Episode 272: Hugo Méndez - Who Wrote John?
Is the biblical author John the person we think he is? In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Hugo Méndez joins Jared and Jennifer Garcia Bashaw to talk about some of the theories on the authorship of the Gospel and Letters of John, diving into an alternative to the traditional ideas about who wrote the texts and the implications for how we approach the Bible as a whole. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What led Hugo to pursue historical and literary issues in the Gospel of John and the Letters of John?
What is the Johannine community and why does it matter to authorship of John?
How is the Gospel of John related to 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John?
What are the similarities and differences in the Gospel of John and Letters of John?
How has Hugo’s work challenged the status quo in Johannine studies?
What does pseudepigrapha mean and how is it relevant to the authorship of John?
What are some hallmarks of pseudepigraphal literature?
Who is John identified as in the Bible? Is this the same John that wrote the Gospel of John or the Letters of John?
What does it look like to go between different authorship theories and go where the data leads?
What are the implications if biblical authors are fabricating characters and backgrounds?
How do we have a robust conversation so that we learn without apprehension about these things and how it can integrate into the life of faith?
What resources are there for Bible readers to learn to look out for clues to authorship?
Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
“The titles that we have on our gospels are, in the estimation of most scholars, probably not the original titles, if these works even originally had titles in the first place.” @DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“When we want to analyze who actually wrote the Gospel of John, ordinarily as scholars, we would turn to the internal data of the text.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“What I've argued is that the Gospel Letters of John are better understood as a chain or series of pseudepigrapha.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“We know that there were a lot of people in the ancient world who disseminated literature under other people's names for various reasons. They're using pen names, they're taking on other identities.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“Scholars have amassed evidence that these texts have signs of direct copying between them—that whoever was writing 1 John was probably looking at the Gospel of John and imitating some of its expressions.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“This is the kind of thing that we tend to see a lot in pseudepigraphal literature, where one author, in trying to co-opt another author's identity, will try to copy their vocabulary, imitate it very closely by even looking at the model text.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“There have always been questions about the authors of the Gospel of John and the Letters of John.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“The Gospel of John itself is strictly anonymous. It never names its author, but over the course of the gospel, it clearly intimates that it is fundamentally a gospel that is anchored in the witness, if not actually written by, a disciple whom Jesus loved.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“This disciple [John] feels very idealized in some ways. He has this kind of perfect faithfulness to Jesus. He's always, always there. A lot of scholars have raised the question of: is this a real character or could this be something else? Could this be a character that the text has created perhaps to draw people into the story?”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“I think the posture of some people is sometimes to dismiss this as merely scholars being skeptical, attacking the faith. What I hope anybody listening to this podcast understands is those of us who work in this field or are really trying our hardest to make sense of some very complex literature and questions.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“Sometimes there's such a fear of scandal or loss of faith that we create somewhat unrealistic expectations of how certain faith is going to be, or what sort of certainties faith is meant to deliver to us.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“If you went to a modern church today and tried to take two people from that church and ask them questions about the faith, odds are eventually you'll get two different answers to a question. There's so much diversity within contemporary Christianity, and it was that way in the first and second century.”@DrHugoMendez@theb4np
“It's always been that way, that there have been different perspectives, slightly different points of view, different ways of articulating the same reality, maybe some disagreement.”
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: June class “Restoring All Things” taught by Bradley Jersak
Books: Hugo’s Publications listed here
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
-
Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music plays]
Pete: Attention pupils, it’s that time of year again—to tell you about Summer School 2024! We’ve got a great lineup this year with topics chosen to address some of your biggest faith questions. We’re kicking it off with our June class called “Restoring All Things: Biblical Roots of Christian Universalism” taught by the one and only Bradley Jersak. The class will cover topics like: defining ultimate redemption or ‘biblical universalism’ and whether it’s really biblical; key terms, symbols and descriptions associated with ‘eternal condemnation’; ways that early Christian teachers modeled reading Scripture faithfully to harmonize texts of dire judgment AND universal hope, and more.
When you sign up you’ll get access to the live one-night-only class plus a live Q&A session, a link to the recording afterward, and downloadable class slides. As always, it’s Pay What You Can until the class ends, and then it costs $25 for the recording. If you join our community Society of Normal People, you can get access to this class AND all our other classes for just $12/month. To sign up, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/Christianuniversalism.
And lastly, for those of you who want extra credit, we’ve resurrected our Hall Pass—which gets you access to all 3 courses in the 2024 Summer School series: June class “Restoring All Things,” July class “Go to Hell?” and August class “Banned Books: The Apocrypha Edition” …plus a fun little bonus gift for your support.
