The Presence of the Ascended Son in the Gospel of John

Abstract

The Presence of the Ascended Son in the Gospel of John Markus Bockmuehl The Fourth Gospel distinctively articulates the shared Christian conviction that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead after his crucifixion and was exalted to heaven.1 As for other New Testament writings, that belief also raises the fundamental question of how this same Jesus continues to relate to ongoing Christian faith and experience. Where is Jesus now? Is he here or somewhere else, at a spatial and perhaps temporal remove from the lives his followers lead now? In scholarly and critical study of the Gospels, that rather basic question is further complicated, made more strange and complex by its methodological elusiveness. There are many possible ways to try and contextualize it in either ancient cultural or modern analytical settings. A century ago, standard approaches to the comparative study of ancient religion tended to focus on expressions of divine presence either in terms of "the numinous" (Rudolf Otto),2 of social ritual as expressing the power of society (Emile [End Page 1301] Durkheim), or in history-of-religions comparisons with providential or animistic conceptions. Today the comparative bird's eye view has for the most part surrendered to more focused textual and empirical study of the texts and phenomena in view. So, for example, one frame of reference might be Jewish, early Christian, and Graeco-Roman mysticism, on which a good deal of work has been done in recent years. Others have studied the role of interiority and cognitivity in specific religious traditions. There have been books on ascetical, shamanistic, and neurobiological aspects of ecstatic experience, especially in relation to the Apostle Paul. And a series of recent studies has called for fuller discussion of the role of religious experience in the formation of early Christian belief and theology. The broader theme of divine presence and absence has also repeatedly attracted the attention of scholarship on ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism. A clearer methodological account must be left for another occasion. I do not doubt that many of these modes of characterizing divine presence are relevant to a description of early Christian realities: quite likely they are. This paper probes the focused and in a sense "dogmatic" question about how the Gospel of John envisages the location of Jesus after his earthly lifetime. How does the Fourth Evangelist handle the dialectic between affirmations that Jesus is present with the disciples or on the other hand that he has gone to another place? I am for present purposes not as concerned with abstract definitions of absence or presence in metaphysical or personalist terms,3 nor with a comparative phenomenology of Johannine religious experience. Instead, my focus will be on the Gospel of John's stated ("emic") affirmations about the presence or the absence of the post-Easter Jesus—the convictions that shaped and were in turn shaped by this evangelist and his community. The Fourth Gospel's manuscript distribution and especially its reception in the exegetical disputes and deliberations leading up to the great Christian creeds leave no doubt that this text had an inestimable effect on [End Page 1302] the formulation of Christian doctrine about the person of Jesus Christ. Among the company it keeps in the library of early Christian sacred texts, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are clearly paramount. Richard Bauckham and others have plausibly argued for John's knowledge of something rather like the Gospel of Mark in particular; and despite some useful criticisms, that view may represent a growing consensus.4 But beyond this there has long been a notable trickle of New Testament scholarship which would affirm the historical priority of John over the Synoptics,5 or even just over Luke.6 Others more cautiously propose stages of composition in which each stream of Gospel tradition influenced the other, possibly through the continuing interrelationship between writing and primary or secondary oral tradition.7 But rather more revealing than this Gospel's inscrutable literary relationships with other New Testament texts is its formative influence on early Christian belief. One thinks here of the prologue's exegetical pressure on the creedal language of Jesus as the only-begotten Son...