The reading is chapter 2 of Herold Weiss’s book Meditations on According to John, Making Himself Equal with God and the scriptures in it. My recommendation is to read the entire gospel of John through each week during this study. The topics are so carefully tied together through the entire book.
Here’s the trailer:
And you can watch the event here (Jan. 22, 2015, 7:00 pm central, 8:00 pm eastern):
The advantages of being a publisher is that I can put books on sale to go with posts. Normally I only do that for things on my company page (Energion Publications), but since I’m starting a study of the Gospel of John on my Google+ Page/YouTube Channel, I’m doing it with a few of my own books. I haven’t spent time pushing my books for some time, I think.
In any case, the book I’m using for the study, Meditations on According to John by Dr. Herold Weiss, and three of my own books are on sale for 30% off until the end of the month, so this is your opportunity.
While I’m following Dr. Weiss’s book, I won’t be reiterating the contents of it in the video. I intend to spend more time in the nuts and bolts of how one interprets the passage. Dr. Weiss subtitled his book “Exercises in Biblical Theology,” and I’m going to be doing some exercises during the week myself and sharing these each Thursday night. So if you want to get what he has said, you’ll need to buy his book.
This article is fascinating, both because of subject and because of how it demonstrates how paleography functions (HT: Dave Black Online).
I’m posting it here both for the interest and because I have cited P52 in discussing the dating of the Gospel of John with various classes. Just a few points:
1) In my own defense (and that of others who use it), I have always pointed out the potential error in paleographic dating, and used the +/-50 years figure as an approximation. Thus I would have always pointed out that P52 could be as late as 175 CE. It appears possible it could be even later. On the other hand it could be somewhat earlier, even with the evidence cited in this article. Think of a 100 year window moving forward or backward. One might say 2nd century. In fact, I suppose one has!
2) One should also consider that the likelihood that one has laid hands on the earliest copy of a work ever produced is unlikely. So while the gospel cannot have been written after it was produced, it also was not likely written at the same time. A date of 150 or 175 CE would imply some distribution of the gospel at that point. Unfortunately, this amount of time is inherently unknowable. Still, I think it suggests that trying to date the book at or about the time a copy was produced is also questionable.
3) The article also illustrates the considerable problem with dating a small fragment, which simply compounds all of the difficulties involved in paleographic dating. With only a small amount of text to work with, one has difficulty finding sufficient data points to narrow down the result.
Still, the article is totally fascinating!
Anyone who has made a serious effort to teach from the Gospel of John has likely experienced the difficulty of giving people a clear picture of the connections between various parts of the book, not to mention the frequent allusions to passages in the Hebrew scriptures. One can easily run out of fingers to “hold that passage” while one flips to another in order to compare. The difficulty is that one needs to get an overview of the entire book before one can truly comprehend the individual parts, and people rarely study Bible books in that way. Too frequently they jump into a passage on a particular topic from the middle of the book, and the Lectionary encourages this, and never really get a full picture.
So I was delighted to get a manuscript from Herold Weiss, at one time a professor at my alma mater, Andrews University, and later at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame titled Meditations on According to John. Editors generally look with some disfavor on collections of essays, meditations or sermons. I’ve had to reject not a few such collections. They often don’t sell. One of the reasons they don’t is that people rarely read sermons by anyone who is not famous. They tend to prefer books that cover a particular topic in some detail than a collection of different thoughts.
But this book is not that sort of collection. It does not consist of unrelated thoughts that have no particular sequence. Rather, the 24 meditations on this book take particular passages in the gospel of John, According to John as Dr. Weiss likes to call it following the Greek title, and then fits them into the scheme of the entire book. I like to invite people to read a Bible book multiple times in order to get an overview. With this book, you get that sort of an overview multiple times, each with a different theme.
The gospel of John is extremely simple on the one hand, but very challenging on the other. The language is easy to understand at the basic level. But as you meditate further it tends to grow on you and make you think again … and again and again.
I think I have an excellent group of authors represented in the Energion Publications catalog. I have a long list of books I want to write about, but haven’t had time. Sometimes these books challenge me. Sometimes I am simply saying, “Yes, that was a good presentation of the _____ topic, and people should read it.” But some books stand out in that they inspire me to study as I read the manuscripts as an editor. This one had be referencing my Greek New Testament frequently, and eventually had me re-reading the entire gospel in Greek just to follow some of the thoughts presented.
You may agree or disagree with some of the conclusions. For example, Dr. Weiss does not accept this gospel as the source of sacramental theology:
The sacraments were established toward the end of the first century when Christianity was becoming institutionalized and starting to create official channels through which the Holy Spirit could flow under ecclesiastical control. (p. 152)
and
It is a bit disconcerting, therefore, to find that most commentators consider this gospel as the New Testament document that provides the basic source for sacramental theology. This judgment is based on interpretations which see the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus as supporting the sacrament of baptism, and the discourse following the feeding of the five thousand as supporting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The texts, however, do not support these interpretations. (p. 152)
Now that will annoy a number of my friends! A bit later Dr. Weiss says:
In According to John Jesus is not baptized, does not celebrate a Lord’s Supper, and does not institute bread and wine as sacraments that need to be administered by authorized clergy. Jesus only institutes the washing of the feet which must be administered by everyone to everyone, in this way democratizing the kingdom of heaven. (pp. 156-157)
That, I think, is worth discussing. Why is it that only authorized clergy can administer sacraments? I know the theology, but is it well rooted?
In any case, both reading this book and reading John after reading this book have been beneficial experiences for me. I strongly commend this one to my friends who are interested in either biblical studies or theology. It’s a great text.
Will Humes has drawn up a four year lectionary, which he believes offers the chance to give the gospel of John its own place in worship, and also covers some passages we never see in our three year version. He’s looking for comment.
My immediate comment is that I really like the basic idea. I’m going to spend some more time looking at the specific passages before I make further comment. One of the great blessings I see to lectionary preaching, besides covering the various seasons, is that it prevents a preacher from getting stuck on a small set of favorite passages. The inclusion of additional wisdom readings, as well as a year for the reading of John, should help with that problem.
Head on over and comment. This is a project worth thinking about.