Jared: Well, folks, on today's episode, I've got Jennifer Garcia Bashaw as a co-host and we are talking about Who Wrote John with Hugo Méndez. What a treat to talk with Hugo alongside our very own author of John for Normal People, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Yeah, I love John so much. I used to tell people that Mark was like my first gospel love, but once I started studying John, I wanted to marry it. So, I'm very excited to talk to Hugo today. Hugo is an assistant professor in ancient Mediterranean religions at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Jared: What a weird nerdy thing to say. [Jennifer laughs] This is just—folks, just a heads up. This is a great intro to how scholars talk about and think about the Bible. I just thought, between you, Jennifer, and Hugo, just the conversation was such a good entry point for just how scholars think and talk about the Bible. I just thought it was very well done. Alright. With all that said, let's get into the episode.
[Teaser clip of Hugo speaking plays over music]
Hugo: “There's so much diversity within contemporary Christianity, and it was that way in the first and second century. It's always been that way. Different perspectives, different ways of articulating the same reality. Maybe some disagreement. And there are ways that we can understand them in unison as harmony, where they don't have to be identical, but they can sing together in different ways on different keys, so to speak.”
[Ad break]
Jennifer: Hugo, welcome to the show. We are so happy to have you here today. I have a question about your background, actually. Your degrees are in religion and linguistics. So what led you to pursue historical and literary issues in the Gospel of John and the Letters of John?
Hugo: Yeah, thanks. I definitely have a different route to my current career than many other New Testament scholars have taken. I did a PhD in linguistics, in historical linguistics. You know, I wasn't planning to become a New Testament scholar at all. What happened was that my doctoral advisor, my major professor, had suggested that for my dissertation, I do a project on the early translations of the Gospels. And, you know, this makes a lot of sense in historical linguistics to work on the Gospels, because very often, the Gospels are the first literature that's translated into any language, partly because Christian missionaries actually created the alphabets for many of the kind of major language families we find in Europe.
So yeah, it made sense to work on looking at how the Gospels were translated in different languages to understand those languages. What happened over the course of that dissertation was I fell in love with the New Testament and with the Gospels in particular. I liked linguistics, but there were so many other questions in these texts than, yikes, prepositions and verbs and everything that linguistics was suited to answer, right? There's history, there's culture, there are avenues for literary analysis, there are theological questions to wrestle with. And so, you know, I ended up leaving that defense really deeply aware that I think I had changed as a scholar over the course of my dissertation years.
Yeah. After I finished my PhD, I ended up getting a postdoc at Yale University. And the entire idea behind that postdoc was to shift from linguistics into New Testament studies fully. So that meant writing a brand new book relative to anything that I had written before in linguistics. That involved teaching New Testament and early Christianity at Yale Divinity School, which I did full time for three semesters. It also involved writing lots of journal articles. I ended up doing that for two years, then I came to UNC Chapel Hill for two years as a postdoc, and that's where I've been now, this is ending my sixth year as faculty here. And so I'm, yeah, feeling really great about this long circuitous journey that actually, nobody should try, uh, you know, do New Testament, the direct route. Uh, yeah.
Jennifer: Well, I, uh, love the gospels. I fell in love with them a long time ago. So I commend your choice, actually.
Jared: I want to get into, you know, the conversation today, we want to talk about the Johannine community and that's going to be a phrase that it's going to be new for a lot of our listeners. You know, they would have, when we think about the gospels, we think of the gospel writer, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. For a lot of people, that's an individual who wrote down and, and wrote a book. And even though now maybe listening to the podcast, they've realized that's not exactly how things happened, but the idea of the community around Mark or the, the Johannine community around the gospel of John or the letters of John, that's, that's a, maybe a new area for people. So can you kind of just give people an understanding of that community and maybe summarize the scholarship around these discussions of these communities so that we can familiarize ourselves just with what we're talking about here.
Hugo: So the starting point for the study of the authorship of any gospel is recognizing that first of all, the titles that we have on our gospels are in the estimation of most scholars, probably not the original titles, or if these works even originally had titles in the first place. The titles we have, “The Gospel According to Matthew”, “The Gospel According to Mark”, are the kinds of titles one would expect to end up on texts after you would have had several of them out there in the world circulating, and somebody had to sit down and start defining which ones were which.
And so we think of these titles as ones that probably later scribes attached to these works, trying to make good guesses of who their authors were based on prevailing beliefs, speculations, traditions that were available to them. In the case of the Gospel of John, you know, when we want to analyze who actually wrote the Gospel of John, you know, ordinarily as scholars, we would turn to the internal data of the text.
