the Christian Jews in the Diaspora (Perkins 2007:949).
During the Roman Empire, the Diaspora was referred to as the dispersion of the Jewish people outside of their homeland Palestine - conceived as a holy land, the land promised by the covenant with Yahweh. In addition to Babylonia and Egypt, Jews lived in many other countries outside Palestine, carried there very often as prisoners of war, but also by voluntary emigration. Wordelman confirms that through military and economic conquests during the prior three centuries, Rome had expanded its domain to encompass parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa that surrounding Mediterranean Sea (Wordelman 1998:482).
People of the Diaspora were driven away from their homeland for various reasons; for some it was for political reasons, but there were those who voluntarily could decide to leave their homeland. The recipients of the gospel are then believed to be primarily a community of Jews regardless of their location whether Palestine or any Mediterranean region.
Moloney observes that the community was characterized by Jewish messianic expectations, illustrated by various events in the gospel. These events include the act of religious authorities who come from Jerusalem to ask about John the Baptist’s identity in John 19:28, the testimony of John the Baptist in John 1:29, 34-39 and also the disciples of John the Baptist calling Jesus a ‘Rabbi’ and Messiah and following him (Moloney 2005:1418). According to Moloney, these events and many others in the Fourth Gospel provide a clear indication that the Johannine audience could be identified as a Jewish community which was familiar with these Christological issues and their implications.
To the suggestion that the community was Jewish comes the challenging issue of the language of the gospel, the Koiné Greek. Yamaguchi provides a solution to this, pointing to the community of a mixed audience of the Greco-Roman world (Yamaguchi 2002:3);
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Greek was a common language of the Empire. The possibility remains that the implied audience of the Fourth Gospel consisted of a broad area of the Mediterranean region within the Greco-Roman world rather than a narrow region of Palestine. For the purpose of this work, it is assumed that the audience of the Fourth Gospel consisted of the Christian Jews and Gentile converts who were living in the broader Mediterranean region both on the Jewish land and in the Diaspora. It is then important to look into some aspects that characterized that broad region starting from the milieu of the Greco-Roman world during the first century, with specific interest in the condition of women.
5.2 The Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean region during the first century