Is John’s Gospel Anti-Semitic? -- By: Glenn Balfour

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 48:2 (NA 1997)
Article: Is John’s Gospel Anti-Semitic?
Author: Glenn Balfour


Is John’s Gospel Anti-Semitic?1

Glenn Balfour

Before 1945 a few pioneers began to argue that anti-semitic sentiments exist in some New Testament writings. After the war other scholars joined in with this contention, culminating in Rosemary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide (1974). The Fourth Gospel, with its notable polemic against ‘the Jews’, has subsequently remained largely abandoned to an anti-Jewish interpretation. Our aim is to demonstrate that the Fourth Gospel is not anti-semitic.

We begin by addressing some important related issues. First, what was first century Jewish faith? It encompassed a wide variety of strands, which were linked to Messianic expectation, Temple cultus and halakic observance. After the Temple destruction, however, these strands had to substitute something else for the significance they had attached to the Temple cultus.

Second, what is anti-semitism? It does not include all criticism of things Jewish. The genuinely Jewish form of self-criticism is more properly intra-Jewish polemic. Nor does it include all external criticism of things Jewish. External criticism of the Jewish faith is anti-Judaism. Only external criticism of the Jewish race can be rightly designated anti-semitism.

Third, what was the state of relations between Jews and ‘others’ in the first century CE? With the exception of the Alexandrian situation, they were generally good. Given the convincing evidence that the provenance of the Fourth Gospel was Ephesus, any anti-semitic notions would have to be entirely the product of the writer’s own experience.

Much work has been done on the Fourth Gospel’s use of the Old Testament, and it has shown the importance of the Old Testament

to the shape and content of the Gospel. We contend that the Gospel’s use of the Old Testament demands that it is in fact specifically Jewish in character, and that its polemic, like that at Qumran, is intra-Jewish.

Using the criterion that anything the writer explicitly presents as extant scripture constitutes an Old Testament quotation, there are eighteen such quotations in the Fourth Gospel -- 1:23; 2:17; 6:31, 45; 7:37f., 42; 10:34; 12:13, 15,

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