But the Gospel of John's a little more complicated than that, because we not only have a Gospel of John in the New Testament, we also have three other shorter works: the letters, or epistles, we call 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John. And for centuries and centuries and time immemorial, right, Christians have recognized that the authorship of these texts somehow seems to be connected.
If you open up the Gospel of John, it has a way of speaking about Jesus discussing ideas that is notably different. You're going to find different idioms. You're going to find different phrases in that text. And so one thinks of expressions like “the true light”, “passing from death to life”, “knowing the truth”, “doing the truth”, “being children of the light”, “walking in the light”. These are expressions that are distinctive to the gospel of John. Well, what's interesting is the letters of 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John actually have all of these distinctive expressions also reflected within themselves. And so for however long it's been that people have been speculating, and it's been very nearly since the beginning, you know, second century, Christians have understood somehow these texts are related to one another.
The question is, how are they related? The traditional conventional explanation for how the Gospel of John and Letters of 1, 2, and 3 John are related is that they must have had a common author. If you find distinctive phrases in one text and you find them in other texts, well, that could be a sign that you're looking at the linguistic fingerprint of a single author.
But by the early 20th century, scholars had begun to question this view. Scholars are very clear today that these texts are dramatically similar in their language and ideas, but they also noted subtle differences between these texts. And so, you know, in the 1920s, 1930s, you have scholars like C. H. Dodd who are recognizing that when 1 and 2 John have this very clearly defined concept of Antichrist, that's not something we find in the Gospel of John. Their language of atonement feels a little different from the Gospel of John. The way they describe the second coming of Jesus uses different Greek expressions than the Gospel of John.
And so, scholars in the early 20th century decided, okay, we're not working with a single author between all four texts, we must be looking at something different. And what they developed was the idea that instead we're looking at multiple authors, but since they shared the same vocabulary, ideas, language, the idea was that these authors must be connected on some other level.
And so scholars began assuming that these authors, although different people, must have at least come from the same social setting or community. They must have been people who probably belonged to the same Christian movement, maybe even the same Christian congregations.
You know, when I teach this to my students, I always give them an analogy of you know, if you had two friends of yours, and one of them tells you they're going to Mass, and so does another one tells you they're going to Mass, you might kind of put in your mind that, well, A, Mass is not a word that I hear every day. It's not a word that I hear my Baptist friends use, my Methodist friends use. It's very distinctive of Catholics. If both of them are using it, they must be Catholics. They must belong to the same tradition themselves. So, kind of similarly, the scholarly assumption by the mid 20th century is, if we're seeing similar expressions in multiple authors, in multiple books of the Bible, expressions like Children of the Light, Walking in the Light, then that must mean that the authors in question have somehow belonged to the same Christian group or movement.
We could think of early Christianity as having different kinds of flavors and movements, and maybe they just belonged to the John sounding one, what scholars then end up calling the Johannine one. Johannine is just the, you know, adjective form of John. So that was pretty much where the scholarship was and where it, you know, has kind of roughly been for at least the last half century.
There have been minor challenges in some ways to this thesis, I say minor only because they haven't really made the kind of impact one would want, necessarily, a full blown challenge to make. Back in the 1990s, Richard Bauckham and some other scholars suggested that you know, some aspects of the community model might not quite fit these texts. The best explanation that Bauckham gave to try to understand the relationship between these texts was to go back to common authorship as an explanation. But again, there are very good reasons why most scholars haven't wanted to go back to that explanation. We don't think it fits the data of these texts.
Uh, another scholar, Adele Reinhartz has questioned the extent to which we can really use text to reconstruct history with the same kind of certainty we have as scholars. But there again, she hasn't necessarily offered another alternative to this community model. So today, most scholars are very happy to say that the Gospel Letters of John probably come from multiple authors, who were united in the same community or social setting, but we don't necessarily know a lot about that community or social setting, our ability to reconstruct it might be limited, and that's about where the field is.
[Ad break]
Jennifer: I'm wondering about your work, if you could tell our audience about how your work has challenged this sort of status quo in Johannine studies.
Hugo: Yeah, thanks. So I published an article in 2020 called “Did the Johannine community exist?” I actually began writing it oddly enough while I was listening to a panel celebrating 50 years of the Johannine community hypothesis as laid out by this one scholar in the 1960s.
