A New Vision: A Fresh Beginning

By Alexander Woolley

It matters whether we believe in God or not. No one can prove that there isn’t a god and no one can prove that there is. However we can find signposts. In an interesting new book, A New Vision: A Fresh Beginning, Alexander Woolley looks for them and claims to have identified them. Current Christianity is often like a Christmas tree hidden under a canopy of decorations which camouflage the truth. All sorts of improbable ideas have been developed without there being convincing evidence to support the claims made. This book throws these decorations away and finds a real tree underneath it all. This is done by looking for the source of the Fourth Gospel. The access to information about discussions and decisions in the High Priest’s household and entourage is explained because the very young witness had business there, was intensely curious and addicted to running. They knew he was associating with Jesus but his charm and youth enabled him to get away with this. 

The witness was a constant companion of Simon Peter, but, like Peter, he was illiterate and so his vivid tales of Jesus were unknown until the theologian writer of the Gospel met the witness late on in the lives of them both. The writer was so excited by the discovery that he composed the Gospel. The two met in Ephesus, in modern Turkey, after the witness had saved the life of someone in the public baths there, and so aroused the amazement of the writer. The Gospel was the result of this encounter. Tombs to two Johns were recorded there and A New Vision suggests that these were the tombs of the two Johns responsible for the last canonical Gospel. A compelling, fascinating read for anyone interested in theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800465909

Alexander Woolley

Alexander Woolley was educated at Blundell’s School Devon and Balliol College, Oxford after 2 years in the Royal Artillery. Studied, also at the Institute of Education, London, and La Sorbonne, Paris. His interest in John’s Gospel has been lifelong, although he has no theological pretensions.

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Copyright © 2021 Alexander Woolley

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Dedicated to Margaret, my long-suffering wife, who has helped me, many times, to make this more intelligible. I feel I owe special thanks to Frank Macarthy (-Willis-Bund) who asked me to read lessons at evensong in Balliol College Chapel, and to Russell Meiggs who inspired individuality of thought. Russell possessed an extraordinarily wide-ranging and questioning mind of considerable power, totally unshackled by any tradition. His historical ability would have discovered flaws enough to question the truth of Christianity, had he felt this appropriate. The fact that he appeared not to do so adds a substantial counterbalance to the views of people such as Richard Dawkins.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography

Notes

Last Words

Preface

Caveat Lector

There is so much information, nowadays, that it is often almost impossible for a normal span of comprehension to command the whole of a relevant picture. As a result, the information comfortably taken into account tends to be that which suits the mental set of the thinker, while that which suits less well tends to be disregarded or even rejected outright. Therefore, decisions are often made after assessing only part of the available evidence and so end up flawed. This mental bias, occasioned by the fog of facts, makes it difficult to see what really matters and place it in the right order of priority. In an age of so much uncertainty and complexity, and when this complexity is increasing at an exponential rate, we tend to look for what is stable and predictable. Sometimes we believe we see these qualities as being present when there is insufficient evidence. Then also, as we do not like having our cherished beliefs challenged, we often reject ideas that threaten those beliefs before we have assessed those ideas properly.

Secondly, the idea of trying to reach a view of God might be likened to trying to reach the top of a mountain. The mountain is in one place but we, who may aim to scale it, are all in different positions and so not only have different views of that mountain and its top but must also pursue different paths, at least initially, involving different levels of challenge, to reach its summit.

Thirdly, and connected to the previous concern, different views and ideas, which appear to contradict one another, may all be right, as was pointed out by Albert Einstein,¹ when he thought of the perceived path of a stone dropped from a train window. The train is moving in the same direction as the wind and at the same speed as the wind. To the stone-dropper, the stone would appear to be falling in a vertical line, a dot. To an observer on a bank beside the track, the stone would describe a parabolic curve. To an observer in a helicopter, hovering motionless and directly above where the stone was dropped, the stone would describe a straight line. These three quite different views conflict with each other but each is totally correct from the point of its viewer. The agreed facts are that there was a stone, that it was dropped and that it reached the ground. Agreed facts are that Jesus lived and taught in Palestine, he died there, crucified, while his name, philosophy and teaching live on after him.

