"I said, you are gods": John 10:30-38, Psalm 82:6, and us

I begin with a short prologue (or longish paragraph) before getting to my main topic. It presents four brief but related observations, without attempting to elaborate on any of them. Here goes: First, with the discovery and intense study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the profound Jewishness of the Gospel of John (and, more generally, all the earliest Christian writings) has become evident. It isn’t too far off the mark to say that this event changed forever how John’s Gospel should be read. What once looked like a book of somewhat diluted Greek concepts overlaying a more pristine Jewish Christianity has been shown to be a book primarily of deeply Jewish concepts filtered through a Greek idiom (as perhaps we ought to have expected). Along somewhat parallel lines, but not related to the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery, it has more recently become clear that, in those places in John where the term Ioudaioi (Ἰουδαῖοι) has wrongly been rendered as “Jews” in most translations (contributing thereby to charges against the Gospel of embryonic antisemitism), the word should rather be rendered “Judeans” – meaning people from the region of Judea, as distinct from the regions of Galilee or Samaria, and principally referring to those in some official capacity connected to the Jerusalem religious establishment (this is, for example, obvious in such a verse as Jn. 7:1). Parallel with both observations above, it can no longer be said with genuine confidence that John is clearly the last of the four Gospels to have been written. Not that mainstream scholarship has adopted or even paid the attention it deserves to J. A. T. Robinson’s lucidly argued, posthumously published, critical work, The Priority of John (1985), but his book has nevertheless made any such confidence debatable at best – at least, it has for those of us who have read it (Robinson, it should be noted, was by no means a conservative theologian). The internal evidence in John suggests that the earliest layer of this manifestly edited book might even feasibly be dated to before AD 70. Along with all the above, it’s difficult to ignore how strong the Second Temple Judaic background is for understanding John. Astute readers can recognize it in Jesus’ straightforward claims to be, not only the Messiah, but more strikingly “I Am” (see Jn. 8:24 and 58, for example, which is sometimes misleadingly translated as “I am he,” but is, in all probability, Jesus identifying himself as the “earthly” manifestation of YHWH, the last and perfect theophany of God), “the Son of Man” (the “second YHWH” described in Daniel 7 and 1 Enoch), “the Son of God,” the Lord whose glory Isaiah saw “high and lifted up,” the One who reveals “the Name” of God (HaShem = הַשֵּׁם; the Name of God in Judaic thought was understood as nothing less than God himself; cf. Ex. 23:21 and Jn. 17:6), and so on. Such claims were associated with a matrix of Second Temple Jewish ideas, derived from the Scriptures and expanded on, that were eventually condemned as the “Two Powers in Heaven” heresy in post-70 Judaism. Some of the best modern studies regarding such Judaic ideas as they relate to Christianity have been the work of Jewish scholars, such as Alan F. Segal [1] and Daniel Boyarin. Finally, before getting into the subject of this post, let me say that – to the question of who “the historical Jesus” claimed to be – I have no doubt whatsoever that he claimed to be all that John (and Matthew, Mark, and Luke) said that he claimed to be, with some necessary interpretative elaboration. I believe that if he hadn’t made such potent claims (and confirmed them by rising from the dead), it’s highly unlikely that his followers (including Paul) would have invented them on his behalf or staked their very lives on the truth of these claims. Christianity would have died aborning. And despite the “critical” work of scholars with noticeably materialist philosophical presuppositions, there really is no evidence whatsoever that Jesus could not or did not identify himself as the earthly embodiment of YHWH, the completion and summation of all theophanies. What made him stand out divisively were his authoritative charisma, his “works,” which could not be denied by his detractors, and his seemingly audacious claims about himself. Any interpretation of Jesus’ self-understanding that short-changes these aspects suffers from a scarcity of hard textual evidence, even if it’s packed to the gills with loquacious reasonings.