And, you know, there was something about sitting, listening to this that just kind of felt like, ah, I got to start writing this paper. Because I'd been thinking for a while about how we want to rethink this paradigm. I'm one of the scholars who feels that the Johannine community hypothesis is one that doesn't necessarily explain all our data. And that there is room for critiquing and rethinking it. But the fundamental question for me, as for so many scholars, has been, but what should it be replaced with? What fits our data better? And what I had developed by that point, and what I've continued to develop since, is what I think is an alternative, and I would hope, better way of understanding the same evidence.
So, in the Gospel and Letters of John, again, I noted we have lots of linguistic similarities that tie these texts together. We also have some subtle differences between them. The similarities tell us they're connected, the differences tell us they probably belong to different authors. What I've argued is that the Gospel Letters of John are better understood as a chain or series of pseudepigrapha.
So, just to gloss the term here, when biblical scholars use the term pseudepigrapha, we mean texts that claim an author that they were not actually written by. You know, today, critical scholars who work in New Testament actually suspect that a lot of New Testament texts fit into this category. We think, for instance, that of the 13 or so epistles that come down to us in the name of Paul, that at least six might not actually have been written by Paul, but might have been written by later authors who took on the name of Paul.
Critical scholars, in general, have similar suspicions about 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, raising the question about whether or not the figures to whom these particular letters are attributed are actually their authors. Part of the reason why we think this is not least that pseudepigraphal letters were really common in antiquity.
You know, if you look outside Christian evidence and just look at the vast kind of mass of Greek letters that come to us from antiquity, at least 1600 are believed by classicists to be pseudonymous or pseudepigraphal. We know that there were a lot of people in the ancient world who disseminated literature under other people's names for various reasons. They're using pen names, they're taking on other identities. Some of these reasons are ones that might have been within the sphere of what we might think of as actually something ethical. We think that some of them might have been women, some of them might have been enslaved persons who had no other way of getting their ideas out there unless they wrote them under the name of some well known, elite, established male author.
Some of these might have been more deceptive. You know, in the mass of kind of non-canonical gospels, you'll find the Gospel of Thomas, that purports to be written by a disciple of Jesus to launch its distinctive, peculiar, gnosticizing views of Jesus, except that it wasn't actually written by Thomas. So, you know, from the ethical to the unethical, arguably, you know, there's a lot of this kind of literature out there.
One thing that I began to notice a few years ago is that the Gospel Letters of John might actually make a lot of sense as this kind of literature. And for two specific reasons. If you go back again to the fact that these texts have many similarities between them, then on the one hand, it's important to note that for the last several decades, scholars have not only noticed that these texts are very similar, they've also amassed evidence that these texts have signs of direct copying between them. That whoever was writing 1 John was probably looking at the Gospel of John and imitating some of its expressions.
You can see this pretty clearly if you look at John chapter one, the opening verses and the first few verses of 1 John, you'll see a constellation of very similar terms, the beginning, word, life, with the father, a narrator that speaks in a way who speaks about having seen Jesus. There's strong similarities between these two texts.
If you look at 2 John and 1 John, you'll see clearly almost word for word parallels between them. And this is the kind of thing that we tend to see a lot in pseudepigraphal literature, where one author, in trying to co-opt another author's identity, will try to copy their vocabulary, imitate it very closely by even looking at the model text.
So that was one kind of piece of evidence that was really important for me. Another one was that there have always actually been questions about the authors of the Gospel of John and the letters of John. The Gospel of John itself is strictly anonymous. It never names its author, but over the course of the gospel, it clearly intimates that it is fundamentally a gospel that is anchored in the witness, if not actually written by, a disciple whom Jesus loved. He's a figure who appears for the first time in chapter 13. He's depicted as Jesus's most famous, you know, kind of intimate faithful disciple. He is there at the last supper leaning on Jesus' breast. He is there at the crucifixion. He's the only male disciple who will not abandon Jesus.
And at the resurrection, he is there at the empty tomb before anyone outrunning even Peter. To see the empty tomb of Jesus. Well, if you go to any other gospel, you won't find a trace of this character. Luke has a scene where Peter runs to the tomb. There's no beloved disciple there. There's a scene with women standing under the cross and other gospels, no beloved disciple there.
And then there's the fact that this disciple feels very idealized in some ways. You know, he has, again, this kind of perfect faithfulness to Jesus. He's always, always there. And so I, you know, a lot of scholars have raised the question of, is this a real character or could this be something else? Could this be a character that the text has created perhaps to draw people into the story?
Is the beloved disciple a kind of character who's supposed to represent what an ideal disciple should do rather than being a real disciple in and of himself. Well, what's interesting is if you read 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John, and I've made this argument, the narrators of these texts sound a lot like that original gospel writer.