What is written here may seem, and actually be, totally wrong for some readers, according to their particular experience and understanding, but may be more readily acceptable and even conceivably helpful to others whose experience and understanding are different. But it should always be borne in mind that someone who produces ideas may have some useful ones even when that person is relatively unlettered and without powerful academic abilities. That some things seem trite or wrong does not mean that everything is so: there might be a nugget hidden away for someone to stumble upon.

Alexander Woolley

Bembridge, 2020

Acknowledgements

I start with a personal confession: I know far fewer books and authors than any real biblical scholar, while I know many of the books that I do have better by their spines than by their contents. I owe much to William Barclay, especially the two volume 1975 edition of his Daily Study Bible commentary on the Gospel of John, to which the debt is enormous. I am indebted to The Unauthorised Version: truth and fiction in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox, E.P. Sanders’ The Historical Figure of Jesus, the second edition of John Ashton’s Understanding the Fourth Gospel, and Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses and The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple. The RSV Interlinear Greek English New Testament (Nestle Greek text with literal translation by Alfred Marshall) was a vital aid. John Marsh’s commentary, The Gospel of St. John, helped, while John A.T. Robinson added other ways of looking at the problems in his Redating the New Testament. Géza Vermès also provoked different methods of facing problems. My brother, the Revd Canon Francis Woolley gave me valuable books, including some of the above, as well as Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Professor Henry Mayr-Harting suggested The Oxford Companion to the Year as a help with dates. My sister, Margaret Alice Stewart-Liberty, gave me The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church and other extremely useful publications. These titles, and others I have consulted in preparing this monograph, will be found in the Bibliography.

I owe a special debt and would like to express my great gratitude to Gareth Vaughan who has been kind enough to edit and proofread this work. I should like to thank my brother Edward, also, whose patient care helped eliminate errors and improve the text.

However, in spite of the paucity of my reading and knowledge, this one point is worth consideration: just as to be a Christian needs no special training, knowledge or innate abilities, to be a useful commentator on Christian studies needs only a logically valid, useful and true point of view that has not yet been made available by others, however little information there be behind that point of view, so long as the criteria of validity, utility and signpost to truth be met.

Introduction

Mark’s Gospel, written in Greek, as were all the other books of the New Testament, states in 1:15 that John the Baptist declared everyone should ‘repent’. The Greek word which Mark’s writer used was metanoeite (μετανοεȋτε), where the first element (meta-) means ‘change’. We might be nearer to what was actually meant by ‘repent’ if we imagine he was telling people to think again, change their minds and readjust their ways of looking for God. Then they were to redirect their behaviour and begin their lives afresh. They were being asked to change their opinions, their ways of thinking, and their conduct. This is an exposition of what the author’s ideas have now become. It is a new vision, a new way of looking at the Gospels.

At a school in Ruyton-xi-Towns, Shropshire, the author heard the story of Balaam and his ass (Numbers 22-24), where Balaam thought God was in agreement with what he wanted to do. God was not, as Balaam was to find out in terrifying fashion, and rather painfully, when his ass crushed his leg against a wall. Balaam, who was not an Israelite, had a reputation for having a devastatingly powerful curse. Balak, king of the Moabites, confronted by invading Israeli forces, had just seen how easily they had overcome the Amorites. He urgently needed Balaam to curse the Israelites, so he offered a powerful inducement for him to do so. After initial information from his God, telling him not to curse the Israelite forces, an even greater offer from Balak persuaded Balaam that God was no longer against his going to curse the Israelite army. So he went, but was stopped, while he was on his way to curse the Israelites, by an angel with drawn sword, blocking his further advance. He had ‘misheard’ God and had to change his mind, so he blessed the Israelites instead of cursing them, to the infuriated disgust of Balak.

