HERE is a Sunday in Easter with a word from Jesus that really appeals to students attending morning worship: “Come and have breakfast” (v.12). First, we break bread when we meet around the Lord’s table, in chapel. Afterwards, we break bread again, in the college bar/café. If there are visitors in chapel, I speak the very words of Jesus when I invite them to eat with us.
That beachside barbecue is not the Gospel equivalent of a social-media post: the trivial and forgettable elevated to an art form. It is epic in meaning, though not in scale, crammed with messages for those of us who seek out Jesus’s company wherever we can find it.
John 21, though, makes for a stormy course between a monster Scylla and a whirlpool Charybdis. Charybdis is the trend in New Testament scholarship which churns up a centuries-old status quo. It makes the case that John 21 is a later addition to the Gospel, probably not even by the same author as chapters 1-20. No less an authority than Raymond Brown, in his giant (in both senses) two-volume commentary, thinks it likely that John 20.30-31 was the original ending of the book.
Scylla, on the other hand, is the many-headed mythical monster known as biblical orthodoxy. Why, she demands, is there not a single trace of a more original, more authentic, 20-chapter Gospel among the early manuscripts? Not one copy of John has been found which lacks the section that we know as chapter 21. As for the fine points of linguistic detail, some detect a different hand at work in these, but others disagree.
I am currently proofreading my new critical edition of Augustine’s book Teaching Christianity — a work several centuries later than John’s Gospel. It undoubtedly existed in a shorter version for decades, before a final, four-book edition was completed. Another example: about 100 years before the Gospel, the pagan poet Ovid wrote a five-volume edition of love poems, but then reduced it to three. People rethink, refine, rewrite.
Altering texts is a process as familiar in the ancient world as in the modern. When I have writing to do, I begin without overthinking. Words start peeling off my fingers, via the keyboard, on to the screen. Once started, my writing continues more easily. Then I leave it to “mulch down”, or “percolate”, or whatever metaphor does best justice to the process. In that pause, I may rethink my position. Sometimes, a fresh idea comes out of nowhere. Often, the finished text bears the marks of threads of thought from different phases of writing. But I am still the sole author — as John may be of chapter 21.
The strongest argument for a single author looks at two key people in the Gospel whose stories have been left hanging: Peter and the beloved disciple. We have not seen them since they found the tomb empty. Their journeys of faith — unlike Mary Magdalene’s or Thomas’s — have been left suspended.
In John 20.8, the beloved disciple had a moment of recognition: “He saw, and believed.” Now he echoes Thomas’s confession — “My Lord and my God!” (20.28) — when he declares “It is the Lord!” (21.7).
Peter’s recognition and confession takes a whole scene, a dialogue. As I have suggested before, it undoes his threefold denial with a threefold affirmation. Jesus’s prophecy about Peter’s future (21.18) is full of pathos. “The rock” is still a man. He will grow old and become helpless and have his path dictated by others. I cannot tell the exact moment in my discipleship when that verse stopped being just about Peter and became a verse about me, too. But it has.
Following the traditional chronology (in events held in the collective Christian memory, though not recorded in the Bible), Jesus was 33 when he died, whereas Peter lived into old age before martyrdom took him. Both of them experienced death as helplessness: submission to unwanted treatment that cut across their own will, imposing the will and fulfilling the objectives of other, stronger, people, who did not have their best interests at heart.
Am I fanciful in seeing Peter’s death, in particular, as iconic of the fate that awaits many people who have passed from healthy youth into the frailty and powerlessness of old age? Yet somehow — for this is still Eastertide — the celebration of the death of death, the resurrection hope, speaks to both.