They actually sound like they're positioning themselves as the disciple whom Jesus loved. The, you know, narrator of 1 John claims to be an eyewitness. He speaks the same way that the narrator of the Gospel of John speaks. And so what I've argued to kind of wrap this all up is that the gospel and letters of John are connected, but they're probably connected because the people who wrote 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John probably had read the gospel, had seen and encountered this character, this disciple whom Jesus loved, and like so many other Christians of the era, decided to write the follow up works in the voice of that disciple. These texts are very similar to the gospel because they were actively copying expressions from the gospel, but they were doing it to try to open new ground.
When you read 1 John, it explores questions that the gospel of John never answers about sin, about eternal life. Second and third John take you into different corners of that disciple eyewitnesses thought and ideas. Uh, and so it's a very different way of understanding this literature, but it's one that I think helps us address a lot of problems that tradition has had. It tells us on the one hand that the traditional idea that these texts might share a common author wasn't exactly wrong. These texts probably share at least a common implied author. They were meant to look like they were texts written by the same figure, even if they were not. And it helps us answer some of the questions the community model tried to answer, too.
Jared: There's so much to unpack with what you have just shared, Hugo. I think it's important that, that, you know, if you're listening to this, that you're, you're, you're really trying to hear how you Hugo are walking through this process. Because it is, it is how scholars operate. And I think that's just important because I think for a lot of people, they maybe had, have gone to churches or, or grew up in a tradition where it's like, well, no, the simplest answer to all of this is just that there's one author and it's John, and that makes the most sense of the data. For me, I'll speak for myself, that's a superficial understanding of what scholars do and the data that you're talking about. Cause every step along the way, as you've kind of walked us through this process, it's sort of we got to this point, but then the data, this theory didn't make sense of all the data.
And so the idea that there's one author, there's, there's too much data that shows the differences linguistically, that it's highly unlikely that it's one author, but there's some similarities in other ways that don't point us to one author, but point us to some commonality or community or something. And then, you know, this pseudepigrapha idea of putting it in the voice of a character, it helps explain more of that data.
So can you just say more in terms of the process? Because I think for some people trying to get their head around how scholars operate, what does that look like to go between these different theories and try to fit where the data leads you? Because that really is the scholarly pursuit, is to go where the data leads.
Hugo: Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, when I talk to my students about this a lot in the classroom. I teach New Testament at this, you know, large public university, UNC Chapel Hill. I'll get 200, 300 students in a room. And, you know, what I'll tell them really is that in general, scholars don't like questioning the authorship of biblical texts for a variety of reasons, right?
Most of us got into this field because we are believing, practicing Christians. An emphasis on the present tense, “are”, you know, we understand as well as any Christian out there does the challenges that, you know, can sometimes come with asking these sorts of questions. But, you know, just kind of on a more basic level, the work of biblical scholars is we want to actually understand who wrote this. And, you know, when we look at the letters of Paul, for instance, it would be great if we could absolutely say with certainty that Paul wrote all 13 of these letters. We would be able to know a lot more about the thought of Paul, catch so many more nuances in Paul. The explanation that, for instance, six of those might not actually be written by Paul is kind of a difficult one for even us as scholars to swallow because what it means is we might never know who these authors are. We might never know who, what their names are.
And so, you know, just kind of starting off the bat, I think we're sort of predisposed as scholars to not want to do this exercise. But you're right. The data does, for us, present a challenge. And there's a puzzle we're trying to work out. We're trying to make the best sense of it. And, you know, we have our theories and we have our alternative competing theories and we're engaged in academic debate from year to year, from decade to decade, trying to advance more and more closer to the truth.
Jared: Can I also ask a clarifying question here? Because this is, maybe you heard this in seminary, but I never really took time to anyway, you're blowing my mind a little bit here. And that is to say. with the gospel of John, that this disciple whom Jesus loved may be an invented character for point of view, right? That the gospel, this narrative or gospel is written from the perspective of a made up persona or character, this disciple whom Jesus loved. And whenever you said that, the pieces kind of went in my head of like, oh, yeah, it is an idealized figure. It reminds me of, not one of the best arguments, but one of the arguments for why Moses probably didn't write the Torah is, it describes Moses like the most humble man to ever live, right? Yeah, number is 1, 2, 3 or, yeah. It's like, uh, really? So, he, the most humble man probably wouldn't write that he's the most humble man. And so, like, this disciple whom Jesus loved, like, if this is who it is, they really, it's, it's a little bit, like, strange at how this person would describe themselves.
