The Bible:John 1
A LITERARY APPROACH PART 1
As you will notify from the very beginning, I am not a native speaker of English. So I want to apologize for the way I mistreat your beautiful language)
Many christians consider this text as one of the most profound things ever written. Serious biblical scholars (and by these I don’t mean people who try to convince you that this is the word of god or something, but I am referring to people who use serious academic standars also appliable to the study of other ancient texts) have discovered many interesting things about what the author wants to tell his readers. Amongst these scholars it is comon belief that we are reading a text which above all wants to convince the reader that Jesus, and not John the Baptist, is the one and only man that shows us the way to God. he is ‘The Word’.
Now we know that this theological claim can’t be true in the way most christians take it, since God doesn’t exist. ‘God’ shares this ontological status with Zeus, Allah, Mormon, Cinderella and Donald Duck.
‘Jesus’ and ‘John the Baptist’, the disciples and most of the other persona enacted in John’s gospel probably have a slightly different ontological status, which they share with, for example, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or Hamlet, or Macbeth. The names and some characteristics go back to historical persons and historical events, but these persons and events are placed in a fictious context in order to create a work of fiction.
Now a sensible person can ask himself two serious questions. First you can try to figure out what relation exists between the historical and the fictious persona. I consider this an important, but highly academic question. For many christians the question of the ‘historical Jesus’ is very important, but that’s only because they believe that ‘the man Jesus’ is (the Son of) God. But I believe as much that God has sons then I believe that Cinderella really became the wife of a prince and lived happily ever after.
Now the second serious question one can ask is: Given th fact that God doesn’t exist and given the fact that we are dealing here with a work of fiction, is there something this work of fiction can tell us about ourselves, about, if you wish, ‘human nature’, other then: god exists and Jesus is his son and you should believe that? I think there is and I would like to share my ideas about it next time…
