Blomberg on John

Craig Blomberg, author of The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel

IVP: How would you summarize the current state of scholarly opinion when it comes to the historical reliability of John's Gospel?

Craig Blomberg: There are two conflicting trends. On the one hand, the Jesus Seminar--which has gained so much recent press despite representing only the most liberal fringe of scholarship--discounts John almost entirely for use in reconstructing the historical Jesus. In England, Maurice Casey's 1996 book Is John's Gospel True? is scathing in its denunciation of the "sub-Christian nature" of John. On the other hand, the "silent majority" of scholars--including a considerable number of non-evangelicals--continues to amass more and more evidence for its historical reliability, even if few go as far as I have in presenting the case in this much detail.

IVP: Did you encounter any surprises along your research trail? For instance, was the case for historicity better or more difficult or in any way different from what you had supposed at the beginning?

Blomberg: I didn't expect to find as much support as I did. There were an enormous number of articles and chapters in books tucked away in comparatively obscure sources that gave me much more evidence to consider than I imagined would already exist. Also, when I began to think through Tom Wright's double similarity and dissimilarity criterion--which is pretty new and untested outside the Synoptic tradition--it struck me that it had repeated application to John, and I might actually be able to say some new things, not just catalog what others had already done.

IVP: You have taken a commentary approach for much of your book. What led you to adopt this format rather than a strictly topical approach? What are the advantages?

Blomberg: The introduction comprises about one-quarter of the whole book and is entirely topically arranged. Most previous works trying to defend historicity in John have been entirely topical in approach and my sense in reading them has always been, "Yes that's good, they make some telling points on the particular topics they've chosen, but what about this or that specific text that they didn't address?" Putting it another way, if there's something in virtually every passage in John that the Jesus Seminar thinks disqualifies it from being historical, then any completely credible case for historicity--on whatever scale--sooner or later had better tackle just about every passage in the Gospel.

IVP: How reliable does a Gospel need to be to serve as inspired Scripture? That's not a question for us to answer, I guess. But can't we cut the Evangelists some slack as interpreters of Jesus, perhaps allowing the notion that they composed or embellished an episode in order to drive to the heart of who Jesus was?

Blomberg: Narrative material can be entirely fictitious and still be inspired, as all of Jesus' parables demonstrate. Theoretically, the Bible could have included an entire book that was written in the genre we call historical fiction in order to communicate theological truths, though I don't believe this actually happened with any of our Scriptures. But when it comes to the historical Jesus, given the unique claims of Christianity as based on the life, death and resurrection of this man at a certain point in human history, certainly the major contours of the Gospels' portraits need to be historical if Christianity's claims are to stand. Could a Gospel satisfy these requirements but also contain minor fictitious embellishments and still function as an authority for believers in matters of doctrine and morals? Yes, I believe it could, though then we would be speaking of a "looser" kind of inspiration than the church has historically defended, and again, I don't think that's what does actually happen in John. But my book really isn't about those matters; it's simply looking at the Gospel of John as we have it, assessing the historicity via the various standard criteria and observing what a surprisingly positive case does emerge.

IVP: Focusing in on a specific point, you essentially argue that the temple event that we find in John 2 may or may not be identical with the temple event we find at the end of Jesus' ministry in the Synoptics. The evidence is not as clear as we would like, and it is possible that such an event took place earlier in Jesus' ministry, just as John's order has it. But if John did actually "move" the event from back to front, so to speak, would that undercut the case for historical reliability?

Blomberg: Not in the least, just as few would feel threatened by the observation that Luke, as shown by a comparison with Matthew and Mark, has moved the account of Jesus' preaching in Nazareth to the front of his narrative (Luke 4:16- 21) as a programmatic introduction to his whole Gospel. Interestingly, the temple cleansing is the first incident in John not specifically introduced with reference to time that requires it to have happened immediately after the preceding events of the Gospel. That might well be John's tip off that he is arranging material more thematically here.

IVP: You comment that even conservative scholars--such as Tom Wright and Ben Witherington--shy away from appealing to the Fourth Gospel in reconstructing the historical Jesus. But that is understandable, is it not, if one is trying to gain a broader hearing in today's "quest"? How would you like to see them operate and still gain a hearing?

Blomberg: It is often an important first step in arguing a controversial position to begin from some agreed-on common ground with one's critics. I'd just like to see somebody take the second step. Now that there is so much support for historicity behind at least a critical mass of John's distinctive content, let's use this material too and see what that does to our picture of the historical Jesus.

IVP: Well, how would you sum it up? How reliable is John's Gospel?

Blomberg: I think John is extraordinarily reliable once one makes all the necessary allowances for him writing in literary genres and using the freedom historians felt in his day to put things in their own words, with their own interpretive spins, that they nevertheless believed were faithful to the people and events surveyed.

IVP: Finally, what do you hope your study will do for the present state of scholarship?

Blomberg: I hope it will help John be less the orphaned child of Gospels scholarship when it comes to historical Jesus research. Paul Anderson, a Johannine scholar at George Fox University, has just written an essay speaking of Mark and John as the "bi-optic" Gospels, and I think he's exactly right. In other words, there are basically two Gospel traditions in our New Testament--Mark's (used and varied slightly by Matthew and Luke) and John's. Both are historical, both are theological, both are literary--both must be mined for any balanced or full-orbed understanding of Jesus on any topic we might wish to pose of him.

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