MetaCatholic

I confess to a fairly thoroughgoing ignorance of scholarship on John, so for all I know this ground is well-trod elsewhere, though I haven’t tracked anything down. But it seems to me that while everybody admits, in varying degrees if discord, to serious disagreements between James and Paul, the Jerusalem church and the Pauline mission, by contrast there’s little said about what I think is the far more serious case of John.

Whatever the level of disharmony between those associated with James and the Pauline churches, the evidence seems clear enough that Paul continued to seek recognition from Jerusalem, and James felt he had a say in the governance and shaping of the Pauline churches. They contend with one another for the definition of the same people of God, and one should not read the later developments of Ebionitism back into this dispute.

By contrast, the fourth gospel has some very harsh words about James (although he is not mentioned by name), words that are not taken back..

After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish festival of Booths was near. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” (For not even his brothers believed in him.) Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil. Go to the festival yourselves. I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come.” After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret. (John 7:1-10  NRSV)

This is one of those passages (like most of John?) where we should almost certainly read Judeans instead of Jews. Interestingly, Jesus’ brothers speak about “disciples” in Judea, whereas the narrator speaks about those who want to kill Jesus being there. Against private Galilean ministry the brothers’ seek public Jerusalem ministry, and Jesus himself keeps his doings secret from them. Above all, he identifies them with “the world” and so characterizes them as not truly his disciples.

It is, I think, difficult, especially in light of  what I see as the sectarian markers of the Johannine writings (for example, the great stress on not loving the world, while intensely loving one another),  not to see this as a coded conflict with the Jerusalem church, as led by James. Jerusalem is home to the Judeans, and those who make their home there identify with them. Jesus only visits, constantly returning to his home in Galilee.  For the narrator Judeans are mainly  the ones who oppose Jesus, who are not his disciples, but lovers of the world. For James and the brothers, however, it is ”your disciples” who are located in Judea, as they themselves came to be when they set up the church in Jerusalem, precisely the opposite view of the narrator. What does this say about relations between the Johannine community and the Jerusalem Church?