In the late first century, when the Jews had no political power, John and the other evangelists to various extents shifted the responsibility for Jesus' death from the Romans to the Jews. The precise level of Jewish involvement in Jesus' passion and death is disputed among both Jewish and Christian scholars. Still there is little doubt that the evangelists gradually make the Jewish leaders or the Jews into the prime movers and Pilate and the Romans into somewhat unwilling accomplices.

Josephus makes a similar move when he explains the destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 as the inevitable result of Jewish fanatics having gained power and forcing the Romans to intervene. By blaming the Jews for Jesus' death, John explained away the embarrassing circumstances of Jesus' death and connected the Jews of Jesus' day with the rivals of his own community. This political apologetic on John's part, ingenious in the situation perhaps, has had unfortunate long-term consequences on Christian-Jewish relations through the centuries.

Theological factors. In addition to the sociological and political factors, there are theological dimensions to John's portrait of the Jews. John assumes a dualistic framework and locates Jesus with reference to Jewish institutions and traditions.

First, there is John's dualism. For many years John's Gospel had been read as the most "Greek" Gospel. That changed with the discovery of the Qumran Scrolls, in which eagerness for knowledge and the sharp contrast between light and darkness appear. While acknowledging the ultimate power of God, the Qumran Essenes divided all present reality into two camps. The children of light do the deeds of light under the leadership of the Angel of Light, and the children of darkness do the deeds of darkness under the leadership of the Angel of Darkness. This Jewish form of modified dualism found its way into early Christianity and received its strongest expression in John's Gospel. It is not surprising, then, that John placed his rivals, the Jews, alongside "the world" with the children of darkness. There are no "grays" in dualistic thinking, and the Jews end up on the wrong side of the dividing line.

Another theological challenge posed by the events of A.D. 70 was the task of locating Jesus with reference to Jewish institutions. John responded by showing how various Jewish titles—Wisdom, Lamb of God, Messiah, Son of God, King of Israel, Son of Man—apply to Jesus. He also showed how Jesus gave new meaning to the Sabbath, Passover, Tabernacles, and Hanukkah.

Whereas the Torah was given through Moses, the premise and goal of the Torah ("grace and truth") came through the Word made flesh, Jesus (1:17).  Jesus was the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote (1:45).  Although John portrays Jesus as a Torah-observant Jew who regularly made pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the holy days, John, like other early Christians, was more interested in how the Torah stood with reference to Jesus and how the Scriptures pointed toward him than in how Jesus observed the Torah.

Dealing with the Problem

The problem of the portrayal of the Jews in John's Gospel is basically a Christian one, though it surely has implications for Jews. The responsi­bility for dealing with it resides primarily with us who affirm that John's Gospel is part of Christian Scripture and is authentic testimony to Christ. There are two major avenues open to us who want to do something about the problem: educating people to recognize the shape of the problem; and reflecting on what our biblical translations communicate.

 

Educating people. Recognizing the shape of the problem involves aware­ness of the historical circumstances in which John's Gospel was com­posed. John was a Jewish Christian. He wrote for a largely Jewish-Christian audience living in tension with other Jews in the late first cen­tury. He was trying to show that the Christian movement was the authen­tic response to the crisis posed by the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. His negative comments about the Jews had a specific setting. They were not intended to be what we call anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish since they came from within Judaism, and attempts to label John as anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish are anachronistic and unfair.

Nevertheless Christians must be willing to admit the anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic potential of John's presentation of the Jews. When taken out of its late first-century intra-Jewish setting, the Fourth Gospel can be read as anti-Jewish and has been done so. This is where the liberating func­tion of historical study comes in. What was perhaps understandable in a first-century ultra-Jewish context need not be repeated for all time or raised to the status of an abstract truth. Those who know history are not doomed to repeat it. The Johannine treatment of the Jews is a powerful argument for the need for Christians to become more sensitive to the historical origins of our sacred Scriptures.

 

Biblical translations. We need also to consider what our biblical trans­lations communicate. With each Good Friday I become more uncomfort­able about what parishioners may understand about the actions of Jews in the Johannine passion narrative. What images do they have of the Jews? Do they make connections with their Jewish neighbors and coworkers? Does the Gospel add to their negative stereotypes of Jews? Some biblical scholars and Church leaders suggest that our translations be modified to read "some Jews" or "the Jewish leaders" or even "the Judeans" to break the pattern of collective imputation of guilt for Jesus' death. Although many (including me) hesitate to tamper with the gospel text, there are precedents for doing such things. In antiquity the Jewish targumists produced Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible in order to make sure that the theological content of the biblical text was correctly understood. (See "Scripture's Use of Scripture" in Dr. Schuyler Brown's article on page 199.)

Today translators sometimes adopt what is called the dynamic equivalence theory of translation. According to this theory, the translator must first understand the original text as precisely as possible and then attempt to say in the language of translation what the original author was com­municating. Since the thought is the most important concern, there is no need to reflect woodenly the word order and vocabulary of the original.

From the perspective of history, "some Jews" and "the Jewish leaders" are accurate translations. But they do not really capture John's dualism or his fondness for collective nouns, and thus may distort John's text. "Judeans" does break the connection between ancient Jews and mod­em Jews. But it is primarily a geographical term and fails to convey the religious aspect of the Greek expression hoi Ioudaioi ("the Jews"). So put­ting what we know about the Jews in John's Gospel into English remains a challenge.

One hesitates to turn a Good Friday homily into a lecture on the evils of anti-Semitism. Yet the problem posed by the Johannine portrait of the Jews should at least be woven into Christian preaching and teaching. Above all, our people must be instructed about the intra-Jewish debate in which the Gospel took shape. On a more general level they need help in grasping some points of Christian theology that have been clarified through recent Christian-Jewish dialogue. The claim that Jesus "fulfilled" the Jewish Scriptures and institutions does not mean that he evacuated them of meaning.

Father Daniel J. Harrington S.J. is associate professor of New Testament at Weston School of Theology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and the editor of New Testament Abstracts. Among his books are Interpreting the Old Testament (Michael Glazier), in which he discusses translations of the Bible, and The Gospel According to Matthew in the Collegeville Bible Commentary series (The Liturgical Press).