Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Second Pass at This Weekend's Bible Lesson: John 1:43-51

I'm continuing to look at John 1:43-51, the Bible lesson for this weekend's worship celebrations at our congregation. For an explanation of what these "passes" at the Bible lessons are all about, see here. I hope that lots of people will find these notes beneficial.

v. 43: (1) Jesus, it appears, is somewhere close to Bethany, which, according to commentator Raymond Brown, was about a two-day walk from the Galileean region from which Jesus came.

Bethany, I'll remind you, is to play an important part in the public ministry of Jesus. It's the hometown of Jesus' good friends Martha and Mary and their brother, Lazarus. It's Lazarus that Jesus will so dramatically raise from the dead in the thirteenth chapter of John's Gospel.

(2) Philip, Brown points out, is the third disciple of Christ named by John. The first two named are the brothers, Andrew and Simon Peter. While Philip appears in all four of the Gospels' lists of "The Twelve," it's only in John, Brown reminds us, that he has "any role in the Gospel narrative."

This is not the same Philip we meet in the book of Acts. The latter Philip is a layperson, one of seven called by the early Church called to oversee the practical administration of the church. This other Philip is also the one who, in a famous incident in Acts, tells an important Ethiopian official about Jesus and then baptizes the man in a desert wadi.

v. 44: (1) The fact that both Andrew and Philip have Greek names is indicative of a large Gentile (non-Jewish) presence in the area where they lived.

(2) An apparent difficulty this passage presents is that it says that Andrew and Peter lived in Bethsaida, whereas Mark tells us that they lived in Capernaum. Over the centuries, some scholars, troubled by this, have suggested that the two had been born in Bethsaida, but lived in Capernaum. Since this doesn't cut to the core issues of the text, I'm indifferent to the seeming contradiction. As Brown puts it, if one feels the need to harmonize the Gospels on this point, then the "born in Bethsaida, resident in Capernaum" solution is as good as any.

v. 45: (1) Nathanael appears in no list of the twelve apostles. His name means God has given.

(2) Jesus, son of Joseph, would fit the pattern of the normal, everyday way of referring to a person.

v. 46: "Can anything good...?" Brown believes that this may invoke a local proverb about the inconsequential village from which Jesus comes.

v. 47: Another rendering of "truly an Israelite" is "a genuine Israelite," according to the late German scholar Rudolph Bultmann. It carries the literal meaning of "one worthy of the name of Israel." When I saw that last night, you can imagine how it made my eyes pop out. That's because it tends to support the argument I made in my first set of notes on this Bible lesson that Nathanael is a kind of "patriarch of the new covenant." The old covenant (or first covenant) is the one that God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be their God and to make them His people. The new covenant (or the second covenant) is the one God has made with the whole human race that all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ will not perish, but live with God forever.

I particularly think this insight from Bultmann supports my view that Nathanael is an antitype of Jacob. Unlike Nathanael, Jacob constantly displayed guile. He also was the first person to be called Israel.

While the meaning of the name Israel is somewhat obscure, it appears to carry the notion of wrestling with God. Certainly the guileless Nathanael was wrestling with God, seemingly incapable of believing that a good thing from God could pass into the world via the podunk town of Nazareth.

(2) Having said so much about Jesus saying that Nathanael was an Israelite without guile, I should point out that Brown says that, in light of variant versions in the different early manuscripts we have of this passage, he's not sure that Jesus actually said that. Hmmm.

v. 48: Brown points out that in the New Testament's original Greek, Nathanael asks Jesus, "Where do you know me from?" This makes Jesus' response to Nathanael more sensible.

v. 50: Brown compares the words of Jesus here to his question of Martha in John 11:40. You can look at my first pass at this lesson to see how I think Jesus' encounter here with Nathanael relates also to His encounter with Thomas in John 20.

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