The coherence of John's portrait

The question that we shall be addressing in this chapter is whether John, as he adapted various traditions in response to a number of different issues, integrated the developments he made into a coherent portrait of Christ. One important point needs to be made from the outset: it must be recognized that what seems incoherent to a reader today may not have seemed so to an ancient reader. In other words, our task will by definition contain a measure of anachronism. Nonetheless, it still seems worthwhile to note, wherever possible, indications that may help us to understand the underlying thought-world that harmonized elements that appear to us today to be in tension, or to recognize where, even in John's time, certain ideas would have been perceived as incompatible.

It may be useful to distinguish between two ‘types’ of tension that may exist in the Fourth Gospel. Anderson has recently emphasized that the tensions which modern readers perceive in Johannine thought may be either internal or external to the Evangelist. In other words, the tensions in the Evangelist's literary work may represent either tensions in his own thought, or tensions between unharmonized elements of different literary strata. This distinction is an important one. However, in terms of our reading of John it is entirely possible to reach the conclusion that, in a sense, both are true.