It makes more sense if someone's trying to idealize them rather than that. So anyway, I just wanted that—those data points were helpful to me, but I just want to make sure I heard you correct. Is that what you're saying? That it seems like that John was, was written from this point of view of a character that maybe is not identified with a particular historical disciple.
Hugo: Yeah. And there are a number of scholars that have argued this. I mean, I'm standing in a line of people, Lindars, uh, Attridge, Litwa, who have made similar arguments, Dunderburg, in decades past. Yeah.
Jared: So I'm going to reorient. Let's talk about some of the implications about this. So what are the implications if biblical authors are fabricating characters and backgrounds?
How do we reframe? Because I think in the ancient argument for, you know, canon, meaning how books got in, there's ties to the apostles and there's a line of authority and that kind of thing. We don't much think about that now, because we just have the inherited text that we have, but what are the implications of saying, you know, some of these letters that we thought were written by Paul aren't written by Paul, or that some of this literature, the John literature, is pseudepigraphal, or, you know—which again, is a common, I want to emphasize, like, that's a common genre or writing practice in the ancient world. So it's not like there is something—when you say pseudepigrapha can be seen as something that's deceiving or deceitful—I don't think that's what's going on here. Maybe you can clarify. But what are the implications of this?
Hugo: Yeah, I mean, I think the next question that you're inevitably going to have to ask is how you evaluate, like you said, I mean, how do you think about deception in this context? What do you think about the ethics potentially of an author doing this? What can we actually know about the real author who did this and what their motivations, their intentions might have been for doing this? I think those are, yeah, the next questions you have to ask.
I think it's fair to say that those are questions worth asking. The idea that the biblical authors might not be who tradition, who the titles that later scribes added to the books, you know, or what, you know, are that's been out there in biblical scholarship for a century, century and a half. I mean, you know, and, and I think one of the things that I feel as a scholar is that, you know, very often the reality of what we as scholars have worked on in biblical studies hasn't always really hit the pew very well.
Partly because I think in some ways it gets filtered out. It gets filtered out in part by potentially pastors, priests who learned this material in seminary, but who have never quite been able to find a way to bridge this, to lay audiences, to really kind of invite them into, in part, the open ended questions about how do we think about any of these authors, but then also that, as you said, kind of the implications, the next questions of what would it be like to think about the authors in this way.
I think the posture of some people is sometimes to dismiss this as merely just, you know, scholars being skeptical, attacking the faith. And, you know, what I hope anybody listening to this podcast understands is actually those of us who work in this field or are really trying our hardest to make sense of some very complex literature and questions.
Yeah, I think at the very least, it definitely has implications for one's doctrine of inspiration, for how one thinks about scripture. I can't necessarily tell you exactly how to formulate that. I mean, I have my own faith location. I'm Catholic, and you know, the Catholic tradition reflects on this in different ways than other Christian traditions might. But suffice it to say, I think that if your doctrine of inspiration doesn't have a place for this evidence and doesn't grapple with these questions, it's probably not yet a complete doctrine of inspiration or of scripture.
[Ad break]
Jennifer: I'm wondering what it feels like to go against all these many decades of traditional scholarship. Like, how has your work been received by others? And how do you think it's benefited the scholarly conversation about John and other New Testament writings?
Hugo: Yeah, it's funny. When I first really kind of told myself that I was going to write this particular article, And make the kind of challenge to the Johanan community hypothesis that I planned on making.
And as you can tell, it's about much more than the community. It's really about origins and authorship of these texts. I think it's a little scary for a younger scholar to do this. You know, you kind of know in this field that the moment you publish something, It is out in the world forever with your name on it, right?
You really do have to take ownership of it. And so for me, you know, I kind of went several years wondering, is this the thesis I want to make? Is this the way I'm comfortable with this data? I think it comes down to that mirror test, right? When I look at myself in the mirror at the end of the day, is this the way that I feel comfortable making sense of all this evidence?
But suffice it to say, I think it's been a very positively received article. I think that in a field like ours, it will probably never be the majority of opinion, because biblical scholarship is already going to be divided between more critical scholars and more conservative scholars. There are many scholars, maybe even half of our field or more who are working in seminaries and institutions that might have very strong statements of faith for whom basic ideas of the Bible has to be literally precisely true in its exact wording are going to probably preclude the kinds of answers I'm giving, let alone potentially the kinds of questions I'm asking.