The author’s special regard for the last chapter of the Gospel according to John developed slowly, subliminally, over the years. When asked to read two lessons, on successive evenings, in 1957, he was told that it was the responsibility of the reader to choose the lessons. An excerpt from the initial part of the story of Balaam and his ass came first. Second was John’s version of the fishing expedition (chapter 21), which the writer of the Gospel places sometime after the resurrection. The fishing expedition took place because the disciples, at Simon Peter’s prompting, felt this would be a good way to pass the time and, possibly, make a few extra pennies. They were not yet getting on with preaching Jesus’s message. In 20:21 & 22 Jesus had breathed the Holy Spirit into the disciples gathered there and sent them out to preach. They were not doing this yet. This second reading in the chapel related how Jesus asked Simon Peter, three times, if he loved him more than his disciple friends loved him. The real question was whether he should be going around with his friends fishing rather than preaching the Gospel. The interchange ended with Simon Peter being urged to start doing that, to prove that he really loved Jesus. He had to change his way of thinking and change course. He had to fish for people rather than for fish. Pointedly, Jesus had addressed him as Simon son of John and not as Simon Peter (the Rock). This occasion cemented the central importance of the last chapter in the mind of the author and increased the appeal of the Fourth Gospel. Especially enduring was the almost plaintive, somewhat jealous question from Simon Peter when he had learnt how he himself would be facing a terrible end to his life: And what is going to happen to this one?, pointing to the unnamed disciple. This is too close to real life to have been invented. It is a caught-in-the-act snapshot. The account is particularly appealing if one thinks that there was a special bond between Peter and the other disciple. A bond almost like that between a much older brother or even stand-in father, who had an unquestioning regard for the opinions and guiding hand of his mentor, Jesus, but also a special respect for a fancied spoilt, but nevertheless much loved, admired and far younger boy.

There are two minds at work in the Fourth Gospel,¹ a writer’s and a witness’s. This is highlighted whenever the Writer does not understand exactly what the Witness has told the Writer about Jesus. For instance, the Writer learnt from the Witness about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, chapter 13:3-11. Jesus was showing that the master is not greater than the servant, but the Writer goes on to say that Jesus is explaining that the servant is not greater than the master. He has missed the point which Jesus was trying to make. We find the mind of the Writer ending chapter 20, while we find the mind and words of the Witness ending chapter 21, showing there are two minds in the one Gospel.²

The picture of Jesus produced by the Witness in this last chapter, about the fishing expedition, might be one of the most important of all. From some points of view it seems as though it might be a later addition, possibly to emphasise the authenticity of the Gospel’s source. It is, anyway, without too much significant input from the Writer as he seems to have adapted little of what he had learned from his informant. It is the most faithful picture, brief though it be, that we can find of Jesus, how he dealt with his disciples and how they felt and behaved with him. The ending, too, shows the charming, almost childlike naivety of the Witness, when he thinks that the whole world would not be able to contain all the books that could be written about Jesus. He implies that a great amount has been omitted from this Gospel. At the same time, the Witness makes it clear that he had spent nearly all his available spare time, of which there must have been a considerable amount, with Jesus, so he had a very good idea of how much Jesus had done. Comparison with the other Gospels makes this even clearer.

It is true that 21:18-19 bear clearly the imprint of the Writer, with the introductory words, ‘Truly, truly’ (ἀμὴν ἀμὴν), combined with the apparent knowledge of how Simon Peter would die, while v. 24, where the Writer declares, in effect, that what he has written has come from the Witness, must also be from him alone. One may wonder if the introductory ‘Truly, truly’ could usually be taken as a sign that what follows comes from the hand of the Writer, more or less disconnected from the Witness’s testimony.

If one can accept that this Gospel is the product of a naive Witness, who invents nothing, and a Writer whose theology is so developed and so high that supremely plausible fiction is not in his armoury, one can dismiss the claim made by John Ashton (2007, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd edition, Oxford: O.U.P., p. 486): ‘Neither the resurrection itself nor the stories told to illustrate its significance are historical in any meaningful sense of the word. Anyone who disagrees with this statement has a lot of puzzles to wrestle with, puzzles for which, I am convinced, no solutions are available.’ It might be suggested, on the contrary, that explaining the reinvigoration of the dispirited band of Jesus’s disciples and Paul’s matter-of-fact claim that Jesus had appeared after the crucifixion to his brother James, make it clear that Jesus did indeed actually come back in some form. John’s Gospel hammers home a chest of nails into the coffin of statements such as that of Ashton.

Much theology, sometimes desiccating scholarly analysis, deeply delving tortuous exegesis and all the other distracting paraphernalia are secondary. The things which Jesus said and did are primary. If we may somehow contrive to disentangle from all the variety of early writings anything that is securely primary, our theological understanding should be based rather more on that than on other things which may be seen as secondary, tertiary or yet more distant from the original thinking and events.

