18
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yes no yes yes yes yes no no yes
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no no no no no yes no no no
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no yes yes no yes yes no no yes
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EXEGETICAL STUDIES
CHAPTER 6
Once More—John 7:37–39 (1978)
John 7:37–39 has long been a notorious crux. The basic problems, as formulated by R. E. Brown,1 are: (1) Who is the source of the rivers of living water, Jesus or the believer? That is, to whom does the αὐτοῦ refer in v. 38? and (2) What passage of Scripture is cited in v. 38? These two questions are interrelated; for since there is no Old Testament passage that looks very much like v. 38, a series of passages can be mustered to support the two answers to question (1).
Ordinarily the solutions have been related to how one punctuates the whole of vv.
37–38.2 On the one hand, the solution which is traditional in English translations (first found in Origen and supported by P66) is to make αὐτοῦ refer to the believer, whose antecedent, ὁ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμέ, functions grammatically as a nominativus pendens.
Thus it is translated (RSV):
“If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink.
He who believes in me, as the scripture has said,
‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ ”
On the other hand, there is increasing support among scholars (though,
interestingly, not among translations) for the “christological” interpretation, which can be traced as far back as Hippolytus. This solution puts a full stop, with quotation marks, after ὁ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμέ, which is thus understood to be the subject of the
1 The Gospel According to John (i–xii), Anchor Bible 29 (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), pp. 320–21.
2 This note does not intend to list all the scholars or translations that support one view or the other. Brown, who supports the “christological” interpretation, has fairly complete listings. His presentation of that case is comprehensive. Since Brown, the commentaries by L. Morris (Grand Rapids, 1971) and B. Lindars (London, 1972) both favor the English tradition. The most recent and comprehensive presentation of this position may be found in J. B. Cortes, “Yet Another Look at Jn 737–38,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 29 (1967): 75–86.
preceding πινέτω. Verse 38 then becomes a Johannine comment, and the αὐτοῦ is seen to refer to Jesus. Thus it is translated (NEB):3
“If anyone is thirsty let him come to me;
whoever believes in me, let him drink.
As Scripture says, ‘Streams of living water shall flow from within him.’ ”
As long as the questions are posed the way Brown poses them, the solutions appear to be stalemated—for obvious reasons: equal arguments can be mustered on either side. Stylistically it can be shown that the nominativus pendens is a recurring feature of Johannine style (see, e.g., 1:12; 6:39; 15:2; 17:2); but it is also true that the chiastic parallelism of the second solution fits Johannine style (cf. 6:35) and that the καθὼς εἶπεν ἡ γραφή formula is ordinarily the first member of its clause in the Fourth Gospel.4 Likewise, either solution can gather a group of Old Testament texts which imply that the water of the new age more appropriately belongs either to the Messiah or to the believer.5 Finally, either solution is fully in accord with Johannine theology, where Jesus is the one who pre-eminently has and gives the Spirit (1:33; 4:10; 7:39;
20:22), but also where the believer has (or will have) the Spirit “within him” (4:14;
14:17).
The purpose of this note is to suggest that the solution to these problems lies in framing the exegetical question in quite a different way. Barnabas Lindars has recently suggested: “In order to make a decision, John’s own comment in v. 39 must be given due weight.”6 Exactly right. However, Lindars limits his comments to the meaning of v. 39 vis-à-vis vv. 37–38; I would suggest that the solution lies as well in the thoroughly Johannine stylistic feature at the beginning of v. 39: τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν.
The real question is, What did the author intend by that editorial remark? To what did he intend τοῦτο to refer? Or to put it in another way, to whom did the author intend to attribute v. 38 (from καθώς on)? Are these the words of the Johannine Jesus, or are they the author’s own comments?7
Once the question is posed in this way, the most viable exegesis of the passage is the traditional one. For the author of v. 39 almost certainly intended the content of v.