So I'm sort of aware of that. But I have seen this article shake up a lot of discussion in different corners. I've seen some young scholars already trying to work and build upon this thesis and really experiment with, okay, well, if we thought of these texts in this light, how would we think about 3rd John differently?
What would be the ideas or intentions of an author wanting to write in the voice of the gospel author? And I think that's where, you know, I'll be kind of curious to see how scholarship continues to evolve in the next few years.
Jared: I want to go from scholarship back to the church here because I think, you know, we touched on this and I maybe want to dive in a little further.
Over the last 15 years or so, this kind of thing wouldn't surprise me because if we take our time with the biblical text, we see that it's just doing what the biblical text does, and it's very much at home in the ancient world. And so, kind of seeing this as pseudepigrapha, it's sort of like, oh, well, yeah, of course, that makes sense.
1st, 2nd, 3rd John are furthering the tradition. They're modeling for us here in the biblical text what centuries of Christians are going to do after this, which is to take the tradition and then further it and make it relevant to clarify it, to fill in the gaps, to scratch the itch of the holes in the questions that are still left because any text can't answer all of our questions.
And maybe Jennifer, I'm going to ask you to take a crack at this first, and then Hugo, maybe you can jump on as well. It was a little concerning what you said, Hugo, which I think is very true, that a lot of people learn this in seminary, but they don't know how to crack the code of how do we actually talk to everyday people, everyday Christians about this?
How do we have a robust conversation so that we learn without apprehension, uh, about these things and how it can integrate into our, into our life of faith? So Jennifer, I just, I ask you because you, you straddle that world often between the pew and the lectern here. How do you talk about it when you're in churches and are there ways that you've helped everyday people or pastors talk about this kind of thing?
Jennifer: Yeah, this is so hard. I teach in evangelical Christian setting, and then I'm also in churches all the time, and I'm wanting to give them more academic scholarship and push them in the way that they look at scripture, but I have to go slowly with them. Like, a lot of times, you know, we have to explain and start talking about, well, what do we think the Bible is?
And, you know, Where do we think it came from and how did ancient writers write and what is the first century world like, you know, and so in a classroom, it's a little easier to do that, but I still have to ease them into it. But at a church, it's hard if you're packing it into a sermon. Or a Bible study or something like that.
I think sometimes I give options. I say things like, the people who study this have lots of different opinions and here are the different opinions. And I usually kind of leave it for them to think about, because if I start pushing things on church people too quickly, it scares them. So it's this kind of dance of how much to say and how much background to give and giving them options and asking them to think and all of that.
But I'm curious about how Hugo handles that, too.
Jared: Yeah, I'm sure you have students who are looking for new paradigms as you sort of maybe rock their world a little bit. So have you found things that work to help them maybe come into a new understanding?
Hugo: Well, it's funny. I think I'm a little relieved of that responsibility a bit in a public university, right?
So, you know, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, I have to teach in this very secular frame because of the separation of church and state that governs public universities. You know, in other words, there's room for talking a little bit about how different traditions in Christianity might address these sorts of questions.
A little less of the kind of constructive, direct work of, well, what do you think? Or how would we as Christians put it together? And that's fine because in a room full of two or three hundred students, I might have ten Hindu students, 30 Muslim students, and that “we” doesn't resonate with them. So, you know, the beautiful part of my job is I'm getting to invite so many more people into this conversation and get them actually excited about the Bible.
The flip side is I'm having a different conversation than is happening potentially in a church setting or could happen there. I would say that as a professor, I would love it if my students didn't completely feel shocked and stunned the first time they ever hear this, right? I think that, you know, that, that age of 18 to 24, so to speak, just about, is a really plastic age. And a lot of young people at that age are really coming for the first time into their own religiously, intellectually, and I would love it if pastors really did care to spend time walking them into the kinds of questions. I would love it too if that posture wasn't simply apologetic or defensive, the idea that there is a right answer, and if we just clamp this down and tighten it as far as we can, this will be fine.
I think sometimes, and I've seen this in the church setting sometimes that I walk through, you know, there's such a fear of scandal or loss of faith, that we create somewhat unrealistic expectations of how certain faith is going to be or what sort of certainties faith is meant to deliver to us. In this case, I would love it if more ministers welcomed their congregations into the beauty of the debate, the detective work, the nuance of, you know, the Bible might actually be even more interesting than your title says.
There's a history behind this. There are questions, there are clues, and there's an open endedness that in the figure of the beloved disciple potentially lets you enter into the world of the text where you can step into the shoes of the beloved disciple as an idealized character and ask yourself the question, would I stay faithful under the cross of Jesus? If I heard that the tomb was empty, would I stay locked in the room scared or would I like this disciple, in the persona of this disciple, run as fast as I can to the tomb to see what evidence there is. I think that there are ways that we can free ourselves for that sort of discussion, be honest with the evidence, create robust faith that can explore different ideas and remain faithful.
