HERE is a Sunday in Easter with a word from Jesus that actually appeals to students attending morning worship: “Come and have breakfast” (v.12). First, we break bread once we meet across the Lord’s table, in chapel. Afterwards, we break bread again, in the school bar/café. If there are visitors in chapel, I speak the very words of Jesus once I invite them to eat with us.
That beachside barbecue will not be the Gospel equivalent of a social-media post: the trivial and forgettable elevated to an art form. It is epic in meaning, though not in scale, full of messages for those of us who hunt down Jesus’s company wherever we are able to find it.
John 21, though, makes for a stormy course between a monster Scylla and a whirlpool Charybdis. Charybdis is the trend in New Testament scholarship which churns up a centuries-old establishment. It makes the case that John 21 is a later addition to the Gospel, probably not even by the identical writer as chapters 1-20. No less an authority than Raymond Brown, in his giant (in each senses) two-volume commentary, thinks it likely that John 20.30-31 was the unique ending of the book.
Scylla, alternatively, is the many-headed mythical monster generally known as biblical orthodoxy. Why, she demands, is there not a single trace of a more original, more authentic, 20-chapter Gospel among the many early manuscripts? Not one copy of John has been found which lacks the section that we all know as chapter 21. As for the advantageous points of linguistic detail, some detect a distinct hand at work in these, but others disagree.
I’m currently proofreading my recent critical edition of Augustine’s book Teaching Christianity — a piece several centuries later than John’s Gospel. It undoubtedly existed in a shorter version for many years, before a final, four-book edition was accomplished. Another example: about 100 years before the Gospel, the pagan poet Ovid wrote a five-volume edition of affection poems, but then reduced it to a few. People rethink, refine, rewrite.
Altering texts is a process as familiar in the traditional world as in the fashionable. When I even have writing to do, I begin without overthinking. Words start peeling off my fingers, via the keyboard, on to the screen. Once began, my writing continues more easily. Then I leave it to “mulch down”, or “percolate”, or whatever metaphor does best justice to the method. In that pause, I could rethink my position. Sometimes, a fresh idea comes out of nowhere. Often, the finished text bears the marks of threads of thought from different phases of writing. But I’m still the only real writer — as John could also be of chapter 21.
The strongest argument for a single writer looks at two key people within the Gospel whose stories have been left hanging: Peter and the beloved disciple. We haven’t seen them since they found the tomb empty. Their journeys of religion — unlike Mary Magdalene’s or Thomas’s — have been left suspended.
In John 20.8, the beloved disciple had a moment of recognition: “He saw, and believed.” Now he echoes Thomas’s confession — “My Lord and my God!” (20.28) — when he declares “It is the Lord!” (21.7).
Peter’s recognition and confession takes an entire scene, a dialogue. As I even have suggested before, it undoes his threefold denial with a threefold affirmation. Jesus’s prophecy about Peter’s future (21.18) is filled with pathos. “The rock” remains to be a person. He will become older and develop into helpless and have his path dictated by others. I cannot tell the precise moment in my discipleship when that verse stopped being nearly Peter and have become a verse about me, too. But it has.
Following the standard chronology (in events held within the collective Christian memory, though not recorded within the Bible), Jesus was 33 when he died, whereas Peter lived into old age before martyrdom took him. Both of them experienced death as helplessness: submission to unwanted treatment that cut across their very own will, imposing the need and fulfilling the objectives of other, stronger, people, who didn’t have their best interests at heart.
Am I fanciful in seeing Peter’s death, specifically, as iconic of the fate that awaits many individuals who’ve passed from healthy youth into the frailty and powerlessness of old age? Yet one way or the other — for this remains to be Eastertide — the celebration of the death of death, the resurrection hope, speaks to each.
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