Is John 8.38-47 Anti-Jewish?
Is 8.38-47 anti-Jewish? No, not
from the author’s point of view. Just the opposite. The author’s interest is
precisely in what he sees as true Judaism. From his point of view, it is
precisely his opponents who are not being true sons of Abraham (or of God). The
author is not saying that the Jewish perspective is wrong; he is saying that
his opponents do not have the true Jewish perspective (see for example Jn 7.19:
‘Did not Moses give you the Law? Yet none of you keeps the Law’). As much as
the author’s opponents would have disagreed with him then and as much as the Jews
disagreed with Jesus before him, the author was not anti-Jewish. Such a charge
would have been unthinkable to the author—and, I suspect, unthinkable to his
original opponents.
The Gospel was born in a context
in which there were opposing points of view on the true meaning and future of the
Jewish tradition. Within this period, what is now referred to as ‘Johannine
Christianity’ should perhaps be more correctly referred to as ‘Johannine
Judaism’. That is, the Johannine community represented a group, Jewish by birth
and by choice, a group which had, until just recently, lived and worshipped within
the synagogue. It was a tradition that was developed among followers of Jesus
who were ethnically Jewish. They did not reject the synagogue (i.e. ‘Judaism’);
the synagogue rejected them. They would have said the synagogue was wrong but
that they would have not said that Judaism was wrong.
Why Call These Opponents ‘the Jews’?
‘The Jews’ of the Gospel of John
are certainly a group with authority in religious matters. But more specifically
the Greek term ‘Ιουδαιοι could mean what English refers to
as ‘Jews’ and also ‘Judeans’ referring to ‘those in Judea’, i.e. the religious
authorities in Jerusalem with whom the Johannine community saw themselves in
conflict and who were ultimately responsible for the exclusion of the Johannine
community from the synagogue. In this sense, their situation would have been
not unlike that of the community who settled at Qumran rather it had experienced
conflict with authoritative Jewish groups in Jerusalem. (Urban C. Von Wahlde, Gnosticism,
Docetism, and the Judaisms of the First Century: The Search for the Wider
Context of the Johannine Literature and Why It Matters [Library of New
Testament Studies 517; London: T&T Clark, 2015, 2016], 168-69)