Jared: I was going to ask you a question of if people were interested in learning more about authorship of biblical texts, where would you point them? And so you can answer that, but I'd actually like to, if we can, in a short amount of time for our last question here, I thought it'd be nice to send listeners who still do read their Bible on a treasure hunt, and that is, if they're going to go read their Bibles, they're going to go open up the Gospel of John and 1st, 2nd, 3rd John and 1st Peter, 2nd Peter, James, Jude, these books that are maybe in question.
What are some indicators when scholars and linguists like yourself, you're looking for data, you're mining these texts for data to try to figure out authorship. Is there anything that you could give to readers to say, look out for these things. These are the kinds of things that authors are looking out for.
I was intrigued earlier when you said, you know, the data goes one way against one-person authorship and it kind of goes against another way of being just the community piece of it. When you talk about that, do you have like categories or kinds of things that scholars are looking at for that, that we can kind of send people off as they read their own Bibles?
Hugo: Yeah, sure. You know, one thing I think we could just sort of start off with is sometimes we're very aware as Christians that there are certain texts in the Bible that don't seem to sit in complete ease with other texts in the Bible, right? We might think of these as tensions, discrepancies, at worst contradictions, or things like that.
And I think that there's a lot of energy that's expended on trying to make sure that these things can be fit together and we clamp down as tightly on the suitcase as we can and zip as hard as we can, where I think biblical scholars feel a lot freer to say “Or this could be a sign that we're reading two different authors with two different points of view, potentially, in a corpus.”
You know, it's kind of a natural explanation. I don't know, if you went to a modern church today, any modern congregation you like, and tried to take two people from that church and ask them questions about the faith, odds are eventually you'll get two different answers to a question. There's so much diversity within contemporary Christianity.
And it was that way in the first and second century. It's always been that way, that there have been different perspectives, slightly different points of view, different ways of articulating the same reality, maybe some disagreement. And there are ways that we can understand them. in unison as harmony, where they don't have to be identical, but they can sing together in different ways on different keys, so to speak.
But those are the kinds of things that we're interested in a little bit as scholars to actually just kind of breathe around those sorts of things. But there are other things, right? Pseudepigraphers, as I mentioned, really liked to imitate the writing style of an author. You know, if you want to claim to be Paul, then writing like Paul writes is an important skill to have. And so we tend to be very interested in signs of direct copying. So if you look at, you know, two different verses of two texts and, and, you know, great example of this would be like the opening verses of 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians, like one, one to two, one, one to three, or looking at like first Thessalonians two, nine, and second Thessalonians three, eight.
I'll let your, your listeners pull out their Bibles if they want and look those up. But there are places where there's, there's this kind of like almost word for word copying that has been a clue for us as scholars that this might be a play. There's certainly, you know, levels of the complexity of language.
Those are a little harder to see in English translation. But, you know, another funny one, too, that we sometimes see as scholars is a general, you know, sometimes people who are engaged in pseudepigraphy kind of show their hand because they really start to even lean into concern about pseudepigraphic texts or things like that.
That becomes significant for us. If this is a pretty complicated thing to deal with, don't worry, there are really good resources out there to walk you into this. I mean, I would start minimally to kind of maybe answer that question a little bit about scholarly resources. I mean, I would start with your most basic New Testament textbook.
So I coauthored the New Testament with Oxford University Press with my colleague Bart Ehrman at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We have two very different faith positionalities, but we've written a textbook that I think really speaks to the center of the field and how scholars work out these issues and have these sorts of debates. And when we cover each of these books, we get into this evidence. Frankly, if you really want the deep dive on pseudepigraphy, albeit with maybe a little more of a provocative angle, Bart Ehrman has also written a great book, Forgery and Counterforgery. It's a massive book with Oxford University Press, 2012, but in which he really gets into the evidence book by book.
That can really help you understand in exhaustive detail, why are there questions about 2 Peter? Why are there questions about 2 Thessalonians or things like that?
Jared: Wonderful. Well, Hugo, thanks so much for coming on and just sharing your expertise with us and broadening our perspective on, you know, the two questions we ask here, which is what is the Bible and what do we do with it? And I feel like we were able to touch on both of those today. So, thanks so much.
Hugo: Thank you so much.
Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
Pete: And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com.
Outro: You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People. Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
