Tuesday, May 10, 2022

A Case Against the "Intact View" of the Use of the Present Tense in John 5:2 and the Pool of Bethesda

In John 5:2, we read that

 

Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches.

 

The Greek uses the present tense "is" (εστιν), indicating that, when the Gospel of John was written, the pool was still there. Many argue that this supports a pre-70 date for the Gospel of John (e.g., Robertson; Wallace). Perhaps the best argument against this argument is the "intact view," that is, the pool survived the Jewish War intact. Arguing against this perspective and in favour that John 5:2 is indeed evidence of a pre-70 authorship of John, Jonathan Bernier writes that:

 

Contemporary scholars typically identify the pool of Bethesda with two pools located near St. Anne’s Church in the Muslin Quarter. The present excavator of this area, Shimon Gibson, has argued that the southern of the two pools with a mikvah, that this was the pool mentioned in 5:2, and that the stirring of the water mentioned in 5:7 is the result of a sluice being opened between the two pools. Responding to Gibson, Jodi Magness accepts that the southern pool was a mikvah but argues that “there is no indication in any of our sources—literary or archaeological—that Jews immersed in miqva’ot [mikvahs] for purposes other than purification, such as seeking miraculous healing” (Magness, “Sweet Memory,” 327). Considering Gibson’s argument to be speculative, Magness advances a speculation of her own: since we know that at some point after 70 this area would come to serve as an Asclepeion, Magness argues that John 5:6-7 might be alluding not to pre-70 practices associated with the God of Israel but rather to post-70 practices associated with the god Asclepius (Magness, “Sweet Memory,” 328). There are significant problems with this argument, however. For instance, it is not clear when the Asclepius cult began to operate at the site. Both André Duprez and Nicole Belayche discuss this cult within the context of pagan religious life in Aelia Capitolina, which from 135 was the official name for the city once known as Jerusalem. Although Duprez allows that this cult could have been in service as early as 70, he also states that the only certainty is that it was in serve during the time of Aelia Capitolina (Duprez, Jésus et les dieux guérisseurs, 43-54).

 

We have seen already that reception-critical data make a date for John’s Gospel much later than 120 unlikely. If indeed the Asclepeion was not in service until after 135, then on chronological grounds Magness’s theory of anachronism is not impossible but certainly dubious.

 

More crucially, the practices described in John 5:6-7 do not strongly resemble those that Magness or her authorities on the matter—Belayche and DUprez—ascribe to the Ascelpeion (Magness, “Sweet Memory<” 328n16, cites Belayche, Iudaea-Palestina; Duprez, Jésus et les dieux guérisseurs). In Magness’s own summary, “Ancient sources describes Asclepius and Serapis as healing patients through a combination of bathing in water and dreaming during incubation” (Magness, “Sweet Memory,” 328). The absence of either dreaming or incubation vitiates, although does not entirely obviate, Magness’s argument from parallel. Such vitiation is particularly problematic, as Magness’s only grounds for concluding that John 5:6-7 does not suppose pre-70 conditions is the absence of parallel cases in which mikvahs were associated with healing. Moreover, Magness herself grants that given the archaeological data, John 5 might well constitute evidence that in at least one instance Second Temple Jewish persons did indeed use a mikvah for healing purposes (Magness, “Sweet Memory,” 327). This seems to be a more preferable solution than a poorly fitting parallel with an Asclepeion that might have come into existence only after John’s Gospel.

 

Wallace further identifies a “fundamental problem” with “intact” arguments such as Magness’s—namely, that they “attempt to divorce the porticoes from the pool” (Wallace, “John 5:2,” 186). Wallace notes rightly that John speaks about not only the pool of Bethesda as existing in the present but also the five porticoes that surround it. He thus correctly concludes that any iteration of the intact view should demonstrate that both pool and porticoes existed at the time that John 5:2 was written. As such, even if Magness could demonstrate that the pool was functioning as an Asclepeion as early as 70, she would still need to demonstrate that the porticoes remained intact. Unfortunately, precise knowledge about the state of the pool(s) and the porticoes after 70 eludes us. Given the extent of the destruction to Jerusalem, however, we can reasonably anticipate that the porticoes were indeed destroyed. This would be most consistent with the evidence provided to us by Josephus (cf. Josephus, J.W. 7.1.1 §§1-3).

 

Considering the above, and absent evidence that suggests otherwise, it is probable that 5:2 was written prior to the destruction of 70, and with it the balance of the Gospel. (Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament: The Evidence for Early Composition [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2022], 100-2)

 

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