One

Why the Fourth Gospel is the best source

It is argued here that the Fourth Gospel is more useful than other writings because there is revelatory information behind it which is primary. If we want to appreciate the humanity of Jesus and discover his persona we should look at the Fourth Gospel first. A fresh-minded examination of its contents suggests that an important proportion of this Gospel is derived directly from the more or less undistorted, unfading memories of someone who had known Jesus intimately and never ceased to worship him. The internal evidence supports the proposition that a writer, with a totally different cast of mind, with deep, magisterial theological knowledge,¹ used what was newly discovered evidence, provided by a witness, to write the Gospel, while he added his own interpretation of what he thought this new evidence meant. The central importance of this Gospel is highlighted by John Ashton, William Barclay, Richard Bauckham, John Robinson and J. L. Martyn among many others,² while Professor E.P. Sanders seems to agree when he says that it is primarily in this Gospel that we should seek information about Jesus (1993, The Historical Figure of Jesus, London: Allen Lane, p. 57). Sanders (p. 67), for instance, finds the account of the trial in John much more convincing than the accounts in the Synoptics.

The Fourth Gospel may be the spiritual Gospel, but it is also, to an extent that the others are not, the Gospel of true-to-life stories. This is because the Synoptic Gospels are not only dependent on second-hand or third-hand witness, or sources more distant still, but are also the products of single minds, separated from the events with which they are dealing. The Fourth Gospel, however, appears to be the product of two very different, indeed, more or less alien, minds. One of the minds is that of a simple, devoted, single-minded and illiterate eye-witness of the events recorded in it. The other is that of a great theologian. In this way, the reader is allowed, on a very useful number of occasions, to discover where the Witness’s mind predominates over that of the Writer, and so gain firsthand access to what Jesus almost certainly did and said. As a result, it also provides, owing to this unlikely combination of totally disparate Witness and Writer, a sort of wide binocular vision that enables one better to determine perspective. The accounts from the Witness might be described as coming from this world below, while the theology of the Writer comes from his understanding of heaven above. None of the other Gospels affords this wide-angle lens luxury.

One might note the differences in theological outlook demonstrated in this Gospel, as compared with the other Christian writings of the time, all of which the Writer is just about certain to have known. For instance, he will have known of the tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but he omits any reference to that, even when he might have done so in 7:42, where it is averred by some that the Christ has to be descended from David and come from Bethlehem. It is quite possible that he produces no counter argument because he thought that there was no reliable evidence to support the idea that Jesus was descended from David nor that he was born in Bethlehem. Indeed, the Writer appears neither to refer to other Christian writings nor obviously to use them. This is possibly because they may have seemed unsound as to detail. The Writer had just come across the Witness who knew the truth, however disappointed he may have been to discover that the Witness remembered so little of Jesus’s actual teaching. The views of other Christian writers fitted in neither with the Writer’s idiosyncratic views of what Jesus taught, nor with what he believed to be the true direction, intention and character of the ministry. In fact, the Writer may have found that his theological views were so different from those of his local fellow Christians that, feeling more or less a ‘loner’, he had been disinclined to write anything extensive before he produced this Gospel. The short letters attributed to him may have come after the Gospel. The attack on docetism (the idea that Jesus’s humanity and suffering were apparent, not real) in the first letter, or tract, might be a repeat exercise, as the Writer of the Gospel may have felt that he had not yet succeeded in unifying Christians with a trustworthy credo.

The difference between the resurrected Jesus and the Jesus of the flesh, when he was engaged in his ministry, is telling. Comparison makes it clear that Jesus, before the entombment which followed the crucifixion, was very much a real human in a real human body, whereas after the crucifixion his appearances were little more than fleeting and seemingly insubstantial. The resurrected Jesus appears out of thin air and then vanishes back into it as if he is only seemingly there (docetic).

Only Jesus’s last appearance to his disciples or rather, perhaps, revelation to them, recorded in the last chapter of this Gospel, lasts for a significant time. Luke’s beautiful account (24:13-32) of the journey to Emmaus may last longer, but Luke’s source and treatment of it cannot be regarded as totally reliable, as the recording of the story will, almost certainly, have been too far separated from any original event. Another difficulty is that Luke seems to have been incapable of resisting the temptation to embroider and dramatise any stories that came his way. Perhaps the author may have been right to say to his great-aunt in Cambridge, when he was about seven years old, that he believed that the ‘gossip’ of Luke was good. It is, indeed, excellent, but we must read it with care.