3 It should be noted in passing that although these are the two basic—and historic—
interpretations, there have been others. Both C. F. Burney (The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel; Oxford, 1922) and C. C. Torrey (“The Aramaic Origin of the Gospel of John,” Harvard Theological Review 16 [1923]: 305–34) found the solution in mistranslations of a hypothetical Aramaic original, where v. 38 referred to the Temple Mount (Burney) or Jerusalem (Torrey). J. Blenkinsopp has more recently argued that ὁ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμέ is a gloss, a mere parenthetical insertion to explain in the logion itself who are the believers in v. 39. See “John vii. 37–39: Another Note on a Notorious Crux,” NTS 6 (1959): 95–98.
4 Cf. G. D. Kilpatrick, “The Punctuation of John vii. 37–38,” JTS, n.s. 11 (1960): 340–
42.
5 See E. D. Freed, Old Testament Quotations in the Gospel of John (Leiden, 1965), pp.
21–38.
6 Barnabas Lindars, The Gospel of John (London, 1972), p. 301.
7 This problem remains even if one assumes a variety of editors/redactors for the gospel. The exegete finally must interpret the text in its last form, not only
hypothetical prior stages. For after all, the final form is the one we actually have; and the final redactor is himself interpreting the text, so that our interpretation must take this final view into account.
38 to belong to the words of Jesus; therefore, the most natural meaning of the third person pronoun αὐτοῦ is the believer, rather than the Messiah.
First, it should be noted that the stylistic feature τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν is typically Johannine. Although the formula is not always the same, there are seven other instances in the gospel where the author (or redactor) similarly comments on or interprets what has been said:8
of Jesus’ words
2:21 ἐκεῖνος δὲ ἔλεγεν περὶ…
6:6 τοῦτο δὲ ἔλεγεν πειράζων…
6:71 ἔλεγεν δὲ τὸν Ἰούδαν…
12:33 τοῦτο δὲ ἔλεγεν σημαίνων…
21:19 τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν σημαίνων…
of Caiaphas’s words
11:51 τοῦτο δὲ ἀφʼ ἑαυτοῦ οὐκ εἶπεν…
of Judas’s words
12:6 εἶπεν δὲ τοῦτο οὐχ ὅτι…
In each instance the formula refers specifically to a saying that immediately precedes it. Therefore, τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν περὶ τοῦ πνεύματος ὃ ἔμελλον λαμβάνειν οἱ
πιστεύσαντες εἰς αὐτόν is a comment that includes the content of v. 38. Since the emphasis in the comment of v. 39 is clearly on the believer’s reception of the Spirit, rather than the Messiah’s giving the Spirit, this further supports αὐτοῦ as referring to the believer.9
One must insist, therefore, that the translation of the NEB creates something of an absurdity. By putting quotation marks around vv. 37–38a, the translators clearly intend “As Scripture says …” to be the comment of the evangelist. He then makes a further comment, which in this case must exclude the “rivers of living water” and refer back to vv. 37–38a. But in such a case one would expect him to have written εἰρήκει, precisely as he did in 11:13 where there is a break between Jesus’ words and the evangelist’s further comment.
Bultmann recognized the inherent difficulty of this kind of translation and argued (correctly) that it made “an inadmissible break between Jesus’ words in vv. 37, 38a and v. 39.” But his own solution is surely not correct—to argue that v. 38b is “a gloss, inserted by the ecclesiastical editor.”10 No one has followed Bultmann at this point,
8 This does not include 11:13, which, because it lacks τοῦτο and has the perfect εἰρήκει, is a special case (see below). Nor does it include two other instances (13:11, 28) where the formula is a part of the Evangelist’s “knowing/not knowing” editorial comments (cf. 2:22; 4:53; 8:27; 10:6; 11:13; 12:16; 16:19).
