We are entering election season; hyperbolic rhetoric is already fills the political air like humidity in the South.

We all know that often political rhetoric often seems to be about one thing but is really about something else–it has a subtext that is known but not talked about. Discussions about immigration are, for some people, about the United State’s loss of sovereignty and status.  For others they are about the loss of American identity as hordes of people not like us storm our borders. Talk about the Common Core is about more than just educational theory. It is also about state and local rights, about apocalyptic fears of big governments, and about the place of the United States in the world. Debates about the Confederate flag encode beliefs about heroism and racism.

This phenomenon, of discourse seeming to be about one thing but actually being about something else, is quite common. Think of the film, “Wizard of Oz.” It seems to be about a dream, but it is also about, or perhaps mainly about, the struggles of 1930s America to come to terms with a society moving from a predominantly rural culture to an urban culture. It expresses a nostalgic preference for farm (Kansas) over city (the Emerald City)–Dorothy finds her home only when she leaves the city and returns to the farm.

Or think of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. At one level they are escapist entertainment with no literary pretensions. But they are also expressions of the 1950s feeling that United Kingdom had lost its pre-eminent status as a world power and was subservient to the United States. James Bond represents the literary reversal of all that: He single-handedly and repeatedly saves western civilization with only token help from Britain’s allies. The novels are thus commentaries the British establishment’s desire for status and meaning in a world of super-powers.

Or, consider the Gary Cooper film, High Noon, in which the sheriff has to face a group of criminals alone, his fellow-townspeople finding excuses to avoid helping him. It is generally recognized that this film is an indictment of the political atmosphere surrounding the hearings, in the 1950s, of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which many people were unjustly accused of being communists and had careers and lives ruined while their friends and colleagues did little or nothing to stop the lunacy.

This phenomenon helps us understand the subject of my previous journal entry. That entry described the Old Testament’s affirmation that God had commanded Israel to destroy the native inhabitants of the land of Canaan and (in the book of Joshua) its description of that destruction. I pointed out that in fact nothing of the sort actually happened, as the book of Judges acknowledges, and that the narrative in Joshua is a projection backwards into history of what Israel wished had happened. After the Babylonian exile, with Israel small and threatened by its members marrying outside the Jewish community, a narrative about destruction symbolized the need for separation and identity.

This phenomenon is found in the New Testament as well. In John’s gospel, there is a feature of the narrative that is odd, disturbing, and historically impossible. It is John’s way of referring to “the Jews.” Here are some examples:

• John 5:10 So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.”
• John 5:16 Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath.
• John 7:13 Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.
• John 9:22 His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.
• John 18:14 Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people.
• John 5:18 the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
• John 7:1 the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him.
• John 10:31 The Jews took up stones again to stone him.

What is odd is that the gospel makes it seem that the entire Jewish nation rose up in opposition to Jesus. “The Jews took up stones again to stone him.” This is historically absurd. Jesus and his followers were Jews. In fact, virtually every character in this gospel is a Jew. John’s monolithic portrait of “the Jews” as a group acting in unison against Jesus is not historically accurate.

John’s gospel even acknowledges that “many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus” (John 12:11), telling the reader that “the Jews” were not a homogeneous group uniformly opposed to Jesus. Why then does it insist on saying that “the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him”?

What we have here is a projection into the narrative of a reality at work when the gospel was written. John’s gospel is usually dated to the late first century. We know that this was the period when, in Judea and Galilee, there was growing tension between the Jewish Christian community and the synagogue. Prior to this time in that part of the world, Christians were Jews and seem to have maintained a relationship with the larger Jewish community and its synagogues. But in the late first century tension and alienation emerged, so that increasingly Jewish Christians did not feel welcome in the synagogue.

John’s gospel is written in this context. In chapter 9, the blind man’s parents are fearful of being cast out of the synagogue if they seem favorable to Jesus.  What we are reading is an expression of the fears of Jewish Christians in the last decades of the first century, not a description of historical fact during the ministry of Jesus. “The Jews,” in John’s gospel, represent, not the historical people whom Jesus encountered, but the leadership of the synagogues decades later, a leadership that, from John’s perspective, was hostile to Jesus’ followers.

John’s gospel has thus projected the fears and anxieties of the 80s and 90s A.D. backward into the narrative about Jesus, just as the book of Joshua projects the fears and anxieties of Israel in the 400s and 300s B.C. backward in time.

Recognizing that John’s gospel is engaging in deliberate anachronism is important, because otherwise we might be tempted to agree with the many generations of Christians who blamed “the Jews” for killing Jesus and thus justified their persecution of Jews. Without intending to do so, John’s gospel laid the foundation for Christian hatred of Jews, just as the book of Joshua justified the launching of crusades against unbelievers.

By recognizing these books’ use of deliberate anachronism, we can perhaps avoid unchristian feelings and actions.