The Jesus of the Witness’s narrative is always concerned with individual situations that require his attention. From these one is to induce the principles that underlie the teaching. Bauckham refers to this in The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, 2007, p. 102, where he describes the Johannine Jesus as a man who showed how one should conduct oneself by deeds rather than by teaching – ‘His teaching is ancillary to his deeds’. On the other hand, the Jesus of the Writer and other New Testament writers is shown as speaking rather more about the wider implications of Jesus’s words and actions. From these one has to deduce how one should behave. New-style evangelists, these days, teach; Jesus, then, showed by example. It might be in Mark that we come closest to the original teaching of Jesus. That Gospel is probably based on Peter’s homilies, as reported to its writer. Nonetheless, it is in the Fourth Gospel we approach most closely Jesus as he actually was, because it is here that the characters come to life. We have three dimensions instead of a flat two.

Jesus is indeed concerned with the wider picture, but it is the writers who have taken it upon themselves to substantiate this with their own interpretations, explanations and even, it would appear sometimes, additions and variations in the accounts. The witness-provided slant, which underlies an important part of the Fourth Gospel, might help to explain many of the perceived discrepancies which have occasioned concern to those readers who seek unfailing congruence between the different theological statements and sequence of events, as well as the theological implications or deductions made therefrom. The discrepancies, discontinuities, aporias, would appear as controversial, if they are thought of as coming from an apparently single-minded viewpoint, presented by someone with an extensively informed and highly developed theological stance. The moment, however, one accepts that the Gospel is the product of the combination of a faithful, but naive, Witness to the events, and a Writer with a deeply developed and idiosyncratic theology, many of the perceived difficulties should be greatly diminished, if not removed altogether. We have two otherwise incompatible minds working together because they share an all-consuming common interest in Jesus. The result is unique and uniquely valuable.

John Robinson, a great New Testament Scholar, supports the idea that the Gospel is based on material from a witness (1976, Redating The New Testament, p. 9 and passim); another great scholar, C.H. Dodd, possibly unwittingly, supports the same idea.³ John Marsh (1968, The Gospel of St. John, p. 287) notes that the crowd’s wanting to make Jesus king after the feeding of the 5,000 is not mentioned in the other Gospels and wonders if the Writer picked up the story in Ephesus. He probably did.⁴

Trying to determine the origins of the Gospel is seen as important in this enterprise. It is very possible that it came into being when its writer, who almost certainly wrote the New Testament letters attributed to John, had just come across the Witness, who, fifty years or so earlier, had been a very young and totally devoted follower of Jesus from the very earliest days of Jesus’s ministry. The Writer, in the second two letters, describes himself as ‘The Elder’, so he is often referred to as John the Elder or Presbyter. This late encounter with evidence from what was now a very distant era would have seized the mind of the Writer whose outlook and experience would have been very far removed from that of the Witness. The two outlooks are likely to have been as different as chalk and cheese. Only the all-conquering interest in Jesus will have induced this unlikely pair to compile such an important contribution to promoting Christianity. The evidence suggests that this now older man, the Witness, had, as a very young lad, been his father’s fishing business contact with the High Priest’s household and so had had much more time to follow Jesus than most of the other disciples. It might have been his job to deliver preserved fish there, as is suggested by Barclay (1975, The Gospel of John, revised edition, Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, vol. 2, p. 229). His close association with the household will have given him special access to information concerning people there and knowledge of what had gone on in some of the discussions that had preceded decisions of the Sanhedrin. This is chronicled only in this Gospel.

Although, for the most part, there are two minds at work in this Gospel, a writer’s and an eyewitness’s, there is the possibility that there have been additions from other people, such as the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:2-11), which may not have come from the Witness and also have been written by someone else. The last chapter, which is almost certain to have come from the Witness, might, just possibly, have been written by another as an almost indispensable addition.

If, as would seem certain, the Witness was more or less illiterate, the Gospel could not have been written down until someone who was both interested and literate did so. It might be suggested, presuming the material in Mark’s Gospel comes from Peter, that this is a parallel situation. Peter will have been illiterate too, so people did not learn about what he preached until Mark’s writer wrote that Gospel.

There is an interesting account in the Syriac History of John (Robinson, 1976, p.259, note) stating that John, the presumed witness for this Gospel, gained employment as a bath attendant in the public