9 J. R. Michaels has recently offered a unique interpretation of τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν. He suggests that “the δὲ which introduced v. 39 should thus be taken in at least a mildly adversative sense. The close proximity of εἶπεν in v. 39 to the same form in v. 38 suggests that what is being directly qualified is the Scripture quotation.” Thus he translates v. 39: “But it [i.e., the Scripture] said this about the Spirit.” See “The Temple Discourse in John,” in New Dimensions in New Testament Study, ed. R. N.
Longenecker and M. C. Tenney (Grand Rapids, 1974), pp. 208–9. The difficulty with this would seem to be its uniqueness. Elsewhere the τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν formula always refers to a spoken word, and the implied subject of εἶπεν is the speaker. There seems to be no good reason to abandon that pattern here.
10 The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Eng. trans. Oxford, 1971), p. 303, n. 5.
for good reasons: (1) Such a redactor would be expected to cite Scripture with enough accuracy as to make it identifiable. That is, if a later redactor is going to break into the text like this, one would expect him to do so because he had a precise text in mind, which this logion could be seen as fulfilling. (2) The content and style of v. 38 are thoroughly Johannine. (3) Most importantly, the τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν demands the content of v. 38 in order to make sense. To make it refer to vv. 37–38a as do the NEB and Bultmann means that Jesus’ invitation to the thirsty to come to him and the believer to drink of him somehow refers to the Spirit whom the believers were to receive. This makes both vv. 37 and 39 altogether too cryptic. Being cryptic, of course, would not in itself rule it out in the Gospel of John, but it would certainly be out of keeping with the other explanatory comments in the gospel.
Bultmann is correct that the τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν must refer to what immediately precedes; the NEB is correct in leaving v. 38 there, because even by mistake (or careless writing) the author intended τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν to refer to what he himself had said in that verse.
R. E. Brown offers yet another option, although there seems to be ambiguity in his commentary. On the one hand, his translation includes all of vv. 37–38 within
quotation marks. This means that in the gospel’s final form Jesus spoke the words of v. 38, and thereby referred to himself in the third person. But that seems to make the author far more careless than one ordinarily finds him to be. Since the Old Testament
“text” is as loosely constructed as it is, why did he not simply say, “From the Messiah shall flow rivers of living water”?
Brown himself, however, recognizes the problem this creates and attributes v. 39 to the final redactor,11 suggesting that it “has a parenthetical character which makes us wonder if it represents the primary meaning of 37–38.”12 But this seems to solve the problem in reverse order: to predetermine (for good reasons, to be sure) that the αὐτοῦ of v. 38 must refer to Jesus, and then to find v. 39 somewhat out of step with that interpretation. Furthermore, every stylistic feature in v. 39 is thoroughly Johannine:
τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν; the use of μέλλω for things that have already happened from the author’s perspective (cf., e.g., 6:71; 11:51; 12:4, 33; 18:32); εἰς αὐτόν with πιστεύω;
the anarthrous Ἰησοῦς following ὅτι;13 the entire vocabulary is distinctively Johannine.
Therefore, since all other arguments are stalemated, and are usually resolved by what one thinks is more in accord with Johannine theology, Lindars is surely right.
The solution lies in v. 39, where both the τοῦτο δὲ εἶπεν and the emphasis there on the believer’s reception of the Spirit break the deadlock and decide in favor of the tradition of the English-language translations.14
11 The Gospel of John: A Commentary, p. 324.
12 The Gospel of John: A Commentary, p. 328.
13 See G. D. Fee, “The Use of the Definite Article with Personal Names in the Gospel of John,” NTS 17 (1971): 179.
14 The question of what scripture is being cited in v. 38 is beyond the concern of this note. In any case, since no OT passage fits precisely, the answer to that question cannot have priority as to whom αὐτοῦ refers. Probably Freed is correct here (Old Testament Quotations in the Gospel of John, p. 37): “It appears more likely that John was motivated by a combination of several passages and then from memory wrote down a quotation to support his theology.”
CHAPTER 7